Re-organization Impact on the Telekom Malaysia’s International Division Productivity

International Divisions’ productivity was perceived to incline towards a downward trend which was contravened in 1996 re-organization objective of Telekom Malaysia. This study aims to analyze the root causes of this setback and recommend the solutions to improve the company’s productivity. The method to diagnose the root cause was done through surveys and interviews. The data collection was carried out through questionnaire consisting of 85 questions. Total of 171 respondents from the international employees whom their offices are located throughout Malaysia are responded to the questionnaires. This paper presents a detailed study and analysis on the organization impact on international divisions’ productivity of Telekom Malaysia after the re-organization. Theoretical and empirical data are presented about the re-organization and its challenges, independent variables of the strategic organizational change for organization and external environments, the productivity indicators, a model that explains the relationship between organizational factors and productivity, and lastly the re-organization impact on productivity. The respondents that have significant relationship with company’s productivity perceived ten independent variables. The three most dominant variables are required immediate strategic actions namely; Quality, External Factors and the Leadership Style to reposition back the company’s competitiveness, quality and productivity. The recommended strategic actions to improve the company’s productivity these are, all international divisions to acquire professional quality certification near future. To improve and maintain a very good relationship with government authorities need to adoption of transformational leadership style.

INTRODUCTION
Telecommunications competition era in Malaysia first started in 1980s with the introduction of pager companies. This was followed by the emergence of a few cellular operators and trunk radios, which first gave a slightly impact on the Telekom Malaysia's market shares. The competition gradually increases its force as globalization invaded business industries in Malaysia. In 1990s the globalization through the World Trade Organization (WTO) had successfully persuaded the Malaysian Government to liberalize the telecommunications policies. Subsequently the Malaysian Government through the Ministry of Energy, Communications and Multimedia had issued many licenses to new operators. This had allowed the generation and formation of many partnerships and mergers between the local companies and Multinational Corporations (MNCs). This indeed had given the customers the opportunity to freely select which telecommunications operator is able to suit their needs and wants. In order to develop and enhance traits, skills and competencies to meet the customers' demand, Telekom Malaysia had adopted the strategic organizational change that focused on productivity improvements. Telekom Malaysia's management realized the decision to focus on productivity as the means to enhance the competitive advantage to successfully compete against the competitors.
In 1996 Telekom Malaysia including the international divisions had re-organized the whole organization in preparation to face the intense globalization and to survive in the telecommunications industry. However, the effectiveness of the reorganization had never been carried out to gauge the achievement and performance of the international divisions. So the lack of evidence to identify the strength and weaknesses inevitably did not provide opportunity for the international divisions to make adjustments and realign on the right direction. This has significantly affected the productivity as perceived by the management. The management has voiced out their concern of the downward trend in productivity faced by the international divisions for the past few years. Realizing this issue and problem, it then becomes the task of this paper to study the re-organization impact on the company's productivity. In view its above discussion the aim of this study to investigate and determine the paramount internal or organizational factors that have significant impact on the productivity of the international division of Telekom Malaysia.
A majority of companies has undergone the experience of strategic organizational changes in the form of re-organization, mergers and downsizing in the past several years. The main idea of this strategic organizational change is to provide a clear focus and to help in establishing the company's performance improvement in areas of greatest concern and opportunity for change management. This concept is further defined by [1,2] that strategic organizational change is designed to improve organizational efficiency, productivity and effectiveness to remain survive in the business arena.
Appelbaum et al. [3] , Mishra et al. [4] and Freeman [5] reckoned that the overall vision, strategy and direction have to come from the top management. Once the vision is established, the senior leaders must develop and create understanding and commitment among organizational members to share the vision of the real identity and the necessary actions to achieve it. Upon implementation of re-organization, the new management through the new leaders has to disseminate the new vision and mission across the board. This will set the direction of the company to achieve in the long term.
