Maturity Assesment: A Case of Micro and Small Service Enterprises

Abstract

High percentages of Micro and Small-sized enterprises (MSEs) perish in their initials years of business. That is why various efforts have been made to know their operation and improve it. However those proposals of improvement are mostly based in reductionist diagnostics that limit the understanding of their business processes. This paper presents an integral diagnostic of MSEs, specifically in the service sector in the north of Mexico, through which the maturity level of its processes is determined. The design was descriptive exploratory with a quantitative approach. A rubric-type instrument was applied, which was designed to perform an integral diagnosis and measure the maturity level of the processes in 140 companies. The results indicate that the maturity levels of the business processes in the service sector are mostly craft-like. The elements with the lowest maturity levels include service assessment as part of management, the capacity to design new services/processes, evaluation and selection of suppliers, and improvements to the purchasing process that can assure an appropriate level of service. The need to implement improvement projects in areas related to planning, monitoring, control and information support systems were also detected. The main contribution of this work is having defined the service sector of the municipality where the organizations under study are located, which will help entrepreneurs in the sector, to improve their knowledge on the area in which they operate; researchers decide to make more contributions to the sector; and clients obtain information about the business they purchase from.