Information Leveraging China'S Small And Medium Enterprises "Three Pressures"

Europe and the United States economic downturn, investment and consumption prospects are worrying, while domestic raw material prices are rising, labor costs are increasing, RMB appreciation is accelerated and credit is further tightened. Many unfavorable factors are accelerating the profit margins of small and medium-sized export enterprises, and some small enterprises even face survival challenges.

Can information technology lead to the path of fine management after the expansion of small and medium-sized enterprises in China, and achieve the second take-off in adversity? "Now, we have to suffer seventy thousand or eighty thousand yuan of exchange losses every month."

Pei Zhenhua, chairman and general manager of Suzhou Tianhua super clean Polytron Technologies Inc (hereinafter referred to as Suzhou Tianhua), made an answer when talking about the impact of China's current exchange rate changes on business operations.

Although for Jiangsu's high-tech enterprises that produce dust-free and antistatic products, the loss of such a scale is not worth mentioning. But in Suzhou, a region with an external oriented economy and the number of small and medium enterprises as high as 12 million, such as Suzhou Tianhua, the profit margin is almost 15% to 20%, and annual sales exceed one hundred million.

Xu Huadong, deputy director of the Suzhou Municipal Economic and Trade Commission and deputy director general of Suzhou municipal SME Bureau, said: "the appreciation of the renminbi and the recession in Europe and the United States will have an impact on the export-oriented enterprises which are the majority of Suzhou, especially in part of the traditional micro profit industries, which may even have a serious impact on the survival of enterprises."

But at present, the impact of this aspect is very large. Xu Huadong said it is difficult to measure and needs to be analyzed concretely.

However, it is certain that the operating pressure of small and medium-sized enterprises is from many aspects. Apart from the exchange rate factors, small and medium-sized enterprises are also facing pressure from other sources of survival.

Three pressure Xu Weikang, director of Suzhou SME Service Center, said that from the actual situation in Suzhou, although there are more than 1 trillion and 200 billion yuan in the GDP of 2 trillion yuan in Suzhou from exports, but the specific analysis, Suzhou SMEs are divided into two categories.

One of them is raw materials processing enterprises. Their raw materials come from foreign enterprises, and processed products are also mainly used for export. Therefore, the enterprises with "two out of the way" purchase and sale are less affected by exchange rate.

While the other enterprises are different, their purchases are in the domestic market, but the products are sold abroad. With the acceleration of the appreciation of RMB, the losses in exchange will be bigger and bigger.

Although RMB appreciation does not bring serious losses to all enterprises, the impact of human cost and raw material price increase on enterprise management is real.

Therefore, in view of Pei Zhenhua of Tianhua company in Suzhou, the appreciation of RMB is not the only factor affecting the operation of small and medium-sized enterprises. It is not even the most important factor. The rising price of raw materials and the rise of labor costs have also seriously affected or even worsened the operation of many enterprises.

Therefore, he believes that RMB appreciation, rising raw material prices and rising labor costs are becoming the three most pressing pressures on SMEs.

This view has been widely recognized in many enterprises visited by reporters.

Among them, Qian Xianghua is now preparing for the plan. He intends to report to Suzhou's Dongshan precision manufacturing Limited by Share Ltd, who has recently been listed on the Shenzhen stock exchange's small and medium board, told reporters that 30% to 40% of the company's sales are exported, and the company plans to sell about 600 million yuan in 2008. It is estimated that nearly half of its sales are from exports, so the exchange rate change will obviously have a significant impact on the company's business performance.

For this sheet metal and stamping processing enterprise, its raw materials are mainly aluminum and steel, and the cost of raw materials accounts for nearly 60% of the total product cost. Therefore, the rise of raw material prices has brought great pressure to the company's operation.

In addition, Qian Xianghua said, the minimum wage of employees has risen from 750 yuan to 850 yuan, and with the implementation of the new labor contract law, employment has become more standardized, and the corresponding costs have increased significantly.

Similarly, at the county-level city, which is located in the first place in Jiangsu, Kunshan, the export oriented small and medium-sized enterprise, Wu Guoqing, general manager of Suzhou Information Technology Co., Ltd., which is responsible for information education and promotion in Kunshan area, and general manager of Kunshan Zhong Rong Information Technology Co., Ltd., has also expressed great concern for these three issues.

Based on his in-depth understanding of front-line SMEs, he said: "these three aspects do indeed seriously affect the operation of enterprises."

Moreover, SMEs in response to changes in the external economic environment and customer demand changes, and so on, can not be fast and effective, so some enterprises in these three aspects of the loss is quite serious.

As a logistics company, Kunshan Jianwei Logistics Co., Ltd. is suffering from the loss of high oil prices.

According to Tong Jianzhong, general manager of the company, the gross profit margin of the logistics company is about 10% to 15%. In the past one or two years, due to the high oil price, the short distance pportation cost in East China within 300 kilometers increased by 6%, and the long-distance pportation cost more than 300 kilometers also increased 3%.

Informatization is facing many difficulties in the face of many small and medium-sized enterprises. As the main leader of the work of small and medium-sized enterprises in Suzhou, deputy director Xu Huadong gave another explanation: "it can test the work results of SMEs in a certain period of time, and can test the intrinsic quality of the enterprises themselves.

This also has a further role in promoting the informatization of SMEs, because informatization plays an irreplaceable role in enhancing the enterprise's ability to resist risks and improving the internal quality of enterprises.

In fact, from 2004 to 2006, Suzhou launched the "first round of private economy take-off plan". However, the focus of this round of plan is to promote the expansion of small and medium-sized enterprises in terms of total volume and scale.

