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SMEs urged to maintain business fitness

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CIOL Bureau
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UK: Speaking at the CPiO Customer Conference 2009, former Minister of State for Trade & Investment and Head of the CBI, Digby, Lord Jones of Birmingham Kt. implored SMEs to focus upon maintaining their level of "business fitness" to ensure that they are ready to take advantage of the upswing in the economy when it occurs.

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Giving a keynote address at the CPiO Customer Conference at the Heritage Motor Centre, Gaydon, Warwickshire entitled 'The changing face of global business', Lord Jones remarked to the audience of CPiO customers, "SMEs face the dual challenge of both staying in business and maintaining 'business fitness'. It's not enough just to be there at the end of the recession, but UK SMEs need to keep 'working out' to ensure that they have the very best potential when the business opportunity is there. It's clear that technology offers that significant edge and new and emerging approaches like software-as-a-service (saaS) have the ability to enable the sector to stay healthy and thrive when markets recover."

Lord Jones offered his views on how the UK is performing against the background of sweeping globalisation. With a strong relationship to Midlands industry, Lord Jones has a keen insight into the changing face of industry and provided his view on how the UK is fairing against increasing pressures and competition from around the world.

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The Waterdale Group will shortly publish new research into current and future trends in the use of technology by SME businesses in the supply chain, and associated industries. Commenting on the research at the CPiO Customer Conference, Lord Jones said, "In today's economic climate SMEs struggle to have the resources, expertise or budget to keep up to date. This survey reveals how organisations are responding to the current crisis by postponing investment in IT. Yet it is clear that these organisations are also aware that this trend is likely to compromise operational performance - and makes re-building the sector extremely tough once the economy improves."

As part of the Waterdale Group, CPiO focuses on providing IT solutions to the manufacturing, automotive, engineering and general business sectors. Its expertise ranges from delivering powerful end-to-end Enterprise Resource Planning and Customer Relationship Management solutions to innovative infrastructure redesign projects.