Characterizing viability of small manufacturing enterprises (SME) in the market

This paper examines characteristics of survived small manufacturing enterprises (SMEs) competing to be suppliers to mass merchandisers. It intends to examine various product and management characteristics of small manufacturing enterprises (SME) to determine the critical factors that lead to their long-term survival. Since survey data are usually correlated, fuzzy, inconsistent, and incomplete, we used the adaptive learning network (ALN), an artificial intelligence (AI) technique to build the model. The ALN is non-parametric and known to be much better than multivariate statistical approaches in handling survey data. A sample of over 1600 firms was analyzed in this study to determine the primary factors that are attributable to long-term survival of SMEs and their influences. 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.