• Journal of Korean Society for Quality Management
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• v.32 no.2
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• pp.1-14
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• 2004

As environmental issues have been become critical concerns of business, many domestic small and medium enterprises(SME's) are rapidly accepting environmental management systems(EMS) that confirm ISO 14001 guidelines. The purpose of this paper is to present the results of an empirical study carried out on a sample of certified SME's with the aim of identifying obstacles encountered in adopting ISO 14001 standards and the impact of environmental systems on corporate performance after implementation of the ISO 14001 registration process. Data from this study show that the vast majority of respondents reported environmental improvements related to the implementation of an ISO 14001 EMS, especially in the area of employees' participation of the environmental management and responsibilities for reducing negative impacts, energy and resource conservation, materials reuse, and raising top management commitment. The greatest obstacles for implementing the ISO 14001 standard are lack of cooperation and a scarcity of resources such as personnel, money, and time. Results of this study serve as a reference point understanding the problems in the implementation of ISO 14001 in other small and medium firms.

• Journal of the Korea Safety Management & Science
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.351-362
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• 2014

A prerequisite for improving the quality of a product is to enhance the quality of its parts supplied from outsourced enterprises. An enterprise certified by ISO 9001 Quality Management System is expected to develop their effective quality assurance system and maintain it through continuous control and improvement, thereby ensuring the good quality of products that they produce. However, it is reported that small and medium-sized enterprises certified by ISO 9001 have difficulty establishing an effective quality assurance system. This study aims to propose a new method of improving a quality assurance system that can be more effective in small and medium-sized enterprises. This study collectively considered requirements specified in several international standards on quality system and the results of expert group brainstorming to identify evaluation areas and items for assessing a quality assurance system. Based on these evaluation areas and items, a set of checklists for diagnosing and improving a quality assurance system was developed. In order to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed method, this study applied it to ten small and medium-sized enterprises and could identify four approaches for improving their current quality assurance system. The presented improvement method, which consists of establishment of quality goals and quality innovation plan, defective products corrective activities, 4M and design change process, improvement of customer quality information management, is expected to be utilized as a useful tool for the enhancement of the quality assurance system of small and medium-sized enterprises.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.38 no.6
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• pp.1001-1012
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• 2018

Regarding the small- and medium-sized enterprises in Korea that manufacture the railway vehicle parts, there are over 250 related companies. And they have been surviving in the form of producing and delivering the parts of the railway vehicles by importing the technologies and the products of the foreign countries rather than possessing their own technological abilities. Due to this, regarding the industry of the core components of the railroads, the dependence on the overseas has been high. As such, although, for supporting the small- and medium-sized enterprises that manufacture the railway vehicle parts, the government has been strengthening the diverse policy supports, it is a fact that the effectiveness of the support is not high. And, in order to effectively support these, there is a need to understand clearly and definitely what the important promotion factors are in the process of the technology commercialization. Accordingly, through the precedent researches regarding the factors that promote the technology commercializations of the small- and medium-sized enterprises that manufacture the railway vehicle parts, this research had extracted 10 main items. And the level of the importance of these indices was analyzed by using the AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process). As a result of the AHP analysis, the factors within a corporation appeared to be the most important factor. And, as for the lower-ranking item, the commercialization capability was analyzed to be the most important item. It is highly expected that the contents and the results of this research will be usefully used when formulating the planning of the support program and the support policy for the technology commercializations by the public research organizations and the railroad management organization, which is an organization that supports the small- and medium-sized enterprises that manufacture the railway vehicle parts.

• Journal of Information Technology Services
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.195-215
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• 2015

Recently, as the number of smart-phone users has been rapidly increased, enterprise managers have a keen interest in business application of social media. Most previous studies have focused on perspective of the individual unit of analysis instead of enterprise level unit. The study is focused on the relationship between the enterprises' recognition and behavioral intention (and use) about social media application. The purpose of this study is to develop the model of small and medium enterprises' social media application, and to find the factors affecting their behavioral intention or use behavior. The moderating effects of four corporate characteristics on the relationship between the enterprises' recognition and behavioral intention are also examined. We surveyed 900 corporate staffs and received 203 responses. After questionnaires with unreliable responses had been excluded, 182 effective samples were used in the final analysis. The findings suggest that Performance Expectation, Social Influence, Facilitating Conditions significantly affect Behavioral Intention of social medea, and Behavioral Intention affects USE. Furthermore, some corporate characteristics have moderating effect on the relationship between recognition of social media and Behavioral Intention.

