Electronic business has a strong influence on the relationships between partners within supply chains. Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) need an affordable, integrated set of software tools to support integration of their supply chains and to take advantage of the new ways of doing business in the electronic business environment. The paper reviews evolution and current trends in supply ...

The paper presents relationships between market orientation (MO), knowledge management (KM) and growth and development of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Two basic questions are stated for this study: (1) what are the relationships between those two concepts, KM and MO, and growth of SMEs (direct or indirect), and (2) what is the direction of the relationship between KM and MO. To an...

In small countries such as New Zealand, small to mediumsized enterprises (SMEs) are defined as enterprises employing 19 or fewer employees. Small enterprises are defined as those employing zero to five full-time employees (FTEs) (often called microbusinesses), and medium-sized enterprises as those employing six to nineteen FTEs. Other countries, such as the United States and European countries,...

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) adopt Information Technology (IT) and Information Systems (IS) in order to achieve business goals and obtain net benefits. However, adopting IT/IS into an existing organizational structure is a complex and risky task. Many investments in IT/IS, outsourced as well as insourced, never fully reach the intended objectives and are therefore considered as not...

Although the requirements of smallto medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) for enterprise resource planning systems (ERP) are very similar to those of big corporations, there is still a lack of solutions for SMEs, because the roll-out as well as the maintenance is very expensive. It has become clear that EDP branch solutions, application service providing and stripped-down software versions do not of...

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology represents a common standard for data storage and retrieval that could improve collaboration and data sharing between non-competing organisations. With the advent of RFID, organisations have the opportunity to rethink how their organisation will operate and integrate in the supply chain. Especially for Small to Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs), th...

High growth firms are critical for economic growth yet little is known about their funding arrangements. Examining a survey of over 8,000 UK Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs), this paper investigates the financial issues confronting high growth SMEs compared to non-high growth SMEs. The findings show that rapidly growing SMEs are significantly more likely to apply for finance than non-h...

It is very obvious that the global financial crisis has made a negative impact on Chinese economy. A large number of small and medium-sized enterprises’ production and operations have gotten into a difficult situation. Although many policies and measures have been introduced by our government to help the small and medium-sized enterprises to spend the winter, and there was a decent effect, the ...