E-business Readiness of Industrial Small and Medium Enterprises to Enter Internet markets

For small and medium industrial enterprises (SME), operating in e-markets is considered as one of theirimportant objectives. However, the main question is whether these SMEs are ready to operate in these markets. The main objective of this study is to determine the level of e-business readiness of industrial SMEs in the west of Iran, and to assess the level of their ability to participate and operate in e-markets. Due to taking a number of evaluative approaches to assess the readiness level of the firms, the research offers a new integrated framework.Our dataobtained from a survey results including all 156 SMEs in the western provinces of Iran: Kermanshah, Hamadan and Kurdistan. The results show that the level of e-readiness of the selected firms is considerably less than the expected level (0.28). The findings also suggest that 0.60 of the firms are in the information readiness level and about the same percentage (0.57) in the brochure level. In other words, most of the firms are in the levels of information (PerServais) and brochure in e-business (Levy and Powel). The regression analysis illustrates that the technology infrastructure with an estimated coefficient of 0.87 and the factor of human resources with 0.62 have the highest influences on the e-readiness index.