Economic reform and liberalization in China have affected many institutional obstacles constraining the development and growth of Chinese small and medium size enterprises (SMEs). Using a firm-level data set that comprises all “above-scale” Chinese industrial enterprises for the period of 1995 to 2003, I investigate the patterns of entry and exit of Chinese SMEs and relate these patterns to the...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the current level of best manufacturing practices in Malaysian ISO 9000 certified small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Design/methodology/approach: The authors conducted a survey on 270 ISO 9000 certified manufacturing SMEs. Based on an extensive search of literature on performance requirements, eight areas were identified. Thus, the question...

The maturity and security management systems are essential in order to guarantee the continuity and stability of the companies in the current market situation. However, this requires that enterprises know in every moment their security maturity level and to what extend their information security system must evolve. In small and medium-sized enterprises, the application of security standards has...

 International trade causes that markets to become more competitive and small-medium sized enterprises (SMEs) learn to compete effectively within this increasingly competitive global market place. SMEs are able to take advantage of increased opportunities in domestic markets that follow from international trade. It is indeed a way for internationalization of SMEs. This paper analyzes income and...

Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) comprise 99% of the European-economy, though, most research and implementation methods concerning Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) focus on large enterprises. We create a BPMS implementation method that is suitable for SMEs. Based on three existing BPMS implementation methods and by incorporating differentiators of SMEs and large enterprises a BPMS i...

Throughout recent years a lot of research has been done to develop enterprise architecture (EA) approaches for large and complex enterprises. Consequently, an array of tools has been developed for these large enterprises to aid in EA management. However, traditional small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which are very important for economy, have to a great extent been neglected. Recently r...

Integration technologies like Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and Web Services allow organisations to collaborate with their partners, increase flexibility and gain competitive advantages. Despite the benefits that the integration of Information Systems (IS) can offer to enterprises, little attention has paid on the adoption of integration software by Small to Medium Sized Enterprises ...

This article describes the collection and derivation of requirements for the integration of usability engineering (UE) methods in software engineering (SE) processes from the perspective of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). An exploratory, not generalisable survey of 11 typical SMEs was carried out in order to register their special needs.

Since 2000, the Small and Medium Enterprise Administration (SMEA), Ministry of Economic Affairs in Taiwan has started to aggressively promote “the project of establishing and maintaining Internet database and e-Business in industries” to assist Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) for their application of e-Business. By 2004, it successfully encouraged 58 industry associations/labor unions/socie...

Although small, medium and micro enterprises (SMEs, mEs) play a decisive role in the European digital economy, they have been identified as one of the weakest links in information security. Identifying these security weaknesses and needs we parameterize our open collaborative environment STORM in order to offer a cost-efficient tool to the SMEs and mEs for self-managing their security.