Abstract

Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) account for over 95% of firms in most countries. In Quebec, SMEs account for 96% of all businesses. SMEs are important for economic growth and they are strong contributors to productivity. Some of the challenges of SMEs are the lack of financing, difficulties in using technology, constrained managerial capabilities, or inefficient productivity.
Among challenges of SMEs, finance and inefficient productivity can be considered as two of the most important issues that slows down their growth. Finance issues can be referred to as the lack of money in investing in new technologies, hiring competent resources, and investing in new equipment. To improve the financial status of a company and increase the profit, we can either increase the revenue or decrease the expenses. The objective of this project is to target the finance issue as well as inefficient productivity of the SMEs and improve both of them by developing a workflow model. Workflow refers to a method for improving business process management, and an effective workflow can help the decision-makers in an enterprise to develop pathways leading to the reduction of costs and wastes. It employs the Environment Based Design (EBD) methodology which not only designs an effective workflow but also analyses the environment of the business to find the root causes of the issues to help the SMEs improve their finance issue by increasing the operation and production efficiency and effectiveness.