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SMALL CITY COMMERCE (EL PEQUEÑO COMERCIO DE LAS PEQUEÑAS CIUDADES)

In the last few decades and due especially to the continuous transformation of the economy, small businesses have found themselves having to take great efforts, often without results, to achieve an improvement in competitiveness. This situation is even more difficult for the small companies that exist in small towns, and which have to compete with the larger retailers in neighbouring cities, absorbing almost the total demand of the consumers. On the other hand, most of the training programmes and materials are focused on the large companies, especially the more complex ones, related to quality management systems, knowledge management systems and business networks. The result is a lack of these specially designed tools catering to the specific needs of small town businesses. The Small City Commerce Project, thus, aims to develop a training plan that covers these three basic pillars jointly and globally, three pillars which are not only of importance to large companies. This project will be seen to cover all these needs offering small businesses the opportunity to understand the advantages of training their personnel and the advantages of applying quality control systems, knowledge management systems, and especially, the advantages of the business networks based on the on-line company model.The consortium of the project consists of 8 partners from 5 European countries. The leader is the Ayuntamiento de Vila real. The Federacion de comercio de Vila-real represents the interest of the target group in Vila-real. There are two other Spanish partners, the Fundación Comunidad Valenciana with a major role in dissemination and exploitation activities at European level and FUNDECYT from Extremadura, one of the disadvantaged areas of Europe. Fundecyt is the promoter of the two previous projects KNOWMAKERS and MENS. Other partners are: IDEC from Greece a consulting company, extert in quality management systems and leader of the project “Quality management systems training for SMEs”, Link from Germany a company expert in e-working and e-learning systems, INIMM, the Romanian Institute for small and medium companies and KMI an experienced consulting company in Turkey. The consortium consists of private companies’ experts in the issues of the project, organisations representing the target group of small commercial companies, foundations and institutes for the development of companies and local development. The main results of the project will be an integrated training plan and the relevant training material for quality management, knowledge management and companies networks in the small commercial companies’ networks. A web-platform will support the creation of companies’ networks and provides the facilities for on-line networking and e-learning. The training plan will be piloted in the partners’ countries. Results in the dissemination field include the production of brochures, leaflets, development of a web-site, distribution of newsletters, publication of articles, organisation of local conferences and a large translational conference in Brussels. The project impact will be in the acquisition of skills and competences in the small commercial companies in the fields of quality management, knowledge management and companies’ networks. Through the training courses and the creation of companies’ networks, the project will have an impact in the development of local enterprises and thus in local development and employment.

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