Abstract
In most countries, Small Medium Enterprise (SMEs) are known as main players in generating domestic-led investment and stimulate economic expansion. They are vital for economic growth and innovation, poverty reduction, local employment and development, and social cohesion. However, in the current digitally-connected trading economy, SMEs have face many new challenges that change the way SMEs business-to-business (B2B) trading operates. Among these challenges ARE the level of B2B e-commerce implementation and utilization that able to facilitate B2B trading process. However, the implementation of B2B e-commerce is being categorized as a system with high degree of difficulty since it involves complexity of the multiple relationships and interactions between trading partners. The interactions are not just complicated by their volume and variation in processes, but also by the complexity inherent in the dependencies exist between different trading parties. Based on this, for SMEs to partake in the B2B e-commerce activities, they need to have attained some reasonable level of maturity or readiness measurement in order to participate in B2B e-commerce initiatives. To overcome this, the robust multidimensional B2B e-commerce maturity application to assess the e-readiness level is needed. This paper describes the development of B2B e-Commerce Maturity Application (BeMA) which involves several distinct sequential exploratory stages. In order to ensure its validity and practicality, the application was evaluated by 35 selected SMEs. Based on the evaluation results, all respondents were agreed on the model usefulness and its practicality. The research believes that the model will provide practical guidance for SMEs to clearly define appropriate method of measuring e-readiness and the recommendation approaches to improve their B2B e-commerce maturity level.
Highlights
Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) are often seen as the backbone of the economy for most developing countries in the world
To ensure the continous success and sustainability of SMEs to be the engine of economy growth, it is important for SMEs to remain competitive and be adaptive in the use of B2B e-commerce technology [4] [5]
Even though most e-readiness models provide a useful overview of the significant factors of e-readiness, they do not completely provide meaningful multidimensional measures that are specific for SMEs in developing countries
Summary
Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) are often seen as the backbone of the economy for most developing countries in the world. Considering the various constrains of SMEs compared to large organizations in terms of expert, financial and technological resources, failures of such a complex and expensive B2B e-commerce project might affect their businesses. Many organizations are not achieving even minimal levels of B2B e-commerce adoption, raising concerns as to why e-commerce adoption initiatives, including projects led by government, are not more successful [13]-[15] This highlights the importance for SMEs to know the prerequisite factors before adopting the technology since B2B e-commerce involves high level of implementation risks to the organizations as well as to the trading partners. There is a need for an e-readiness model that can determine the B2B e-commerce maturity level and its requirements on SMEs
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