Heller et al. [6] indicated senior leaders must articulate a clear vision of the re-organization in order to successfully implement the strategic organizational change. According to Appelbaum et al. [2] mentioned that, they must be responsible for ensuring the change process which is consistent with the mission, vision and values of the organization. It is composed of highly visible, supportive, aggressive and confidence-building leaders who know the business and their people well. The leaders need to understand the strength of its internal capabilities to effectively disseminate the new mission and vision downwards. The successful leadership, as seen by Buchan [7] has to be "strong, committed and guided by clear corporate vision and mission statements.
Appelbaum et al. [8] again depicted that courageous and decisive leadership can inspire an organization to overcome difficult situations or take quick action. The leaders should deal with major resources decisions and new directions, not just day-to-day management, like charting the course and not constantly steering the ship. In contrast, a tendency to overanalyze data or practice 'wait-and-see' attitude may cause a firm to lose ground to competitors and may exacerbate internal problems. Karae et al. [9] argued that new workplace uses fundamental groups to learn, in order for the organization to be able to learn. The groups analyzed the patterns of the needs and wants of the customers in order to be competitive in quality and productivity. There are many professional quality tools available in the market where organization would be able to participate to improve the quality, productivity continuously and finally compete for highest award to develop a higher prestige and reputation for the company. Hoffman et al. [10] said that TQM could be viewed as the organization-wide philosophy requiring all employees at every level of the organization to focus their efforts to help improve each business activity of the organization. TQM acts as the quality tool that focuses on continuous improvement to enhance creativity and innovation, which enables sufficient speed of productivity growth to meet the customers' demands. Therefore, with proper implementation of TQM in the organization, it helps and drives the targets towards achieving the competitive strategies of higher customer services with better quality and productivity. Increase in the level of productivity results in adopting TQM, making TQM the quality tool to continuously improve each business activity within the organization. Thus, there exists a relationship between TQM and the companies' productivity.
Appelbaum et al. [2] argued that, in any reorganization exercise, the companies must plan all aspects of the elimination and reduction of jobs to ensure the expected outcomes. It is essential that employees should be involved in all aspects of reorganization. Cameron [11] suggested that employees should be implicated in the identification of what needs to be changed. They will feel as part of the organization and company requires their existence. Similarly Cameron et al. [12] stated that, the most effective reorganization strategies are those designed and developed by the employees of the firm. Mishra, 1994 proposed that, by actively including majority of the employees during the planning stage, it is possible to avoid the negative consequences felt by the survived employees. It also reduces the number of uncertainty and increases the amount of control over the process [4] .
Tvorik et al. [13] in his findings stated that external factors have strong influence on the management decision to adapt for re-organization. The external factors have created many new entrants with highly skilled employees and advanced technology that readily satisfy the customers' needs and wants. As a result, the business industry has become competitive and organizations with strong 'resilience' would survive. Similarly, Appelbaum et al. [8] agreed with this finding and mentioned environmental factors, which can changes in competitors, government regulations, economic conditions and technological advancement are some of the paramount factors that could impede the growth of the company's productivity. Technological innovations by competitors, as well as innovations that unable to implement within the organization itself and its may lead the company to lose its businesses. The rapid change in technology may require the organization to adjust both the structure and the processes. While the ability and flexibility to adapt to any changes of government regulations, customer needs and wants and the economic conditions are considered, the core competency to remain competitive in the business arena need to be considered too. While De Vries and Balazs [14] argued that rather than simply introduce the technology, it is "the administrative impact of the revolutionary transformation in information and communication technology" that has impacted the re-organization. The outcome of technological advances has increased the redundancy of middle management, who previously was responsible for collecting, analyzing and transmitting information which are no longer needed. A study done by Powel et al. [15] the contribution of the external factors in determining the success of the re-organization is so convincing that failure of re-organization has put the blame on it despite the real cause such as the weak businesses and the management decision.
Internal or organization factors may have strong influence, offer significant relationship or difference on productivity. Since productivity is the main concern as the outcome of re-organization, this study is designed to focus on the organization factors. Based on our literature there are four major hypotheses had developed for this study these are: H 1 : There is no significant difference between the identified organizational or known as the internal factors and the company's productivity. H 2 : There is no existence relationship between length of employment and the company's productivity. H 3 : There is no significant gender effect on productivity H 4 : The productivity is the same at all levels of education

