| Nowadays, companies are facing complex challenges. They have to deal with a business environment characterized by rapid and significant changes. The pressure upon organizations to perform better is therefore very high. Thus, companies, especially small and medium enterprises (SMEs), need tools that provide them with information about their current performance and the potential inductors of future performance. The purpose of this thesis is to identify a list of business practices that affect economic value added (EVA RTM) and its components within SMEs. On the practical level, the knowledge of theses practices may allow SMEs managers to manage better their firms. On the theoretical level, this thesis sheds light on certain aspects of performance measures and inductors within SMEs and explores the relations between them.;To explore the link between the EVARTM components and business practices, data on 108 manufacturing SMEs was analyzed using factor analysis and multiple regressions. Our results showed the complexity of studying performance and the difficulties of linking business practices to functional performance indicators. We found that some practices were not linked to any EVARTM component but linked significantly to EVARTM . This is the case, for instance, of the practice "monitoring product/service improvement". For some other practices, effects were only observed where they were implemented in the organization. For instance, the practice of "employees' participation to decision" was found to lower the cost of direct labour per employee but it had no significant relationship with EVARTM.;Some practices exhibit an immediate effect while some others showed a time lag effect on performance. Therefore, companies should not stop an improvement process if no direct effects are immediately apparent. Some practices were found to influence negatively the proximal performance and positively the global performance. Finally, our findings showed that the impact of individual practices was sometimes weak or hard to prove on global performance. In this case, performance can be dependent on the combination of several business practices.;Keywords: Performance, EVARTM, Economic Value Added, practices, SME;Our analysis of performance measures pointed out in the literature suggests that EVARTM may be considered as a convenient tool for SMEs as it allows the management of the organization's performance. In addition, we show how EVARTM can be broken up to several components allowing the elaboration of a performance management plan by pointing out efficient and non-efficient practices. Therefore, SME managers can use this decomposition to identify performance improvement sources. |
