The main objective of this study was to identify the importance of SMEs in Malaysian and Pakistani economies. Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) play a vital role in the development and growth of the Malaysian and Pakistani economies. However, their contribution to the national economies of both countries is still relatively small. Malaysian and Pakistani governments have made various fundamen...

Variability has become important means to provide customer specific products fast to the market. This paper presents findings from a literature study and questionnaire designed to find out the current variability management practices, challenges and needs in small and medium sized companies (SMEs). The literature study was carried out first, and based on its findings questionnaire study was des...

Small and Medium enterprises act as catalysts in the economic development of the developed and developing countries. Developing countries like Nigeria that require sustained economic growth in their economies must pay attention to the SME sector and harness the great potential to generate employment, improved local technology, output diversification, developed indigenous entrepreneurship and fo...

Business finance has been a major problem facing most businesses, both the small and large companies as well as the medium ones. Small and Medium Scale Enterprises (SMEs) are no exceptions of the problems faced by businesses. These enterprises are mostly managed by low income earners. Some of these enterprises cannot grow into large companies because of lack of funds. The objectives of the stud...

The market globalization and increase of competition forces manufacturing companies to adopt new business organization paradigms. Moreover, Small and Medium Enterprises can compete to a global level if they try to cooperate at different levels as: design, production planning, et cetera. Figure 1 shows the driving forces towards the adoption of cooperation mechanism for the Small and Medium Ente...

Business Intelligence (BI) is the key attention of in-depth application of enterprise information. This paper analyzes the difficulties in putting business intelligence into SMEs information, proposes small and medium enterprises BI application solutions in the use of SaaS software distribution method, and deploys on SMEs applied model and the value of management model through a comprehensive a...

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...