Sustainable enterprise KPIs and ERP post adoption

A survey study on Portuguese SMEs

Pedro Ruivo
Microsoft, ISEGI/UNL Lisbon, Portugal pruivo@microsoft.com

Miguel Neto
ISEGI/UNL Lisbon, Portugal mneto@isegi.unl.pt

Abstract Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems and Key Performance Indicators (KPI) in general are currently experiencing an increasing interest from both the academic and business communities. This paper examines the relative influence of eight KPIs determinants and the use of ERP in Portuguese Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). Through a web survey, data was collected and validated from 85 firms. A Structural Equation Model (SEM) analysis was used to tests the hypotheses related with KPIs pertinent to the ERP post adoption. The results show that six of eight variables related with KPIs contribute to ERP usage and value. Additional, enterprise sustainability is a determinate to whether ERP system is used or not. This work is the first empirical research study that focus on sustainable enterprise KPIs. This is a synthesis of existing practice from Portuguese industry, consultancy and academia into a coherent framework for the achievement of sustainable performance and ERP post adoption. Keywords: ERP, SMEs, KPI, SEM, Enterprise Sustainability, Information Systems.

most appropriate tool to adapt management strategies [2]. A successful ERP implementation can be determined by the alignment between ERP and business strategies that are measured by performance indicators [3]. ERP packages generally offer standard reports that point out KPIs based on best industry practices, standard formulas and/or legal requirements for each three functional domains [4]. The set of KPIs that each domain affirms, explain how they contribute to company success, for example, it is usual FM show good profitability figures, SCM lead time reduction and CRM pleasant customer satisfaction surveys rates. The sum of all these management KPIs give the idea that company is performing well. But this snapshot does not reflect the true on a numerous companies because it fails to see not only how these figures are been accomplish but also if the company grow is sustainable [5]. What is needed to successfully make use of ERP system is an adoption process that integrates both technical and organizational elements with new management KPIs that contribute to make decisions with focus on attaining a sustainable business. According to this issue, an exploratory research study made by Ruivo and Neto on 2010 shaped a collection of four sets of enterprise sustainable KPIs [6]. This conclusive work precede the above exploratory study where ten leading SMEs CEOs thought a face-to-face interview defined witch value factors can be mined from ERP system in terms of sustainable KPIs [6]. The present study aims to provide further inside into the post adoption of ERP and its relationship to these new sets of KPIs in Portuguese SMEs with focus on a conclusive investigation.

I.

INTRODUCTION

It is known that the main objective of an ERP system is to integrate as many as possible management enterprise functions. These functions are usually grouped into three domains: Financial Management (FM), Supply Chain Management (SCM) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) [1]. Decision makers daily task is to understand company performance that comes into their desk from several sources with different perspectives. They have to scrutinize a considerable amount of data to have a snap shot of overall performance. This short term focus implies no freedom to think business at long term. A portion of ERP failure is due to implementations that do not have as a goal to provide consistent KPIs that measure enterprise sustainability. Taking in account that Portuguese landscape is majority composed by SMEs, it is essential that technology should play a key role to provide accurate and reliable data in real time to better fact based decisions. It is often essential that firms adopt various information systems (IS) to upgrade or improve their business performance in order to be globally competitive [2]. Adopt and implement an ERP system presents itself as the

II.

RESEARCH FRAMEWORK

A. ERP systems post adoption and KPIs Numerous firms have successfully adopted ERP systems for a variety of reasons. ERP is considered as one of the most important innovations that will allow companies to achieve substantial benefits by automatize, standardize and monitor the overall enterprise performance. On other hand, among many failures of ERP implementations is the lack of alignment between ERP and business KPI [7]. In research conducted by

The authors would like to thank Prof. Tiago Oliveira of ISEGI/UNL and Prof. Virgilio Cruz Machado of FCT/UNL for their suggestions and assistance on this work.

Davenport and Harris in 2007, show that successful firms, decision makers respondents reported that their systems produced thirteen percent of analytical KPIs related with enterprise sustainability. Instead of competing on traditional KPIs, these companies employ enterprise sustainable indicators as elements for decisions to change the way they manage themselves and compete in the marketplace [8]. Those firms that adopt ERP systems as part of a strategic component can monitor internal and external forces, as previous studies showed that internal KPIs needs of a firm are generally important factors that affect ERP usage and value. [9, 10]. These internal factors include employee motivation, empowerment and collaboration and customer satisfaction. On the other way, the external factors aim to pursuit opportunities to use ERP for strategic goals. These factors include information system scalability and flexibility, social and environmental responsibility. Sustaining continuous performance improvement requires measuring and monitoring against these set of KPIs and ERP is the adequate software platform to serve the above strategic needs of a firm [1,3].

