Utmaningarna med digitalisering av ekonomistyrning för små och medelstora tillverkande verkstadsföretag

Abstract

The focus of this study is management control, more precisely how decision making and control mechanisms are affected by digitalization and what hampers the future development of digitalization in small and medium sized companies. To stay competitive it is important that small and medium sized companies also implement digitalization in their business. Earlier studies are mostly focusing on bigger companies and there is therefore a lack of research on how digitalization is affecting management control in small and medium sized enterprises. The methodology of this study is to analyze the interviews based on a review of previous literature. The interviews are used to evaluate how these types of companies are working in practice. We found that these types of companies are working with digitalization and are positive towards further digitalization of their processes. The digitalization has increased the collection of data which has made both control mechanisms and decision making process easier to execute. One example is when working with budgets and visualization in the business. We found that the biggest contributors to the hampering of their digitalization is a lack of competence, lack of resources to make necessary investments and incompatible software.