The Impact of the External Information from SMEs’ Customers and Suppliers on Their Product Quality Improvement and Cost Reduction

The integrated supply chain network plays a critical role in increasing firms’ competitiveness which makes their business more successful in today’s high competition in the market sped up with technology convergence. In the perspective of the integrated supply chain network, this study constructed the research model to analyze and compare the influences of the external information from the customers and suppliers of the small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) on their product quality improvement and cost reduction that their technology development makes. Based on the ordinary least squares regression with the 2,000 data from the SMEs in the Republic of Korea through the IBM SPSS version 23, this study have revealed the two points as follows. One point is that the external information from customers has a more positive impact on SMEs’ product quality improvement than the external information from suppliers. The other point is that the external information from suppliers has a more positive influence on SMEs’ cost reduction than the external information from customers.