MATERIALS AND METHODS
In the context of this study, the primary data was collected through a set of questionnaire distributed to the company employees who working in the various stages of international divisions. The employees are physically located both centrally (headquarters) and regionally throughout Malaysia covering areas around Klang Valley, East (Sabah and Sarawak) and West (Peninsular) Malaysia. The questionnaire, which was composed of objective questions was designed using five Point Likert-scales and was segmented into nine sections. The questionnaires were distributed about 350 employees both executives and non-executives at international divisions personally, by post express service or e-mail. 171 employees finally responded within the specific timeframe either via post express or by hand. With 171 replies received from the respondents, there were data available for further processing in order to analyze for both descriptive and analytic reports. This paper, five relevant tests were carried out such as Factor Analysis, Pearson Correlation, Independent-sample t-test, ANOVA and the Multiple Linear Regression to analyze the impact of re-organization on the company's productivity. The impact of re-organization experienced by the company is generated and caused by the independent variables that exist prominently in the company that controls and influence the productivity of the company.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Results from the primary data focused on the descriptive analysis based on the frequency Table 1.
Regarding the length of employment as shown in (Table 1), with three categories: firstly, those below 10 years are 32.7 %. Secondly, between 10 to 20 years is 42.3 % where as those above 20 years, which is 25 %. It showed that, 75 % of the respondents have the opportunity to serve Telekom Malaysia for the next 10 to 20 years. Respondent's demographic profile is shown in Table 1, out of the total participation of 171, 80.6 % were males and 19.4 % were females. As for the education level, 22.6 % were degree holders while 77.4 % were those with diploma, secondary and primary schools qualifications. Types of employee indicated that, 27.7 % were executives and 72.3 % were nonexecutive. Out of this 27.7 % executives, 5.8 % are managers and above.
Hypotheses testing: Using the multiple linear regression, the significance tests between dependent and independent variables to determine the relationship, whereby independent variables are defined as follows: Leadership style, Quality, Resources, Information technology, Remuneration, Teamwork, Performance, Appraisal, Work stress, External factors, Resistance to IT, HRM, Staff turnover, Quality training, IT training, Routine work.
Results from (Table 2), it showed that, the 'coefficient of determination' or R² for this 15 variables model is about 91 %. The results showed that the existence of a strong linear relationship between the dependent and independent variables. To avoid any coincidence in this finding, ANOVA analysis was done. Prior to analyzing using the ANOVA to determine the significance status of the hypothesis whether there is an over-fitting of independent variables computed by the factor analysis due to many variables are included. In case of over-fitting, this model will perform poorly when applied to a new sample drawn from the same population.  1928 .1929 .1931 .1940 .1979 .2038 The type of analysis used to determine for the overfitting of the independent variables is the backward elimination method. It is an analysis, which eliminates one by one the least useful new variables which is compared to the value of the adjusted value of R². The conditions used in this case to identify in case of overfitting are: a) Random select 70 % of the cases, means that variables with t<0.3 eliminated b) Fit a model and c) R² with more variables is smaller than R² with fewer variables.
By referring to the ( Table 2), one of the variables from the total 15 variables is eliminated starting with the lowest t value. Once the least useful variable is taken out, the remaining 14 variables were reanalyzed to create another model summary and the coefficient tables using the multiple regression. From the new model summary and coefficient table, the variable with the lowest t is then identified and taken out. Then these 13 variables were further analyzed. The whole process is repeated with 12, 11, 10 variables until all values of t<0.3 have been removed as per the condition set above. The value of R and R² are then tabulated as shown in (Table 2). This whole process is called the variable selection using 'the backward elimination method'. From (Table 2), as the variables are reduced, the adjusted R² is eventually decreased in size i.e. adjusted R² for 15 variables is greater than adjusted R² for 10 variables. This indicates the model for this paper is not experiencing any such over-fitting. With this analysis, the final number of independent variables that has been confirmed with 70 % random selection without overfitting is ten. With this confirmation, ANOVA analysis was performed. From (Table 3), the ANOVA analysis demonstrated that, there is existence of a very strong relationship when it is confirmed that the F statistics value is 77.4 significant at the 0.0001 level. Since p<0.05 and it reflects a significant difference between the ten organization factors and productivity, hence Hypothesis 1 has been rejected. This indicates that there is a significant difference between the identified organizational or internal factors with the company's productivity.
Results from (Table 4), formation of a good model equation is feasible as only three out of fifteen of the t statistics are made up of small values. Additionally, it does not face over-fitting, even at 15 independent variables. This briefly explains that the formation of model equation using 15 new independent variables is possible, however p<0.05 and t<0.3 are the conditions and only the independent variables falling within this range is selected.
The coefficients of ten variables and indicates the ideal selection to form the final model equation. The coefficients under column B in Table 4  For the hypothesis 2, Pearson correlation coefficient is used and results showed that, correlation between the productivity and the length of employment is positive with a very weak correlation coefficient of 0.13. The coefficient of determination or R² is then 0.017 and the p value is equal to 0.053 (one tail). This showed that p>0.05 its means that there is no evidence of significant relationship between productivity and the length of employment, thus hypothesis H 2 has been accepted. The Pearson correlation falls in the weak range category with less than 95% confidence level (Table 5).
Independent samples t-test carried out to test hypothesis 3. The results derived from (Table 6), the p value of the equal variances assumed (2-tailed) which is equal to 0.091, is more than 0.05 thus hypothesis H 3 is not rejected signifying that there is no evidence of significant relationship between gender and productivity.
ANOVA analysis is carried out for the hypothesis 4 and 5. The results derived from (Table 7), F statistic is 3.177 with the p value of 0.015. The ANOVA analysis showed that the value of p<0.05, hence the hypothesis H 4 is rejected and indicated the existence of a significant difference between productivity and levels of education. This signifies there is evidence of significant relationship between levels of education and the productivity. The level of productivity varies between different levels of education.
Further F statistic for division and productivity is 6.813 with the p value of 0.005. Since the value of    p<0.05, there is no significant difference between productivity and division hence from this analysis, the hypothesis has been rejected. This signifies there is evidence of significant relationship between divisions and the productivity and the productivity is not the same in all divisions.

