Francesca Mazzieri, MBA MIP                           Isabella Brianza
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it                                        PerMicro

The Rumanian government's strategy of the last years is to enter in the European market and to develop SME environment.
The Rumanian government decided to find a way to help SMEs by sustaining their growth: infact, only four years ago rumanian SME were small; they decided to get more mass and it means to get into the market.
The Government started from a group of institutions that could collect information from stakeholder about the needs regarding new services in SME (such as info, support, professional services and money).
A project, named “Technical assistance to the development of e-government practise and the promotion of the use of information and communication technologies (ITC) by Romanian SMEs”, has been realised.

The project focus was to collect funds, to get attention from stakeholders, to create and offer to SMEs services to become more competent.

The whole project aimed to set up institution, to create network and to stimulate attention from public administration, qualified business services.
Usually the main difficulty met by a SME is to communicate “itself”, and this limit fmeans a lacks in marketing and business strategies. In this case, the point was to have a platform in order to reduce distance between technology and market and we all know that E-marketing promotion attracts peopole into a portal.
An informative environment, ESimplu.ro, has been created by the government to communicate with SME through E-learning and benchmarking and all the Information Technology tools have been used also to create communication channels from government to SME and from SME to market.

The project aimed to offer to SME info and tools and to enable them to do the same (price, catalogue, mission, etc) through the web portal.
Usually SMEs don't use these types of tools, but with E-marketing they can attract people to visit the portal and to begin the communication process.
The Post Privatisation Foundation is an important actor of this process: it gets money and resources to administrate the process; it has not got the possibility to make business since it is a public administration body.
This foundation manages the organisational, technical and administration part.

The first difficulty that an entrepreneur meets when he decides to establish his business in Rumanian is the language: the regulation is written in Rumanian.
There was also another big challenge: to understand what should be offered to the companies.
It is important to remember the context and the culture: in Romania people are living a post comunism period. Many people are afraid to express, to talk. All the bodies involved  are not used to embrace communication.
In particular, SMEs' promotions by web marketing, blog and references stimulate journalists to create contents and to demonstrate that Esimplu.ro is useful.

The services portfolio of Esimplu.ro are:

• Products, services and informative applications;
  
• Consultancy services, secondary products and related applications;
  
• Applications and Internet solutions;
  
• Collateral advertising through links with other websites and portals.

Within the project there are three main solutions:

1.Microportals: technology that enables everybody to create an own site autonomously, with homepage, E-shop and E-catalog. Somehow this project accelerated the process to think into details their own strategy, mission.

2. E-learning: has a big meaning, but it is a way to simplify the teaching  

3. Benchmarking: it compares homogeneous groups 



By trying to make SMEs more competitive, Esimplu.ro uses these tools:

-          Elearning: help these enterprise make familiar with internet, time, commitment, ability to follow a counterpart

-          Benchmarking: that is the starting point that means to collect financial datas and compare with homogeneous groups (it was surprisingly how fast they answered to a questionnaire: be sure that they will provide feedback even if they do not speak English).

-          Production of the report as a starting point “This is where you are”

-          Communication 


In this project both SMEs and Governments have to train: the firsts because have to become competitive, the seconds because have to become a service provider (they have not attitude, even if they recognise there is the necessity).

Esimplu.ro project has been presented to SMEs in a kind of provocative way. The easiest way to become more competitive is to leverage technicians to better position theirselves, emphasise different means that companies can embrace in order to do that.

The “eSimplu.ro” team is composed of Ministry, SMEs, the Post Privatisation Foundation for the professional services, Esimplu.ro and a professional consulting program as support.
Through this program, the team got in touch with a lot of SME and the consulting concentrated in a few days. The period between the qualification and the delivery is about 3 months; after that, a continuous support is given. 

The Esimplu.ro Professional Consulting Program for eBusiness is composed of the following steps:

1. the company is potentially qualified to receive support from Ministry of SME
   
2. the entrepreneur gets an email from eSimplu to inform him about the pre-qualification documents he need to fill in to be included in the program. Post Privatisation Foundation provides e-business services
   
3. the entrepreneur receives an Info Kit with program description and a readiness checklist to sees where he is
   
4. after 4 days the entrepreneur receives the first follow up from Post Privatisation Foundation to make sure he has a good understanding about the initiative
   
5. Post Privatisation Foundation experts analyze the data and plan 1 day workshop session to identify an eBusiness development plan and to train the entrepreneur about the Esimplu.ro capabilities
   
6. The on site workshop takes place
   
7. The entrepreneur gets on going support through FPP

How this portal will achieve a kind of impact in building culture to look online? It is a chicken or egg question! Communication is about looking inside and defining the goals and benchmarking what others are doing.

In one minute the system can provide new environment, there are different simple guides “how to”. All aim to bring visitors into the Internet culture.

There are three levels of users:

• System Manager: is the administrator of the system, manages users, permissions, passwords and the configuration parameters.
  
• Site Manager: is the administrator of the site (the Post Privatisation Foundation Consultant initially, then the Company Webmaster) and manage the structure of the portal, catalogue, e-shop…
  
• Site Visitor is the web user

Concretely SMEs profit of this fact: since eSimplu has higher ranking in google, immediately appeared more links related to the SME. The urls begin always with “esimplu” and it's very easy to find it in the net. Their benefit was a higher amount of Internet traffic. 

The roles of the project are allotted to three different actors:

   1    ministry, which manages the relationship with European Community

   2    Post Privatisation Foundation, that delivers professional and administrative services of the portal, and the content manage

   3    technical support, a group of rumens consultants that offer support services.


The Information Technology must be used as an instrument of independence, to express the own potentialities.