• Journal of the Korea Safety Management & Science
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.1-9
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• 2009

The present management of the domestic and international advanced enterprises is transferring the systems and the regulations to the prevention system management. Expecially, KOSHA (Korea Occupational Safety & Health Agency) in Korea has supported to set up the OSHMS (Occupational Safety & Health Management System) by KOSHA 18001 since 1997. But small & medium enterprises (SMS) has many difficulties to set up the OSHMS system because of limited natural and human resources. In this study, the rating system as a judgment method of an OSHMS based on the certification standard of the OSHMS, which was suggested in previous study, was developed for SMS to adopt voluntarily the OSHMS, certify KOSHA 18001, and improve the safety and health level.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.8 no.12
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• pp.345-352
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• 2021

Guided by a resource-based theory, this study is the first one that takes a quantitative approach to identify determinants of competitiveness of women-owned small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Vietnam. The study employs time series data of Vietnamese SMEs extracted from the Vietnam Small and Medium Enterprises Survey conducted biennially from 2005 to 2015 in ten Vietnamese provinces. Firm competitiveness hereby is indicated by revenue, market share, profitability, and export volume. The research reveals a number of determining factors, of all, research and development, labor skills, business environment, technology investment are the most important factors, followed by capital and headcount. It is indicated that the determining factors have different influences on competitiveness obtained by different measurements. Therefore, it is based on specific targets and situations to make wise business decisions. The authors also make comparisons among groups of women-owned enterprises divided by their firm age, location, ownership, export, age, and educational background of business owners. The findings serve as critical empirical evidence and provide policy recommendations for improving the competitiveness of women-owned SMEs in Vietnam. The recommendations range from technology support, education and professional support for female entrepreneurs, access to capital and human resources to business environment improvement.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.8 no.9
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• pp.155-163
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• 2021

This research was conducted to check the impact of factors related to the small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) on the economic growth in the Southeast region of Vietnam, over the years from 1996-2019. This paper applies a combination of FEM, DKSE, GMM, and RIDGE-FEM regression methods to estimate the influence of independent variables on the economic growth of the whole Southeast region with the panel data collected from GSO; and applying the OLS regression model for each province. The study finds that all variables have a statistically significant positive impact on the economic growth of the study area. Accordingly, the importance of the variables is in the following order: (1) the proportion of workers by professional and technical qualification (SMEH), (2) the number of vocational training schools (LnTSCH), and educational level of workers (LnSchool), (3) the number of SME enterprises (LnSME); (4) The average number of years in the schooling of employees in the enterprise (LnSchool); (5) Enterprise capital (LnCAP); and (6) the average number of employees of SME (LnSMER). The research results also show that factors related to the quality of labor resources have a more positive influence on growth than both the labor size and financial capital of SMEs.

• IE interfaces
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.276-282
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• 2012

Earned value management(EVM) based progress management was designed to systematically manage large or huge projects with budget based criteria. For this reason, existed methods of EVM based progress management have a practical difficulty to apply to small and medium enterprises(SMEs) not possessing enough human resource, time, and cost. In other words, SMEs have performed simultaneously many small-sized projects emphasizing more project delivery than project budget. This study focuses on the area of project management applying to many small-sized projects simultaneously conducted by SMEs. Thus, the method proposed in this study is to manage only the progress of projects after removing cost factor in order to reduce man powers required for allocating the budget of projects to their all activities in detail in the stage of project planning. This study reveals that SMEs are able to manage progress of many projects easily and intuitively using the proposed method.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.24 no.6
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• pp.1309-1318
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• 2014

In the past few years, data leakage of information assets has become a prominent social issue. According to the National Industrial Security Center in South Korea, 71 percent who suffer from technology leakage are small and medium sized enterprises. Hence, establishment and operation of ISMS (Information Security Management System) for small and medium sized enterprises become an important issue. Since it is not easy to obtain ISMS certification for a small or medium sized enterprise by itself, consultation with an expert firm in information security is necessary before the security implementation. However, how to select a proper security consulting company for a small or medium sized firm has not been studied yet. In this study, we analyze empirically the selection factors of ISMS certification consulting company for a small or medium sized firm through exploratory factor analysis (EFA). Our study identified the following four important factors in selecting a security consulting company: expertise of the staffs and human resource management proficiency, market leading capability, competence to make progress during the consultation, and the performance and the size of the physical assets and human resources.

• Science of Emotion and Sensibility
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.65-81
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• 2004

With the arrival of the 21th century, the management environments such as the knowledge system, information system, and technology system surrounding small and medium enterprises are being rapidly changed. These rapidly changing the environment of enterprises like the above can be thought rather profitable for the elastic and resiling medium enterprises than large enterprises. Additionally, these environments are recognized as the management circumstances which provide with the change by which medium enterprises equipped with the trustworthy creativity in the 21th century are able to become the main player of the industrial development. The position and role of medium enterprises in the national economical system are very important. The execution of the local autonomy system and the policy to activate the local economy will generally enlarge the power of medium enterprises which are based on the concerned local society more ant more. But, by the standpoint of designer, it is pointed out that there is the problem that the effective application means or the availability of the industrial design was not sufficiently recognized or understood by the manager in enterprises. Notwithstanding the above problem, a lot of domestic small and medium enterprises became to apply the industrial design as the means for improving the competitiveness of their own products in the relatively short time powered by the governmental policy, and moreover both of the concerned partners(the manager and industrial designer) had the opportunity to newly recognize the industrial design and evaluate the availability or problem of the industrial design in the actual aspect. This event means very important change. With the understanding on the above situation, the purpose of this study is to recognize whether the design is strategically applied in the management level of domestic small and medium enterprises, whether the strategical establishment of the design management is performed without any problem, whether the field designer and CEO are well recognizing the design management and what their recognition level is in order to seek the new solution for plenty of problems. Therefore, the actual proof analysis was performed for the field designer and management CEO of small and medium enterprises with the questionnaire survey and direct interview method to understand the actuality of small and medium enterprises.