1) Collaboration & Satisfaction ERP systems help end users to collaborate up, down, and across their department, company, and industry ecosystem increase their productivity and the health of their companies and business ecosystems. Collaboration is therefore a critical concern among firms for both internal and inter-company needs. When companies align efforts with the business drivers around growth, efficiency, compliance, and future strategy they are collaborating [9,10]. In this way ERP is a kind of gateway to specialist functions. That is, ERP is a sine qua non for other applications. Convergence of FM, SCM and CRM modules provides internal collaboration from meeting service-level agreements to enterprise performance. Implementing business practices, such as delegating decision-making down the ranks of front line employees, contribute to control wasted labor. ERP systems provide people with the right information at the right time so they are motivated to manage their responsibilities. Having satisfied employees will result in increase of employee productivity and commitment. With information from ERP system, employees can solve customer problems quickly. A collaborative work environment can open up parts of ERP systems for customers to use directly. Customer self-service can yield a huge productivity increase, not only for the employees, but also for customers [11]. Managers and decision makers receive considerable amounts of business data; understanding how managing all that information contributes to increased customer satisfaction and ultimately better top and bottom-line financial performance is the key to success. ERP systems are prepared to be used as a platform that helps integrating isolated silos of information to support powerful analytics, and bring the power of the analytics to every management task. In that way it is possible to build a factbased, decision-making organization by putting the insight of company data into the hands of staff. Equipped with the data available in ERP systems, and supported by collaboration, employees throughout the organization can achieve higher productivity and give customers faster and higher quality service. In this way companies are prepared to extend customer satisfaction into customer loyalty and then to their withholding [12, 13, 14]. Based on the guide lines provided by previous research the factor Collaboration included two questions items: increase of real time data availability and improve sharing data across company, while the factor Satisfaction consisted of the following two items: provide and promote quality customer centric product and service and ensure that products are certified to meet quality standards and improve its functions. We measured all the above questions items on a ten-point Likert scale, where a score of ten means that the item is the most important, and a score of one means it is the least important. On the assumption that sustainable enterprise KPIs of a firm in the Portuguese SMEs affects its decision to adopt ERP, we formulated the first set of two hypotheses: H1a. Collaboration between employees positively affects firm decision to use and extract value from ERP system.

B. Conceptual framework and hypothesis Based on the literature and on the exploratory study, [6] a framework was developed that combines factors identified in theoretical and empirical research as important determinants of the ERP usage and sustainable KPIs. The framework incorporates four constructs: Collaboration and Satisfaction; Scalability and Flexibility; Employee Empowerment and Work life Balance; Social and Environmental Responsibility. Eight independent variables are categorized into the four set of constructs, and one dependent variable is tested in the research model (see Figure 1). The justification of using these variables as well the eight hypotheses is presented in the following paragraphs. As determined from the review of existing literature, we classified KPIs in pairs by the tie relation they present to enterprise sustainability.

Figure 1. Research model

H1b. Satisfaction of customers positively affects firm decision to use and extract value from ERP system.

2) Employee empowerment & Work life balance The management concept of employee empowerment can be defined as the creation of an environment in which people at all levels feel they have real influence over standards of quality, service, and business effectiveness within their areas of responsibility. It is a strategy and philosophy that enables employees to make decisions about their jobs [15,16]. ERP systems provide guidelines and boundaries so that everyone knows the limits of how they can operate. A process needs to be established that allows management to set the direction for the organization but lets the workforce finds unique ways to achieve these goals and objectives. These characteristics can be deployed in a process-based organization structure where control exists through responsibilities and accountabilities, approvals limits, statistical information in real time, etc [16]. On other way, proper training gives better output from the ERP system. Lack of proper training to users results on wrong entries, bad decisions and create problems [15]. Many organizations are adopting virtual workforces to address workers demands to work from home to improve flexibility and work life balance. There are several technologies that allow such objective, as ERP and its connected applications [16]. Also for these two factors we measured then on a ten-point scale where the factor Employee Empowerment is composed by two questions items: improve readiness and assist in reducing repetitive task, while the factor Work life balance contained of the following two items: provide and promote flexible schedules and allow working from home. For this construct we have formulated the second set of two hypotheses: H2a. Employee Empowerment on firms positively affects its decision to use and extract value from ERP system. H2b. Work life balance of employees firms positively affects its decision to use and extract value from ERP system.

