Smart Enterprise Research Articles

SMEs -The Smart Enterprises

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are crucial for the economic growth and stability of any country and play a vital role especially for developing countries as they facilitate economic activity and provide employment thus contributing to poverty reduction. In the Indian context they can be considered as the backbone of national economy. The major constraints of SMEs are finance for initial capital and working capital, Line of credit from the suppliers, new technology to produce quality products/ give service, ability to hire qualified and professional staff for production, service and marketing. Majority of the banks consider lending to SMEs an unattractive venture due to a range of factors including information asymmetries and consequently high transaction costs, collateral requirement, financial products not meeting SME sector requirements in medium to long term Information asymmetries, due to inefficient legal system and weak governance structures of SMEs, result in higher transaction costs on the supply side. On the demand side we find most of the SMEs tend to shy away from formal modes of financing due to the high cost of credit, lengthy procedures, collateral requirements and lack of awareness about the benefits of corporate governance. External finance cannot be obtained by firms in their start-up phase as their management structures are not transparent and usually have intangible assets. International investors are often reluctant to invest in developing countries because their institutions do not provide an adequate level of security for their investment particularly in terms of enforceability of legal rights and governance framework. MNCs and international investors will be willing to forge partnership with SMEs only when their level confidence and trust increases regarding transparency and governance of the local partner. Another problem for most of the SMEs being family owned enterprises is that there is no clarity on the roles resulting in credibility problems and inability to arrive at strategic decisions. Good governance is vital for the development of a healthy and competitive corporate sector. For SMEs, corporate governance is about the respective roles of the shareholders as owners and the managers. It is about establishing rules and procedures to manage and run the enterprise. It has been empirically tested that good governance practices of a company gives a positive signal to investors. With the globalization of markets, international capital flows have become extremely valuable source of external financing. Good corporate governance leads to development of a framework that provides adequate protection to the interests of stakeholders and reinforces the fiduciary responsibilities of those vested with the authority to act on behalf of the stakeholders. This paper would analyze the current status of Indian SMEs and how, the introduction SMART governance frame work can make the SMEs SMART Enterprises.

Virtualization Techniques for Mobile Devices

In current mobile system environment there is a huge gap between the personal smart phone and the enterprise smart phone due to the issues related to security, enterprise policies and freedom of use. In the current environment, data-plans on mobile systems have become so prevalent that the rate of adaptation of data plan for the current customers has far outpaced the ability to add new consumers for the mobile service providers. Most of the enterprises require/provide the access of emails and other official information on smart platforms. This presents a big challenge for enterprise in securing their systems. Therefore due to the security issues and policies imposed by the enterprise in using the same device for dual purpose (personal and enterprise), the consumers often lose their individual freedom and convenience at the cost of security. To address this challenge, few solutions have been presented. One effective way is to partition the mobile device such that the enterprise system access and its information are completely separated from the personal information. This paper discusses and presents such approaches for mobile information partition in order to create a secured and secluded environment for enterprise information while allowing the user access to their personal information.

Embedded devices for supply chain applications: Towards hardware integration of disparate technologies

The emergence of the RFID technology and its application to supply chain processes has in particular led to the creation of such standards as the EPCglobal’s model of supply networks as a tool for materializing intra- and inter-enterprise visibility of resources and products, collaboration and integration. Among other critical uses, RFID has been deployed by supply networks to improve asset utilization, effectively combat counterfeiting, and advance targeted product recalls. However, new affordable and deployable technologies and microsensors have recently appeared and keep maturing. This paper discusses the needs and the possibilities that exist for leveraging these technologies and sensors with RFID to guarantee continuous and seamless visibility of all assets (fixed and mobile resources and field personnel) of smart enterprises, thereby expanding and complementing the roles of RFID. It examines the design challenges for the integration of these technologies for advanced logistics operations at the level of product classes or their instances. It then outlines our development of an embedded microsystem that combines RFID, GPRS, GPS and environmental sensors for applications in logistics. The prototyped microsystem demonstrated the feasibility of the multi-sensor integration paradigm that the paper proposes.

차세대 Enterprise Portal 기능의 평가 프레임워크 개발에 관한 연구: 지식창출 관점

The purpose of this paper is to imply for the assessing framework of next generation Enterprise Portals`(EPs) function through the lens of organizational knowledge creation. As the emerging suite products such as Smart Enterprise Suite (SES) converges EPs with collaboration and content management, EPs are no longer just a gateway to information and content. EPs are emerging as the center of convergence for many complementary technologies. Considering that this trend is common and knowledge creation is one of key goals of EPs, it is important to assess EPs` function through the knowledge creation process. This paper reviews literatures to set initial assessing elements of EPs` function, then adopts Delphi Technique to prove and categorize the elements according to the knowledge creation process. The samples are consisted of 7 professional knowledge management consultants at Entrue Consulting Partners, LG CNS. This paper may be significant in providing a new vision to the evaluation of EPs by combining a theoretical model with a practical situation.

Trends in information infrastructure of enterprises

This paper will focus on the development trends of enterprise information infrastructure which will take into account an effective management of institution as well as integration of the existing technologies and systems. A special focus will aimed at the new Smart Enterprise Suites (SES), which should provide for convergence and integration of the originally single systems as portals, content management and collaboration. The author presented part of these results also at the Agrarian Perspectives Conference 2005 in the applied informatics session.