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Implementation Roles, Responsibilities and Accountability
Published in Frances Alston, Brian K. Perkins, Strategic Environmental Performance, 2020
Frances Alston, Brian K. Perkins
Successful strategies for environmental compliance are often built around an organization designed to identify regulatory requirements, determine applicability and facilitate implementation. Companies that incorporate regulatory subject matter experts (SMEs) roles into their compliance organization create an environment that promotes integration of regulatory compliance into the relevant business units as required. The role of environmental professionals and SMEs can provide for consistency in regulatory evaluations, applicability determinations and valuable regulatory expertise to organization elements and business units. Incorporating the SME roles into environmental compliance strategies allows for other organizational elements within the company to maintain a focus on their primary mission while relying on the environmental professionals and SMEs to provide regulatory expertise and effective implementation strategies. The challenge often presented by regulatory compliance is finding a synergetic balance between the corporate or organizational mission and implementing regulatory requirements. This is where the concept of integrating environmental SMEs into the organization can significantly mitigate many of the difficulties in achieving the desired balance.
Factors Influencing Productivity in Manufacturing SMEs
Published in Munyai Thomas, Mbonyane Boysana, Mbohwa Charles, Productivity Improvement in Manufacturing SMEs, 2017
Munyai Thomas, Mbonyane Boysana, Mbohwa Charles
As is explained by Tan, Smyrnios, and Xiong (2014:324–9), manufacturing SME growth is influenced by various human resources elements, such as employee knowledge, skills, training (learning), education, and motivation, as well as other factors such as information sharing, environmental sustainability, and competition (foreign direct investment). Furthermore, the literature studied recommends that manufacturing SMEs need to engage creatively toward their employees in order to improve productivity in their businesses. This is a challenge to most manufacturing SMEs—to encourage employees to use their innovative skills in order to achieve the expected results. By using innovation, the productivity of manufacturing SMEs improves. Finally, manufacturing SMEs need to create a strong learning culture in order to provide opportunities for personal development and the communication of knowledge toward improving productivity.
Business management, environmental health and the EHP/business interface
Published in Stephen Battersby, Clay's Handbook of Environmental Health, 2016
A small or medium-sized enterprise, or SME, is defined by the European Commission as a business that has fewer than 250 employees and has an annual turnover of less than €50 million. SMEs are worthy of separate mention as they are likely to form a significant proportion of the companies that EHPs come into regular contact with and they are also subject to specific legislative support from Europe. It is important to note that the business structure of SMEs still follows the models described above.
Impact of organizational culture on quality management and innovation practices among manufacturing SMEs in Nigeria
Published in Quality Management Journal, 2021
Small and medium scale enterprises (SMEs) play a significant role in the economic growth, development, and overall performance of developing and developed countries (Buli 2017; Eniola 2018a). However, many countries worldwide realize the significant importance of SMEs, as more people establish small and medium-sized enterprises. Thus, they are easy to establish, take quick decision making because they have few employees, and therefore have better understanding and control of the enterprise (Toke and Kalpande 2020). The SME sector provides a more significant percentage of employment/empowerment and a source of innovation and technological growth (Eniola and Entebang 2014, 2017; Eniola 2018b). Moreover, a recent study on SMEs attributed the sector's development to economic factors like a low startup capital, increasing volume of goods and services to the economy, and reduction in income disparity. Similarly, these factors are responsible for entrepreneurial talent (Toke and Kalpande 2020). While SMEs provide a significant source of jobs, they also promote entrepreneurial spirit and innovation worldwide. Thus, they constitute a driving force in ensuring and enhancing competitiveness and employment (Toke and Kalpande 2020).
SME Performance Through Blockchain Technologies
Published in Journal of Computer Information Systems, 2023
Sandip Rakshit, Anand Jeyaraj, Tripti Paul
Small and Medium-Size Enterprises (SMEs) must focus on growth, performance improvements, and firm survival to compete in the continually changing market.1 Many causes including labor shortages, rising salaries, and competition from developing economies have pushed the SME sector from being labor-intensive to technology-intensive and capital-intensive in recent years.2,3 SMEs have traditionally relied on centralized management systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to handle their information flow.4 However, centralized systems havevarious risks including errors, hacking, and corruption.5,6 These risks may be addressed with distributed management systems such as Blockchain technology.
The role of operations managers in translating management ideas and practices between firms
Published in Production Planning & Control, 2022
Martin Spring, Christine Unterhitzenberger
SMEs are chosen for theoretical, methodological, and policy reasons. Theoretically, SMEs are thought to be the main beneficiaries of so-called spill-over effects, whereby technological and organizational advances made by large, leading, ‘frontier’ firms provide some of the means and incentives for smaller, less advanced firms to improve (Andrews, Criscuolo, and Gal 2016).1 Methodologically, studying SMEs that have one main operations manager, rather than larger firms with more diffused responsibilities, allows more focussed insight into the way operations managers translate practices from other firms. In terms of policy, governments in the UK and in many other countries are preoccupied with the improvement of productivity (OECD 2015). Since SMEs constitute 99% of firms in many developed economies, improving SME productivity is essential to this. In the UK, recent policy analyses have pointed to a ‘long tail’ of low productivity SMEs (e.g. House of Commons 2018), and apply influential evidence that management practices are an important determinant of SME productivity (Bloom and Van Reenen 2010) and that, more generally, management intervention does indeed make a difference to performance (Bloom et al. 2013). Our principal contributions are to show that operations managers are active translators of management ideas and practices from outside their organizations, and to identify five important translation micro-practices that they use in the translation process. We also show that the function and expertise of operations managers make them uniquely well placed to be active translators of external management ideas and practices. This extends the OM discipline’s conception of the role of operations managers in introducing external ideas and practices, beyond the literature that emphasizes operations managers’ role in selecting management ideas to fit their organization’s contingencies (Sousa and Voss 2008) or that identifies more general ‘critical success factors’ for implementation of ideas (e.g. Wali, Deshmukh, and Gupta 2003) in OM.