Assessing the impact of collaborative practices on the performance of automotive SMEs: an exploratory study

Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) involved in automotive components manufacturing, offer a sizable contribution in wealth creation and gross domestic product (GDP) of a nation. Better performance and higher productivity are imperative for an enterprise to sustain increasing global pressures, customer demands and market volatility. Major life cycle decisions are finalised in product design development stage as they affect performance of enterprise and late design changes are often undesirable. Collaboration is an approach that helps resolve late design changes by sharing knowledge and data. Collaborative practices in SMEs have found to improve performance appreciably. In this paper, an attempt has been made to assess the impact of collaborative practices on performance. Data collected from SMEs through questionnaire was analysed and results thus obtained were subjected to validation through structural equation model, establishing positive correlation between collaborative practices and productivity. The research findings confirm that collaborative practices are highly correlated for improving productivity.