Small medium manufacturing enterprises in Turkey: An analytic network process framework for prioritizing factors affecting success

A multiple criteria framework has been developed to prioritize the measures of success and the antecedents for Turkish small to medium sized manufacturing enterprises. Analytical network process (ANP) has been used to construct the framework because of the dependency among measures of success and the antecedents. Methodology requires expert judgments. Experts were interviewed individually without interacting and not knowing each other's judgments. Influences among the factors were elicited from each expert separately. We only asked the relative strength of direct influences of two factors with respect to the third (controlling) factor. Second, third, fourth, ..., nth degree of influences are captured by analytical network process (ANP). ANP evaluates both quantitative and qualitative criteria. Both individual and aggregated results are given. Contrary to the experts' expectation prior to study, influence of the entrepreneur turned out to have far less impact on success than some of the external factors such as regulation and policies, facility location, intensity of competition and stage of industry. Sales were the most significant measure of success in line with the literature on small medium sized enterprises. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.