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...

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) was originally meant for large enterprises (LEs), hence most attention on ERP research focuses on LEs. However, ERP vendors have diverted their attention also to small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in order to cater for their needs. This paper presents a systematic mapping study of ERP in the context of SMEs. The study concentrated on the ERP adoption an...

Knowledge Management (KM) has become a critical component for maintaining competitive advantages. Most existing research looks at individual industries or general concepts; few studies have investigated KM use in Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs). This research empirically investigates factors affecting the adoption of KM. Results indicate that important factors maturing of Information ...

OBJECTIVE To determine factors associated with adult squash players' protective eyewear behaviours. METHODS A survey of 303 players (aged >or =18 years) was conducted at three squash venues in Melbourne, Australia over a three week period in June 2000 to obtain information about protective eyewear use. RESULTS Of 303 participants the response rate was 98.1%; 66.1% were males, with a mean ag...

Although there are already some qualification offers available for enterprises to support resource efficiency innovations, the high potentials that can be identified especially for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) have not been activated until now. As successful change lies in the hands of humans, the main aim of vocational education has to be the promotion of organisational and cultur...

The use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) by Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) have the potential to enable these businesses to grow through access to new markets and administrative efficiencies. However, the growth of the smallest of these SMEs which are micro-enterprises is hindered by their inability to adopt ICTs effectively to achieve competitive advantage. This ...

More and more knowledge-based enterprises start to integrate Ambient Intelligence technologies into their business processes. While the usage of such technologies can lead to considerable benefits in a variety of business areas, the envisioned applications have to meet fundamental user needs, otherwise the negative side effects will overshadow the prospective benefits. This paper illustrates th...

With the continuous development of business incubator nowadays, the existing evaluation method of enterprise incubator’s hatch ability has been unable to meet the needs of small and medium-sized enterprises. This paper proposes a small and medium-sized enterprise incubator’s hatch ability evaluation model based on multiclass method, this model introduced the principal component analysis and fac...