CONCLUSION
This study has identified ten dominant independent variables that have shown significant relationship with the international division's productivity. Subsequently, the best model of the productivity in relation to these ten variables has successfully formulated. Meanwhile all the five hypotheses in this study have also been quantified through the selected tests. From the analysis of productivity indicators for the past three or four years, it has shown a downward trend. The specific independent variables have been diagnosed to cause these downward achievements. As such immediate counterproposal strategic actions have been recommended in order to reposition the international divisions on the right direction.
The paper has determined the ten dominant organizational factors that have significant impact on the productivity of the company. All those independent variables which have been diagnosed by these findings namely, quality, external factors, leadership, resources, incentives, routine activities, teamwork, performance appraisal, HRM fair decision and work stress. The findings of this paper indicated that the most prominent independent variables that need immediate action are the quality, external factors and the leadership style. Based on these findings, the proposed strategic action pointed to improve the company's productivity.
Based on the findings, the recommendations have been developed and strategically position the international divisions to continuously improve the core competencies of the internal factors and the competitiveness in order to become viable, dynamic and competitive organization to recapture the losing market shares. So in order to remain in the business, Telekom Malaysia was re-organized the whole organization including the international divisions to improve the company's productivity at present. The impact of quality to serve customer is very damaging. If the current quality of services remains the same, the productivity indicator trends will definitely continue to go down. This will create further dissatisfaction among the customers due to lower quality of services rendered to them.
The external factors if not intelligently, smartly handled, maneuvered and placed under the proper portfolio to successfully negotiate to suit to our needs at sufficient velocity with appropriate authorities. The leaders in the international businesses and those who are involved in the decision making should practice open communication, open-minded, team working, coaching and counseling. Resources can be in the form of materials, staff, incentives, tools, advice, appreciation, relationship and so forth. Lacking of these elements in the organization will reflect the no commitment and interest from the management and leaders. If this is perceived by the employees, as the failure of management, it will put the employees under a lot of constraints and pressures. Finally it would turn off the staff inspiration and drive to work hard for higher productivity. The services provided internationally will involve many other divisions so, team-working is very important in order to make service provision, fault clearance and attendance to complaint on a timely manner. Again, any lacking of teamwork will delay in provisioning high quality service to the customers. This will lead to reduction of the outgoing traffic and affecting the labor and line productivity.
HRM roles are recognized to be important especially in recruiting and terminating the services of employees. What the employees are asking for are fairness in any decision making or selection activities such as promotion exercise, voluntary retirement plan (VRP) selection, training and seminar selection and so forth. If care is not taken, this will develop an indifferent attitude towards HRM activities. However, their main responsibility would not be significantly affected. Productivity will till continue to progress but it may progress at a lower speed. This implies that there are other unidentified reasons why the respondents are currently under stress and constraints. This showed that the respondents have reached the limit from further absorbing any additional workload. This definitely will demoralize and de-motivate the respondents. The indicative signs of declining productivity are very prevalent after the productivity indicators are analyzed. The issues that bugged down the loyal employees have to be addressed accordingly before the damage reaches a situation that is beyond control.


