Design and implementation of a system of productivity indicators for the management of Colombian SMEs

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are key to any economy because of their contribution to employment, as well as their income generation capacity and social and business capital construction. In Colombia, they face enormous problems and challenges due in part to their low productivity, which threatens their sustainability. This article aims to design, implement and evaluate a dynamic system of productivity indicators for the management of SMEs in Colombia. Based on information from the Superintendence of Companies of Colombia for the years 2016 to 2019 for a representative sample of SMEs, a Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model was specified and estimated to evaluate their technical efficiency and identify their determinant variables, as well as Malmquist Productivity Indexes to dynamically evaluate their productivity. This validated system lets any enterprise determining its productivity or that of a group of products/services, the productivity of the sector to which such organization belongs, perform benchmarking, and identify opportunities for improvement in terms of inputs used or quantity of products generated.