Efficient Consumer Response (ECR) für mittelständische Unternehmen

In order to compete in today's market, it is necessary to compensate for one's own deficiencies through collaborations. Efficient Consumer Response, a buzzword from the 1990s, is still discussed in literature today as a means of value creation partnership. However, the protagonists in empirical research are mostly large companies and corporations. Medium-sized enterprises have not yet cooperated extensively in the sense of ECR, even though this type of company is shown opportunities to compensate for resource deficiencies due to their size. This study outlines the current situation of SMEs and describes how it can be improved with the help of the ECR approach. The core issue, after examining the basic strategies as foundations of ECR and the potential for success, is whether the skepticism of SMEs towards the ECR concept is justified or not. To address this, the success factors of ECR are compared with the characteristics of SMEs to determine under what conditions they can benefit from the advantages of Efficient Consumer Response and how previously encountered problems and deficiencies in implementation can be avoided.