Situation of European SMEs in the olive oil and table olive area . Survey

En este trabajo, se realiza un estudio de la PYME europea en el sector olivarero para detectar las principales necesidades que tienen las empresas en información técnica, participación en proyectos de investigación, formación, Tecnologías de Información y Comunicación (TIC), calidad, impacto ambiental, etc. Los datos se obtuvieron a través de encuestas enviadas a empresas de Alemania, Francia, España, Grecia, Italia, Portugal y Turquía. Los resultados obtenidos muestran que las TIC tienen un nivel razonable de implantación en este sector industrial. Así mismo, las empresas encuestadas manifiestan tener gran interés en actividades de formación e información en la legislación relacionada con el sector, el control de calidad y el marketing.

INTRODUCTION
The production of olive oil has a very high economic and social value in the Mediterranean countries and the beneficial effects of the Mediterranean diet, based mainly on the consumption of olive oil as source of fats, has led to a great interest in the European Union both to improve the competitiveness of the olive oil producers and the knowledge by the potential consumers on the healthy results obtained when changing other edible fats by olive oil 1,2,3,4,5,6 .
Spain, Italy and Greece are the major producing countries of olive oil and table olives. Most of the enterprises in this sector in those countries are small, only 0.6% of them have more than 200 employees, and suffer from a lack of technological development.
Olive oil world trade represents hardly 3% of the total of edible fats. The main competitor to olive oil is seed oil that can partially substitute olive oil in consumption and is much cheaper.
In order to have an overview of the current situation, a survey has been carried out to analyse the situation of the SMEs in the olive oil and table olive sector, from several points of view, and to determine their needs in: training, information, R&D, introduction of ICTs, quality, marketing, etc.
Next a short overview of the general situation of the olive oil industrial sector in the countries where the study has been developed is given: • The olive oil sector in Spain (Average annual production 808,014 tons for the years 1991-2004) is of a great economic importance; it is even a monoculture in many regions 7,8, 9 . Although Spain is the first producer there are only 17 Protected With an annual production of 98,857 tons of olive oil, Turkey is the 4th world olive producer 16 . • Among the EU non-producing countries of olive oil, Germany and United Kingdom are the main consumers, with 24,000 t and 23,000 t respectively. Germany has been taken into consideration in the survey, as they have an important packaging, marketing and distribution activities.

