Link up Industry 4.0 with the Enterprise Collaboration System to Help Small and Medium Enterprises

Abstract

Along with Industry 4.0 and the Internet of Things (IoT), the need for e-management has been extensive. For helping small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to take the first step to link up Industry 4.0, the implementation of the enterprise collaboration system (ECS) in SMEs has become inevitable. We use SuccMail to examine the effect of external supports and internal supports for ECS implementation of performance. To conduct this aim, we adopted the questionnaire from ERP and revised it for ECS. We collected the data from three SMEs from Taiwan and used the SPSS to run the correlation and multiple regressions. We find that all the supports are related to the performance; however, considering all the supports together, only some supports have significant and positive effects. We conclude that the supports can help SMEs in implementing ECS to increase the performance. Furthermore, the internal supports are more significantly and positively affecting the performance of implementing ECS in SME.