A Review on Supply Chain Management (SCM) by SMEs as a Strategy to Achieve Global Competitiveness

Small and medium enterprises play a vital role in the economy worldwide as they provide great opportunities for employment. Unfortunately, research shows that a very small percentage of SMEs scale upto the next levels and become large scale enterprises. This is due to several inherent issues and challenges of these enterprises and lack of support from stakeholders on many occasions. This appears to be a global phenomenon and the situation is similar in India too. For SMEs to achieve the global competitiveness, it is observed by researchers that they need to upgrade their technology and strategies in many aspects of managing their enterprises. Supply chain management is found to be one of the best alternatives to enable them to become globally competitive and scale up the enterprise to the higher levels. This study focuses on researchers on issues and challenges faced by SMEs in the implementation of SCM, and how SCM can be useful to SMEs for becoming globally competitive.