SURVEY
In the design of the questionnaire (see Annex I), used to survey the producing SMEs in the countries selected in this study and some non producing German SMEs, the following specifications were taken into consideration: • It should not be too long (11 blocks of questions) • The answers requested should only be: yes or no. • It would be translated into every language of the countries surveyed The total number of contacts made, mainly SMEs, by country was: The total number of contacted companies, cooperatives and associations was 1,158, and the replies, that were completed by the SMEs and associations, were 700. The answer rate achieved was 60.14%.
The questionnaires were distributed using different forms of communication, so as to gain access to the largest number of SMEs: • Personal contact, mainly at the food fairs attended • Telephone • Fax • Post • e-mail: after a telephone call, sending them the survey as an attachment or even within the main body of the e-mail to facilitate the process Among the surveyed SMEs, the most interested and receptive in answering the questionnaires, were those who already had some ICTs implemented, owned a computer, had e-mail and used basic computer tools.
All data were collected and implemented into a database, with 87 fields, of which 13 were fields of general identification of the enterprises, and 74 fields related to the questions asked in the questionnaire.

Country distribution
The distribution of the 700 filled questionnaires obtained by country is shown in table II. It includes   210 Grasas y Aceites the number of SMEs in the olive oil sector and the number of those that were really surveyed. The data corresponding to the 4 blocks of questions included in this group distributed by country seemed to follow the same trend as the aggregated data. The percentage of error for the total of the surveys carried out in the different countries was 3.6 %.

Subject distribution
The results of the surveys will be analysed by six groups of questions: 1. Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs): blocks of questions 1 to 4 2. Legislation and Food Regulations: block of questions 5 3. Environment: block of questions 6 4. Quality Issues: blocks of questions 7 and 8 5. Training: blocks of questions 9 6. Clients and Suppliers: blocks of questions 10

Information and communication technologies, ICTS
It has been set out in four different sections: a) Infrastructures in ICTs. Most of the companies (93%) have at least one personal computer, (88%) with Internet connection and (86%) e-mail. The programs more extensively used are those on management (Excel 83%, sales and accounting 73%). The programs less used are those on web page creation and graphic design (14%). In spite of it, nearly half of those surveyed (48%) have a company web page. (See Figure 1). b) Use of computers. According to the survey, an increasing number of SMEs frequently uses computers: Internet and e-mail (83%). They also agree that these tools are or might be helpful to obtain information of interest to the company (93%), to contact different administrations (81%), clients and suppliers (89%). An 86% believes that these tools could allow them to improve the company image and obtain more publicity for their products, as well as increase their competitiveness and visibility. A high percentage, 53%, still finds ICTs complex and expensive to install and use, and 66% are afraid of security problems, as well as computer viruses. 64% also state that their clients and suppliers use these technologies. (See figure 2) c) ICT training requirements. The "web page design" training program has raised the greatest interest of all training offers, keeping in mind that only 48% of the SMEs have a web page. (See Figure 3) d) Type of information desired. Documents on legislation and regulations is the most demanded type of information (88%), followed by information on public subsidies and grants (84%), and price lists in different markets (84%). The less attractive information was that related to research projects, patents and scientific databases (61%). This result evidences a fact of great concern: the gap between Research and Development (R&D) organisations

Legislation and food regulations
85% of the enterprises surveyed showed interest on information on health safety and on legislation related to olive oil and table olive, 84% on labelling regulations, product presentation and publicity, and 74% on subjects related to the introduction of health claims in food. (See figure 5).

