Business strategy and e-business initiatives in Indonesian B-to-B manufacturing SMEs

Transforming SMEs into e-business is one of efforts to improve the competitiveness of SMEs. However, the initiatives of e-business can not be separated from the company´s business strategy. This means that the transformation of SMEs towards e-business follows the company´s business strategy. However, SMEs often do not clearly define their business strategy, and this strategy is seen as the company´s commitment to customer demand. For manufacturing companies, manufacturing systems literature calls this commitment as competitive priorities which is a part of the manufacturing strategy and reflects the business strategy. This study describes the alignment between e-business initiatives with the competitive priorities. This study uses business process approach to find e-business initiatives. Business processes that are supported electronically by SMEs become the pivot domain for the alignment process. This study shows four types of e-business initiatives that are identified from empirical studies and explains the relationship between each initiative with competitive priorities to be fulfilled by B-to-B manufacturing SMEs.