Abstract
Abstract Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play an important role in the economic growth of a country and of a sector. They seek to be incorporated into permanent productivity and competitiveness dynamics through a cooperation strategy. This article evaluated the application of management practices to horizontal SMEs networks of the dairy sector in Ecuador by following the constructivist methodology. The literature review and exploratory research indicated an understanding of cooperative work in the networks or Milk Collection Centers (MCCs) and identified the need to evaluate performance when applying management practices as an unavoidable element to enhance their operation and development. The construction phase took as reference a model for the evaluation of management practices in cooperation networks and contextualized it to the Ecuadorian environment. In the evaluation phase, three networks were evaluated, from which results and conclusions were obtained. The developed model identified six criteria with which the evaluations of MCCs were made, whose analysis allowed their performance level to be quantified and a proposal of some specific improvement opportunities for this sector and a group of SMEs.
Highlights
Change in economic landscape has brought about profound transformations in management practices, where the most flexible organizational forms gain importance if they are inclined toward market variations and they incorporate innovations more quickly (Bortolaso et al, 2013)
In its vision for development over the decade, has defined sectoral pillars in its industrial policy that sustain the country’s economic growth; the agroindustry leads a group of prioritized sectors where, via the strategy of strengthening local chains, it seeks to facilitate the linkage of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and large national enterprises in global value chains (Cimoli et al, 2017)
In a set of subsectors with greater economic growth, we find high production levels of intermediate goods for national consumption and generators of employment, where dairy production stands out as one of the sectors with the highest local productive development potential (Bravo Velásquez, 2016)
Summary
Change in economic landscape has brought about profound transformations in management practices, where the most flexible organizational forms gain importance if they are inclined toward market variations and they incorporate innovations more quickly (Bortolaso et al, 2013) In this scenario, small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have been identified with organizational schemes in networks or industrial groups that emerge as new market value products and associated production processes. Agroindustrial politics fosters the development of dairy chains by the following guidelines: development of primary production competitiveness; efficient use of the industry’s installed capacity; promotion of innovation; access to the international market In this context, production of fresh domestic milk receives an important contribution from the strata of SMEs with 22.79% (small-sized) and 19.09% (medium‐sized), respectively (FAO, 2015b). This article is organized into five parts, in addition to the Introduction: Section 2 describes the conducted research; Section 3 discusses the cooperation networks in SMEs of the Ecuadorian dairy sector and presents the contextualization process of the measurement model; Section 4 explains the contextualized model and the evaluation tool for cooperative networks; Section 5 offers and discusses the field research; Section 6 presents the conclusions and opportunities for improvement at both the theoretical and practical levels
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