configured ERP can collect and present a company's relevant energy use information. These dashboard commonly package information into four categories: Direct energy consumption, indirect energy consumption, total direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions and other relevant greenhouse gas emissions [17,18]. The factor Social Responsibility included two questions items: exploit the societal potential of corporate data repositories and improve firm notability and integrity, while the factor Environmental Responsibility consists on the following two items: contribute to a green reputation and ensure that tracing products meet an eco-process. These questions items were measured also on a ten-point Likert scale and constructed the third set of hypotheses: H3a. Social Responsibility of a firm positively affects its decision to use and extract value from ERP system. H3b. Environmental Responsibility of a firm positively affects its decision to use and extract value from ERP system.

4) Scalability & Flexibility ERP solutions are largely designed to grow with the company, should not be stand-alone applications, and not succumb to volume and change pressures, leaving companies to start over from scratch. They are modular in order to add or remove business and technical functionalities at the same time as business needs transform. Providing scalability, ERP software also extends the reach of information within an enterprise, giving more people access to critical data for planning and reporting. ERP solutions must scale to new levels to support broader internal and partner access. Creating a private network where enterprises can share information with suppliers and customers is a common task. However, utilizing the public network for these purposes requires enhanced security. Firms will need to secure connections to their ERP systems without jeopardizing the performance or scalability of the application across the entire infrastructure [19]. In general ERP systems are good at what they do; the issue is how they do what they do. They do things in a rigid manner, from an architectural standpoint. Everything in the ERP is very coded. Very often companies have to make changes to a business process to respond to a competitive pressure, or often a regulatory change creates a need to change a financial process. ERP systems should accommodate these types of changes. Might have to go in and reconfigure something. Often, have to implement, re-implement or customize something [20]. ERP should offer flexibility with deployments and making changes. An architecture that allows users to make configuration changes without going in and changing code its a very important capability, as an example, each time a business report needs to be produced should be possible to be created by configuration and not programming [20]. On the other way flexibility is measured by the users on how easy it is to execute infrequent or unusual tasks in the application, how easily the software can be adapted to meet specific new business needs and processes, and how agile the software is in handling problems that arise unexpectedly. Departing from transactional tasks to solve unusual problems or complete ad-hoc tasks translates into decision-making

3) Social & Environmental Responsibility ERP systems can contribute to manage environmental and social business objectives. An internal control system based on a pre-existing ERP framework can centralize the information companies need to manage these activities within any functional area (finance, HR, supply chain management, manufacturing) and across all enterprise [18]. A central repository of all governance, risk management and compliance related data that is accessible to auditors and managers, and where data can be updated as close to real time as possible. Tracking testing activities, including what was tested, when and by whom, results and corrective actions when testing failed and to communicate all key information to the appropriate audiences [17]. More companies run their operations fitting into the grand scheme of environmental responsibility at the same time they save money, and improve their "green" reputation in the eyes of their customers. With fuel costs up and environmental responsibility gaining ground as a moral imperative, companies are increasingly looking for ways to monitor and reduce their energy usage [17,18]. ERP systems can be used to build a dashboard that charts energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. A properly

agility, responsiveness to changing business needs, and addressing critical challenges quickly and flexibly [20]. These two aspects of ERP post adoption were measured also on a ten-point scale where the factor Scalability included two questions items: assist business needs changes and exploit the potential of network partners, while the factor Flexibility consisted of the following two items: provide agility on the decision process; make it easier to perform uncommon task. In this way we formulated the fourth set of two hypotheses: H4a. Scalability of firms IS infrastructure positively affects its decision to use and extract value from ERP system. H4b. Flexibility of firms IS infrastructure positively affects its decision to use and extract value from ERP system.

