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ABSTRACT
The adoption and implementation of e-business by small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in Taiwan has become increasingly important in order to stay competitive. Due to the disparities between industries and the differing maturity levels of e-business, SMEs must apply diverse strategies and activities to deploy their e-business projects. Employing questionnaire surveys and interviews, this study demonstrates that management, process innovation, and resource infusion play a major role in the performance of Taiwanese SMEs to implement e-business, and, therefore, have the potential to promote e-business growth. Results revealed that implementation of cost reduction along with revenue increments during the midterm of the e-business project had good benefits. The factors of management, process innovation, and resource infusion were statistically significant and this implies that they have positive influences on e-business when applied in different industries.
Keywords: E-Business, Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs)
INTRODUCTION
The emergence of the Internet has augmented the speed of globalization, liberalization, and digitization in the industries around the world. The tide of Internet-usage brought a digital economic revolution, furthermore creating an unprecedented economic shock wave to small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). An enterprise is categorized as an SME if it has less than 200 employees or fixed capital amounting to less than NT$ 80 millions. In Taiwan, over 97% of enterprises are SMEs, which account for around 50% of exports. Apparently, SMEs present a significant contribution to the economic development in Taiwan. However, due to limited capital resources, scarcity of informational experts, and inexperienced employees to maintain the information system, SMEs hesitated to collaborate with business partners in the aspects of information, business, logistic and cash flows. However, with the assistance from information technology (IT) service companies, SMEs began to recognize the importance of e-business and took action to gradually implement it.
Since the progress of developing e-business strategies in SMEs is influenced by the industries' characteristics and the degree of the e-business environment's maturity, various strategies are adopted to develop an e-business procedure. Managers of SMEs can therefore adjust their e-business strategies to accommodate the dynamic business environment.
This paper investigates related issues, including the level of maturity in e-business environments, and the key points and strategies of e-businesses among different industries. The benefits of e-businesses...