Automatization for Product Quality as a SME Strategy to Compete Globally

Abstract

Businesses need to constantly maintain high quality in their products, and more importantly to remain competitive even at a global level, which is the current market pressure and need for many SME in countries underdevelopment, where more global enterprises have arrived leaving local businesses to the extreme of perishing. Therefore, already employed strategies in global companies to improve their product quality are essential to be reconsidered and to be implemented by local plants. Automation had become a highly important strategy in the manufacturing industry to satisfy customers and stand out from their competitors, more because today customers increasingly demand sustainable and higher quality products. The aim of this research was to validate the level of automatization and its effect onto product quality, in local, small, and medium enterprises (SME). A survey with two constructs was applied to manufacturing SME in the Aguascalientes region, Mexico. The data was analysed using SPSS-26 software. The regression analyses demonstrated that automation had a significant and positive effect on product quality in local SME, however, automatization is not recognized as a priority strategy leaving SME behind global competitive businesses in terms of product quality. Keywords: Quality, Strategies, Management, SME, Manufacturing.