Rajeev Narayanapillai

ABSTRACT

The development of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) can be considered as a vital instrument for employment generation, exports, poverty alleviation and ensure rapid industrialization of developed as well as developing countries. However, SMEs, particularly in developing countries like India, face constraints in key areas such as technology, finance, Inventory Management (IM), marketing and human resources. It is observed from literature that pursuing appropriate IM practice is one of the ways of acquiring competitiveness among others, by effectively managing and minimizing inventory investment. IM can therefore be one of the crucial determinants of competitiveness as well as operational performance of SMEs in inventory intensive manufacturing industries. The key issue is whether Indian SMEs pursue modern IM practices with an intention to enhance their competitiveness. If so, what are the IM practices pursued by these enterprises? In this paper the researcher has tried to identify the IM practices pursued by Indian machine tool SMEs and recommendations for improvements are identified. The Study brought out that performance of Indian SMEs in terms of IM practices have been found significantly below the international standard and the experience of the entrepreneur is one of the major factors which differentiate between enterprises.