TABLE I. CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SAMPLE (N=85) Characteristics

Total number of employees <50 50-100 100-150 >250 Annual sales revenue () <1.000.000 1.000.000-10.000.000 10.000.000-25.000.000 25.000.000-50.000.000 >50.000.000 Industry Type Finance Manufacturing Distribution Respondents type CEO, owner IT/IS manager Finance manager Manufacturing manager Sales manager

Percentage (%) 2,4 36,5 56,5 4,7 10,6 45,9 29,4 9,4 4,7 11,8 50,6 37,6 17,6 11,8 29,4 20,0 21,2

Cumulative (%) 2,4 38,8 95,3 100,0 10,6 56,5 85,9 95,3 100,0 11,8 62,4 100,0 17,6 29,4 58,8 78,8 100,0

III.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY AND DATA

In the context of this study, the research method involves reliance on both deductive and inductive reasoning approaches. Using the deductive approach, secondary data were collected via a review of literature and previous exploratory study. At this point, we deduced eight hypotheses. Inductive reasoning was then necessary to analyze the statistical data and reach the research results. Primary statistical data were collected using a web questionnaire survey. Using appropriate statistical analysis techniques, the inferential results aim to verify or reject the hypotheses and lead to contribution of modeling approach and theorizing of ERP post adoption. Two ERP consultants pretest the questionnaire, and some items were revised for clarity. Questionnaires were sent only to companies that use the internet in conducting their business and the respondents were chief executive officer, manger director, manager, or firm owners. Questionnaire was developed to be answered in 10 minutes. Data was gathered in September and October 2010 and coded in a manner that allowed them to be quantitatively and statistically analyzed [21]. A list of 185 communications businesses was obtained from an IDC study representative of the Portuguese SMEs market of 2009. Of these 185 firms, 89 companies completed the surveys, and the response rate was roughly 48 percent. The raw data received from the survey were checked for consistency, four surveys were excluded because they were large companies. This resulted in the final sample of 85 observations. The detailed breakdown of the respondents in terms of the total number of employees, total annual sales revenue, Industry type, and Respondents type are shown in Table I. The constructs were operationalized and measurement items used in this research were adapted from previous study and developed on the basis of a literature review, following a reflective model and listed in Appendix A. In this framework eight independent variables and one dependent variable were used. The dependent variable construct was measured by asking respondents two questions to indicate in a three-point scale if their firms had a low, medium or high operational and financial turnover. Then aggregate average measures into Yes=1 and No=0. The control variable used was firms size.

IV.

DATA ANALYSIS AND RESULTS

A. Analysis of reliability and validity The measurement model investigated in this study consisted of four constructs: 1) Collaboration (CO) and Satisfaction (SA); 2) Scalability (SC) and Flexibility (FL); 3) Employee Empowerment (EE) and Work life Balance (WL); 4) Social Responsibility (SR) and Environmental Responsibility (ER). 16 indicators were grouped into the corresponding latent variables. A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) using AMOS 6.0 structural equation modeling (SEM) software was conducted to check the reliability and validity of the measurement model.
TABLE II. MEASUREMENT MODEL: LOADINGS AND RELIABILITY Construct / Indicators
Collaboration CO1 CO2 Satisfaction SA1 SA2 Employee empowerment EE1 EE2 Work life balance WL1 WL2 Social Responsibility SR1 SR2 Environmental Responsibility ER1 ER2 Scalability SC1 SC2 Flexibility FL1 FL2

Loadings 0,831 0,763

t-statistic 0,763

0,702 0,696 0,754 0,658 0,706 0,657 0,731 0,741 0,552 0,688 0,774 0,542 0,715 0,757 0,599 0,693 0,689 0,705 0,700 0,601 0,644

