BAPTISME helps SME managers to cope with the euro
To help managers of SMEs understand the legal, economic and managerial impact of the introduction of the euro, the European Commission is developing the BAPTISME (Business application and tools for SMEs to cope with the euro) project, funded under the Esprit programme. The aim of BAPTISME is to enable companies to identify the elements that can help them to be winners in a global marketplace which is already highly competitive, and where the introduction of the single currency will accelerate competitiveness, expansion and market expectations. At a business level, the economic impact depends upon a mixture of the company's behaviour and structural constraints. Therefore, the most important task for SMEs is to re-focus their business strategy, using the arrival of the euro to extend their market. Hence, individual SMEs could find themselves in a more powerful position if they reorganise specific services and use a network approach. According to the contractors of BAPTISME, a process-based organisational and IT structure can improve a company's efficiency and effectiveness in the market and generate a benchmark framework to compare its performance with that of other market players. The overall design of a set of software tools for BAPTISME has been identified. These tools implement new user requirements to benchmark the efficiency of companies within the same industry in different countries which emerge from the euro environment. As part of the dissemination activity, BAPTISME has provided SMEs with economic, legal and high-tech materials in the form of a website, CD-ROM, slides and brochures in English, Greek and Italian. Also a demo of a software integration tool will be produced, with the aim of showing an application of business process modelling.