Environment
From the companies that were surveyed, 78% are interested in increasing their general knowledge in environmental legislation (see Figure 6)

Quality issues
It has been broken down into two sets of questions: a) Basic quality systems introduced in the company. The data obtained shows that 62% of the companies have some kind of quality control system. Within this percentage, the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point System is the most used (63%). (See Figure 7) b) Other aspects related to areas of quality control introduced in the companies. 76% of the SMEs show interest in the application of new

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Grasas y Aceites technologies in their production processes. As for the regular controls carried out, the physical-chemical, biochemical and microbiological controls are those mostly performed (69%). (See Figure 8)

Training
This group has 12 questions that cover a wide range of possible courses basically in two subjects: food quality and marketing techniques. The results obtained are the following: a) Courses on quality: 88% of the companies show a great interest in courses on overall quality improvement techniques: 78% would be interested in sensorial analysis training courses (training in olive and olive oil tasting), 77% in analytical measurements in quality control and 68% in processing technologies. b) Marketing courses: 81% of the companies surveyed are interested in marketing and commercial promotion training courses, and 76% in product export courses. (See Figure 9)

Clients and suppliers
With respect to the communication channels employed by SMEs to approach their clients and suppliers, a 93% prefers personal face-to-face interviews and only a 34% uses Internet to communicate. (See Figure 10)

ANALYSIS BY SIZE
The distribution of SMEs surveyed by size is presented in Table III and the distribution by country in Figure 11: Table III   1XPEHURIHPSOR\HHV 3HUFHQWDJHRIFRPSDQLHV VXUYH\HG

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In Spain, Italy and France, most of the companies contacted are very small (1-5 employees) with 58%, 82% and 64% percentages respectively. It has to be remarked, once again, that in the case of Germany, the figures are not comparable, as the German SMEs contacted are only packaging and distribution companies.

ANALYSIS BY ACTIVITY
The distribution of the SMEs by type of activity is: (*) The total number obtained adding the number of companies by activity is higher than 700 as many companies have more than one activity.
There are no significant differences in the replies obtained that will allow to establish differences according to the type of activities.

CONCLUSIONS OF THE STUDY
The main ideas extracted after carrying out this work can be synthesized in the following points:

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTS)
• The enterprises have at least a computer (93%), Internet connection (88%) and e-mail (86%), with 83% of use. • 93% claims that these tools are very useful to communicate with administrations, clients and suppliers. • Half of the SMEs (53%) believes that ICTs are expensive and need more qualified staff. • Only 48% has a web page.
• In the ranking of acceptance of the proposed courses, «creation of web pages» is on the top (66%). • A vast majority, 89% of SMEs, chooses the information on legislation and regulations as their main topic, followed by information on public grants and subsidies (84%) and clients and suppliers directories (84%). • Only 61% shows an interest on being informed in research projects, patents and scientifictechnological databases

Food Legislation and Regulations
• The enterprises show a high level of interest in increasing their knowledge in these subjects (74-85%)

Environment
• 78% of the SMEs wish to increase their knowledge on environmental legislation and regulations, and 72% on the support systems for waste processing.

Quality
• Only 62% have some kind of basic quality control system. • The system most used is related to the «Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points» (63%). • The traceability system follows with 45% and the ISO 9001 and 14001 with 28% and 14% respectively

Training
• 88% of the companies wish to attend courses to improve the quality of the products. The most demanded are the following: Sensorial analysis (78%), Analytical measurements (77%), Processing technologies (68%), Participation in R&D projects (58%) • 81% of the companies show an interest in participating in courses of marketing and commercial promotion • 76% would be interested in receiving courses on export trade • The courses related to sales within the national market, participation in quality awards and local sales, present a demand of 71%, 66% and 65.8% respectively

Communication of companies with clients and suppliers
• The 93% of SMEs prefers to communicate with their clients and suppliers face-to-face • Only a 34% uses Internet to communicate