the purpose of this paper is to improve supply chain relationships in iranian small and medium-sized enterprises (smes) in automotive parts industry. for this reason, an importance-performance analysis (ipa) has been employed to categorized supply chain relationships metrics. also, the questionnaire method is used for gathering information. the paper identified thirteen supply chain relationshi...

The work presented in this paper was undertaken as part of BIOCOMP (2005-2008), a European collaborative project, which developed new classes of engineering composite materials from renewable resources. Comprising twenty five European SMEs and research organisations, this three and a half year project generated a wide range of new biocomposite materials, knowledge-based processes and demonstrat...

Metadata plays an important role in online repositories with learning resources, since it can make search, retrieval and access faster, easier and more effective. In this context, a variety of reasons urge using a recognized metadata standard such as IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM). When particularly developing a repository with learning resources for agricultural and rural stakeholders, it...

ICT can be a potential solution in order to cover agricultural professionals' lifelong learning needs. An application area of particular interest is the one of digital learning repositories (DLRs). These are online databases where digital learning resources are systematically organised and classified. In such repositories, educational metadata play an important role since they allow the descrip...

SMEs can now afford enterprise-class services by adopting cloud computing. The four cases reported in the full article show that SMEs are getting great economic and business value from cloud services, including cost avoidance, cost savings, rapid deployment and scalability, management simplicity, and better security and resiliency compared to in-house IT provision. Cloud services have the poten...

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are normally required to attain dynamic success targets by improvement of their processes, products and services. One way to achieve this could be through quality initiatives and innovation in processes, products and services. In a knowledge based economy, use of quality measures alone may not bring competitive advantage due to severe resource constraints. Th...

The partnership between banks and non-banks is one of the oldest and most common lateral business partnerships. While banks are looking for new markets and for cost efficient ways to implement new business models, SMEs presumably have considerable efficiency potentials within their financial processes. Some of these potentials could be realized by embedding functionality provided by banks withi...

What makes elites developmental instead of predatory? We argue that Mozambique’s elite was developmental at independence 35 years ago. With pressure and encouragement from international forces, it became predatory. It has now partly returned to its developmental roots and is trying to use the state to promote the creation of business groups that could be large enough and dynamic enough to follo...

Background. Whilst designing and implementing optimal Web information structures contributes to organisational goals and success, the size and structure of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) make Web information architecture (IA) a challenging task. At the same time, the attitudes and the capabilities of SMEs for online participation are crucial to a robust economy in nations across the world....

This paper examines the adoption and use of information and communication technology (ICT) in small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) across four sectors in the UK. In the paper we report on a survey that explores the factors facilitating or hampering the successful adoption and use of ICT by SMEs. We find that SMEs are generally satisfied with their investments in ICT but that they are conce...