E-Business Initiatives in Indonesian Manufacturing SMEs
Abstract: The
role of information
technology (IT) in
improving companies’
competitiveness, including small and
medium enterprises (SMEs),
has been widely
accepted. But, the IT
investment will be in vain, if SMEs do not align their business and IT. There
is a need to develop a framework of business-IT alignment. The framework
development requires an understanding of the patterns of IT implementation in
supporting SMEs’ business (e-business initiatives). This paper presents an
empirical study on e-business initiatives in Indonesian manufacturing SMEs. The
study uses 41 business processes that are grouped into three business focuses:
supplier side, internal side and customer side. Based
on the complexity
of IT support
to business processes, supplier side score, internal side
score, customer side score and global score can be calculated. These scores
are used to
develop e-business initiative
groups by using
cluster analysis. After validated using discriminant analysis,
the cluster analysis gives five e-business initiatives. First initiative is
e-business implementation in three sides of business focuses, although in the
early stage. Second initiative
is IT implementation with
internal side focus.
Third initiative is
e-business with customer side focus. The fourth is initiative that
focuses on internal and customer side. The last is e-business initiative that
balances and extends IT implementation on the three sides of
business focuses. Then,
this paper explains
the differences between
e-business initiatives.
Keywords: E-business,
business process, small
and medium enterprise,
cluster analysis, business focus,
functional activity
Author: Singgih Saptadi, Iman
Sudirman, TMA Ari Samadhi, Rajesri Govindaraju
Journal Code: jptindustrigg140021
