Assessment and Analysis of Factors Affecting Quantitative Techniques’ Applications in Nigerian Small-Scale Industries

Author(s)

Edwin C. Anene ,

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Volume 5 - June 2016 (06)

Abstract

This paper examined factors that affect quantitative techniques (QTS’) applications by selected Nigerian SmallScale Industries (SSIs). Specifically, it assessed factors affecting applications of QTS to Production Planning and Control (PP&C) activities of companies within the selected SSIs in Nigeria. It also analysed data on the assessed factors to determine the most important of them all. Use was made of responses from the designated staff of 20 companies randomly chosen from each of 8 purposively selected Nigerian SSIs. Kendall’s coefficient of concordance (w) test was used to determine the most important of all the assessed factors In all, 8 factors – unawareness, lack of qualified manpower, lack of adequate financial resources, no research and development (R & D) unit, lack of information technology (IT) facilities, inadequate managerial skills, managers not able to understand clearly the benefits of QTs usage, and lack of exposure of managers to QTs in earlier training, were assessed. Test results showed a significant difference in the ranking of importance of all the assessed factors. Lack of adequate financial resources had the highest mean rank of 8.00, w = 0.82; (ᵡ 2 = 46.572 and P = 0.000 < 0.05). The paper concluded that the above named 8 factors were assessed to have affected QTs’ applications to PP&C activities within the surveyed companies of the selected industries in Nigeria. Further, the lack of adequate financial resources was the most important of all the assessed factor. It was therefore recommended that meaningful and concerted efforts, by operators in these industries, should be increased and geared toward a considerable increase in their sourcing of financial resources. In turn, this would assist in availing them more opportunities to increase QTs’ applications.

Keywords

Assess, Analyse, Factors, Quantitative Techniques, Small-scale industries.

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