Inventory management performance in Indian machine tool SMEs: What factors do influence them?

These instructions give you basic guidelines for preparing papers for the IEEM 2008 Proceedings. Inventory management (IM) plays a decisive role in the enhancement of efficiency for manufacturing enterprise competitiveness. Therefore, major manufacturing industries are following inventory management practices as a strategy to improve efficiency and achieve competitiveness. However, the spread of inventory management culture among small and medium enterprises (SMEs) is limited due to lack of initiation, expertise and financial limitations in developed countries, leave alone developing countries. With this backdrop, this paper makes an attempt to ascertain the factors which influence the IM performance of SMEs in the machine tools industry of Bangalore, India. This issue is probed based on primary data gathered from 91 SMEs. The paper brings out that two sets of factors namely organizational support and external pressure have a positive impact on the inventory performance of SMEs.