TABLE III. DISCRIMINANT VALIDITY OF INSTRUMENTS

Construct CO SA EE WL SR ER SC FL

CO 0,714 0,236 0,473 0,186 0,345 0,352 0,311 0,503

SA

EE

WL

SR

ER

SC

FL

0,612 0,473 0,194 0,289 0,497 0,372 0,239

Model indices Chi-square/df RMSEA

Value 2,894 0,080

Acceptance <3,00 <0,08

0,634 0,264 0,250 0,471 0,309 0,436

0,689 0,512 0,457 0,401 0,315

0,601 0,186 0,138 0,321

0,655 0,240 0,732 0,478 0,320 0,698

The convergent validity was verified through the t-statistic for each factor loading as shown in Table II. The factor loadings in the initial model comprising 16 indicators were significant. All the factor loadings were greater than 0,5 and significant at the p < 0,01 level [22]. The reliability was assessed by calculating the composite reliability for each independent variable. The majority of the constructs have a composite reliability (t-stat) over the cutoff of 0,700, as shown in Table II. as suggested by Straub [23], Although three constructs have a reliability close to this limit (0.659 for Employee empowerment, 0,688 for Social Responsibility, and 0,693 for Scalability), they shouldnt be excluded. This shows the items measuring the constructs exhibit consistency. To measure the magnitude to which different constructs diverge from one another, discriminant validity was conducted. The square root of average variance extracted (AVE) represented by diagonal elements of Table III, measure the variance between a construct and its indicators. Since AVE values are higher than the correlations between constructs (values bellow of the diagonal), implies that elements assess well the discriminant validity [22]. In conclusion, the above tests indicate that the model fit the data well. B. Hypothesis testing Based on the calculated indices of the empirical model, the results of the testing structural model are presented in Table IV, its show that the overall model is significant. The chisquare/degrees of freedom (2/df) is equal to 2,894 and less than 3, implies that data fits structural model [24]. On other hand the root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) is equal to 0,08 implying that the theoretical model predicts the observed data. Six of the eight tested variables showed significance; Collaboration (H1a), Satisfaction (H1b), Employee empowerment (H2a), Environmental Responsibility (H3b), Scalability (H4a), and Flexibility (H4b) were found to be significant factors influencing the ERP usage of these KPIs of enterprise sustainability. Each of these factors shows relative contribution of each to ERP usage and value. Among these six factors, customer satisfaction (H1b) was found to be the most important factor influencing the ERP usage. Since ERP is related to several firms or parties, customer satisfaction play a critical role in pushing firms to adopt ERP systems in particular when integrates CRM and SCM functions. More and more companies are apparently realizing that if they want to fully obtain the benefits of ERP, they have to change internal business organization to a climate of collaboration.
TABLE IV. MODEL INDICES

On an opposite direction, unlike what the previous studies concluded and the hypothesis predicted, employee Work life balance (H2b) is not a significant factor for ERP usage. As shown above, collaboration (H1a) between employees is generally more important than the motivational factor of work life balance. It is also likely that work life balance as a performance indicator to achieve sustainable business is not as important in Portugal SMEs as in others countries. The results of the data analysis on Employee empowerment (H2a) highlights that company wishes this set of KPIs in place and ERP post adoption is likely to effect on the decision of attain a sustainable business. In fact, employee autonomy in the decision making process increases productivity and move up profitability. For companies were intellectual capital is indispensable, the work life balance KPIs set are measured to achieve happy employees to generate motivation and therefore increase efficiency. Social Responsibility (H3a) KPIs is not a significant inhibitor of Portuguese SMEs with respect to the ERP usage. The insignificant path coefficient (0.098) shows that the Portuguese SMEs express less social concern when adopting ERP to exploit the societal potential of corporate data and improve firm notability and integrity. On other hand the energy and gas consumptions KPIs measurements of Environmental Responsibility (H3b) contributes for ERP usage. Flexibility (H4b) of the IS infrastructure was shown as significant inhibitor of ERP post adoption. Firms competing on sustainability have more concerns in regards having a flexible system to respond quickly to rapid market changes needs. In the SMEs landscape this is an important factor to gain advantage over large firms. Scalability (H4a) of IS and business is denoted as a significant inhibitor for ERP post adoption, in particular for those firms that are in the market for many years and have the objective to continuing doing business in the future. ERP scalability is unyielding because adding or removing a business unit can imply firms staying alive or dead.
TABLE V. EMPIRICAL RESULTS (STRUCTURAL MODEL) Independent Variables
Collaboration H1a Satisfaction H1b Employee empowerment H2a Work life balance H2b Social Responsibility H3a Environmental Responsibility H3b Scalability H4a Flexibility H4b

Coefficient 0.342** 0.412*** 0.106** -0.110 -0.098 0.157** 0.289* 0.301***

p-value 0.029 0.000 0.024 0.383 0.026 0.028 0.084 0.000

Notes: Significance at: ***p < 0.01; * *p < 0.05 and *p<0.1

V.

