Improving manufacturing SMEs' competitiveness through systematic IT efficiency evaluation and advancement

Efficiently exploiting the opportunities opened up by modern IT to support the order fulfillment process is one of the most significant enablers of productivity growth in manufacturing SMEs. However, too often it is not clear how efficiently the installed IT systems are used and how well they actually perform - or at least it is rarely evaluated and developed in a systematic way. The reasons are numerous but probably most important is the lack of methodology and tools for regularly and systematically measuring, analyzing, benchmarking, and improving the IT efficiency in SMEs, while keeping effort and cost down. This paper proposes a methodology implemented in a software tool for modeling, analyzing, measuring, and improving the IT efficiency of manufacturing SMEs.