A qualitative analysis of small and medium sized enterprises

Good performance within a company is the result of correct interaction of business management with its internal and external environment. The recognition of internal strengths and weaknesses, as well as external opportunities and threats, takes place on the basis of a SWOT analysis. However despite their importance, many companies often only have vague ideas of their competitive strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats. The development of a knowledge based system is described that can assist managers of small and medium sized companies in performing an analysis. For research purposes, we concentrated only on the identification of internal strengths and weaknesses. The system has been implemented in Level 5 Object and the first field tests are promising. In total the system costed 1.5 man years