CONCLUSION

Taking the existing literature into account that address ERP in terms of technological and or organizational perspectives, this paper is the first to develop and test an integrated model that identify specific factors and explain ERP post adoption with regards to sustainable enterprise KPIs in the Portuguese SMEs context. In general, the result supports the proposed model. A total of eight factors were evaluated in this study. Based on the tests of reliability and validity, the proposed instrument is a good measurement tool. In regards to the variables of the framework model; excepting the factor of Work life balance and Social responsibility the coefficients of the other six factors are significant, indicating that these factors lead to a higher probability of ERP being adopted. KPI of customer satisfaction is evidently a key factor affecting the post adoption of an ERP system. It is apparent that collaboration is the second most important, IS flexibility and scalability as the third and fourth important drivers follow by environmental responsibility and employee empowerment as the fifth and sixth significant factors respectively. This study shows that contrary to the hypotheses assumed on this model, both Work life balance and Social responsibility sets of KPIs are not perceive as positively affecting post adoption decision. Regarding implications for practice, the finding is that customer satisfaction is the major factor driving ERP usage and value suggests that firms not adopting ERP systems will be driven to do so in the future either by their customers or by their need of staying competitive. Although two of the independent variables in the model are insignificant when applied to the Portuguese data, the results of this study provide some insight into the knowledge on the post adoption of ERP in particular to Portuguese SMEs. Demonstrating the statistical significance of all the variables was not the major goal of this paper. Instead, this conclusive work tried to organize and synthesize the results of previous exploratory studies to investigate relationship between sustainable enterprise KPIs and the ERP usage and value. This paper has some limitations that may form the starting point for further research. First, cross-sectional data have limitations in explaining the direction of causality in the relationships among variables. Future work should focus on a longitudinal analysis in order to strengthen the direction of causality proposed by the model. Second, although data cover a general industry; some biases may have been introduced. This is a concern because different industries have different operating characteristics and environments, and the factors related to the impact of ERP may be quite different, this could be shown by the results of Work life balance of employees on manufacturing firms. Firms in distribution (wholesale, retail) and financial (insurance agents, accounting, consultant) with costumer facing and intellectual practice are more likely to require pleased employees to promote motivation to better serve customers and be more productive. Future research might proceed in several directions. One path would be to use dummy variables to test and examine the differences between the three industries. A second way would be to examine, whether SCM, CRM, and FM functions as elements in a firms business strategy have different drivers and barriers. For example, the perceived benefits may differ significantly for firms that mainly operate SCM and those only

do CRM or FM. A third study to measure how ERP adoption affects firms business productivity. There should be some difference between these business dimensions regarding adoption decisions, use behavior, and business value to firms. REFERENCES
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[2]

[3] [4]

[5]

[6]

[7]

[8]

[9] [10]

[11] [12] [13]

[14]

[15]

[16]

[17] [18]

[19]

[20] [21] [22] [23] [24]

APPENDIX A. ITEMS MEASUREMENTS

Variable

Indicators
Using a ten-point scale where 10 is very significant factor and 1 is not a factor, please rate how significant of the following was to your firms decision to use ERP system:

Literature support

Collaboration

Satisfaction Employee empowerment

Work life balance

Social Responsibility
Environmental Responsibility

Scalability
Flexibility Enterprise Performance
(Sustainable KPIs)

CO1 increase of real time data availability. CO2 improve sharing data across company. SA1 provide and promote quality customer centric product and service. SA2 ensure that products are certified to meet quality standards and improve its functions. EE1 improve readiness EE2 assist in reducing repetitive task. WL1 provide and promote flexible schedules WL2 allow working from home SR1 exploit the societal potential of corporate data repositories SR2 improve firm notability and integrity ER1 contribute to a green reputation ER2 ensure that tracing products meet an eco-process SC1 assist business needs changes. SC2 exploit the potential of network partners FL1 provide agility on the decision process. FL2 make it easier to perform uncommon tasks.
Aggregate average of the following questions; Over the last ten years, how you classify your firms

[9,10] [8,11] [12, 14] [14] [9,15] [5,16] [13,15] [15,16] [17] [11,18] [17, 18] [17 ,18] [4,19] [2, 3] [10 e 19 [19, 20]

Financial Performance. Operational Performance.

[4,9] [9,16]