Against a background of the low engagement of small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in ebusiness, this article investigates the impact of e-aggregation applications, provided by emerging vertical application service providers (VSPs), and defined as “an e-business application, promoted by a trusted third party, which engages a significant number of SMEs by addressing an important shared busin...

Banking competition may enhance or hinder the financing of small and medium-sized enterprises. Using a survey on the financing of such enterprises in China, combined with detailed bank branch information, we investigate how concentration in local banking market affects the availability of credit. We find that lower market concentration alleviates financing constraints. The widespread presence o...

Modern enterprises are supported by flexible and agile software systems and architectures to respond effectively and quickly to opportunities in a more competitive market. Even small and medium sized enterprises (SME) highly depend on appropriate software architectures to successfully participate in the growth of the economy. For this purpose they must be in a position to upgrade and enhance th...

In this paper we discuss the new demands put on university faculty for involvement in delivery of Continuing Engineering Education. CEE programmes are often composed in the same way as on-campus programmes – which means straight forward for teachers to conduct. However, the needs for new knowledge and new competencies in small and medium sized enterprises and for teams in larger enterprises are...

Global supply chains and worldwide spread subsidiaries are a topic for both huge enterprises as well as for small and medium sized enterprises. The challenge lies in the right allocation of functions and competencies within the global production network and in their coordination and integration in order to gain the desired outcome and to reach the objectives tied to the networks. In this contex...

Knowledge is the key for all organisations and the success of many of them depends on the effective deployment and continual enhancement of their knowledge base so as to be innovative and to remain/become competitive (Hamburg & Widmaier, 2004). As great challenges loom large for the world economy the need to manage company knowledge becomes more acute. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) ...

Using internet to operate business has become very important for traditional manufacturing enterprises and retailers. These enterprises are facing great risk when entering e-commerce due to lack of experiences and large volume of initial IT investment. This study analyzed the Commerce as a Service (CaaS) solution which can perfectly solve these problems. The solution is based on leading e-comme...

In many companies, a majority of business processes take place via email communication. Large enterprises have the possibility to operate enterprise systems for a successful business process management. However, these systems are not appropriate for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which are the most common enterprise type in Europe. Thus, the European research project Commius address...

In the last decades, numerous developments and legal changes moved the utility industry towards a liberalized market. Utility enterprises have to stay competitive and reduce costs while managing more complex IT systems. The authors of this work see special demand for aligning business and IT for small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) in this industry and identify the development of a referenc...

Cooperation between manufacturing enterprises has recently become widespread in order to cope with newly emerged challenges, such as growing customer expectations, increasing product variety and decreasing product lifecycles. Nowadays the response to these challenges seems to be the formation of tight relations in supply chains and networks, which enables joint handling of market risks and invo...