According to deputy director Xu Huadong, during the "11th Five-Year" period, Suzhou launched a new round of take-off plan. The focus of this plan is to further improve the internal management level of the enterprise, promote the introduction of modern enterprise management system, enhance the capability of independent innovation, make it bigger and stronger, and achieve leapfrog development.

For the goal of the new round of take-off plan proposed by Suzhou, Du Wenzhong, the leader of information technology promotion in Suzhou, and the winner of the national informatization award, have many feelings. As a direct promoter of the informatization of small and medium-sized enterprises, he believes that the future of information technology is promising and is expected to become the most powerful tool for relieving the above three pressures.

Although many people including government administrators, business users and leaders of information counseling stations in Suzhou generally believe that informatization can not directly solve the impact of exchange rate and other factors, they also agree that informatization can indirectly reduce or even eliminate the adverse effects of macroeconomic factors on enterprise management through roundabout means.

In order to better train and improve the information consciousness of small and medium-sized enterprises in Kunshan, Wu Guoqing has done in-depth and systematic research and Reflection on this aspect.

As far as exchange rate factors are concerned, Wu Guoqing thinks: "informatization can not change the exchange rate, but it can reduce costs through information technology in many aspects such as enterprise procurement, production and sales, and raise gross margin to resist exchange rate risk.

At the same time, as information technology improves service quality and product quality, it can improve bargaining power of enterprises in the international market and improve product prices to a certain extent.

And a drop in cost and price can help enterprises to offset exchange losses to a large extent.

For example, in the past, enterprises received an average of one to half a month, or even longer, from receiving orders to delivery.

If the product price is determined according to the exchange rate level at the time of acceptance of the order, the payment will be made in RMB one or two months later and the remittance will be RMB. The exchange rate has changed significantly, and the company will suffer a great loss.

If we use information technology, we can speed up order processing, shorten manufacturing time, and deliver goods to customers in one day or even one or two hours, thus reducing the losses caused by RMB appreciation during this period.

At the same time, information technology can also accelerate the turnover of capital, calculate the cost of every order in real time, offer quotation and shorten the settlement cycle, which is also very useful for reducing exchange losses.

With regard to the problem of rising prices of raw materials, Wu Guoqing suggested that through supplier evaluation system, supplier resources can be optimized according to factors such as delivery time, settlement cycle, historical price level and historical quality level, so as to achieve the "parity, bargaining and quality" in the procurement process, thereby reducing procurement links, controlling procurement risks and reducing procurement costs, and ultimately, to a certain extent, offset the increase in costs due to rising raw material prices.

As for the control of labor costs, Wu Guoqing also put forward his view. In his view, the problems of "recruitment difficulties, difficulties in training and retaining difficulties" can be alleviated to a certain extent through the human resource management system, reducing the human resource management.

For example, through personnel management, contract management, performance management, attendance management and other systems, we can make a detailed analysis of the existing human resource composition and cost of the enterprise, so as to clarify the recruitment objectives, cost and training emphasis.

In the process of interview with Wu Guoqing, when he asked about his idea of whether the three major problems of information exchange rate, raw material price and labor cost were widely accepted in enterprises, he gave a positive answer.

He said: "small businesses may be unable to take account of the problems at this time, but these views have been recognized in the enterprises that I visited slightly.

Moreover, some enterprises have begun to carry out informatization work aimed at achieving fine management.

In further interviews with reporters, many enterprises have already put forward higher level and more targeted information needs on the basis of the existing information technology.

Dongshan precision manufacturing company has completed almost all modules in the ERP system including purchasing, production, finance, manpower, MRP and so on.

According to Qian Xianghua, its operation manager, all of these modules are in use, and recently, the company has invested nearly a million yuan to purchase a full set of genuine CAD design software and other production control software, basically realizing the automation of design and production.

At present, the company has been able to use CAD software to assist design, process and process CNC programs and graphic data through enterprise LAN, and use ERP system to manage information of production process, product quality, user service and other data, ensuring product design quality and production efficiency.

However, on the one hand, because of the need for the company to plan to go public to raise the level of management, on the other hand, it is also due to the continuous improvement of the quality of products by foreign customers. Qian Xianghua introduced that the company plans to gradually increase its investment in informatization in the future, focusing on strengthening the internal management of enterprises and the management of the upstream and downstream enterprises.

For example, design drawing management and data interaction system with customers, especially the semi finished product monitoring system currently under consideration.

Qian Xianghua said: "these systems play an important role in improving the quality of management and reducing the cost of management."

Similarly, in Suzhou Tianhua super clean Polytron Technologies Inc, Li Jiangye, manager of material department, who is responsible for information technology, told reporters that they are also negotiating with software vendors. It is hoped that after the ERP system is basically completed, the production process can be more refined.

This company has many products lines, such as antistatic clothing / dust-free clothes, antistatic shoes / dust-free shoes, dust-free wipes, dust mats, anti-static gloves, glove gloves, ion fans, on-line monitors, anti-static working chairs and so on. If we can achieve more detailed management and monitoring, we will save a lot of management costs.

Jianwei logistics company started to deploy the ERP system since 2005. In 2006, it obtained the 60 thousand yuan subsidy provided by Suzhou science and Technology Bureau, and achieved great results in information technology. At present, the automatic management and online confirmation of orders have been fully realized, and financial management, human resource management, storage management and other management modules have also been fully implemented.

Recently, MITSUBISHI heavy industries of Japan has reached an agreement with Jianwei logistics company to close a large warehouse in Pudong, Shanghai, and outsource all related businesses to Jianwei logistics company.

But for the company's general manager, Tong Jianzhong, signing large customers like MITSUBISHI heavy industries, not just