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Strategic sourcing and supply risk management have become interesting topics of research in the recent years. Automotive industry experts are increasingly focussing on improving the supply efficiency and performance towards gaining sustainable competitive advantage. This study aims to classify, through an exhaustive review of past literature, the various enablers and barriers of strategic sourcing risk management (SSRM) and use them to identify the problems in the automobile sector.

For the purpose of this research, responses were collected through structured questionnaire from respondents belonging to senior management cadre in the industry. Factor analysis and force field analysis tools have been used for analysis.

Through independent exploratory factor analysis (EFA), four SSRM enablers, namely, supplier risk assessment, data sharing in supply network, partnership with supplier and supply flexibility, were identified. Similarly EFA revealed four SSRM barriers, namely, cost focus, ad hoc or poor planning, data security/privy breaches and hard visualization of SSRM benefits. Through a force field analysis, it was found out that the barriers had a higher impact on the SSRM initiatives than enablers.

The research suggests the ways how managers can reduce the impact of barriers and increase the enabling forces.

This paper enumerates the barriers and enablers together on the same platform to prioritize and evolve strategies to overpower the barriers and strengthen the enablers.

This study aims to investigate the impact of information and communication technology (ICT) investment on the micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) profitability in the Indian context.

This study used a framework based on the ICT investment and firm size, measuring the impact on profit before depreciation, interest, tax and amortisation of MSME by taking a random sampling of 300 Indian MSME manufacturing firm’s secondary data from the Prowess database. This framework was analysed using the design of experiment (DoE) technique.

The study showed that ICT investment has a significant positive relationship with profitability. This study examines the different ICT investment levels to predict investment strategies and fine-tune profit targets. The critical finding is that ICT investment maximises profit at one million rupees. This discovery aids MSME leaders’ sustainable business decision-making.

This study has an explicit limit to the Indian context, where the firm requirements of countries are different, and these findings need to be validated with many operating variables and applied to more firms with more data. Even so, as a theoretical implication, this study took a novel approach to ICT adoption (through ICT investment) in the Indian MSME sector with guiding levels of ICT investment for each type of firm (i.e. micro, small and medium). This study opens new avenues for investigating researchers and stakeholders by exploring other factors responsible for ICT adoption.

This study uniquely provides practitioners with the functional level of ICT investment for MSMEs in the Indian context. These finding guides top management to make strategic ICT adoption decisions with information symmetry. At the same time, these findings suggest financial institutions astern their credit programme to provide credit for ICT investment in MSMEs.

This study highlights the value of ICT as a practical resource for business owners that significantly makes MSMEs more informed and profitable, thus creating more jobs and incrementing the country’s gross domestic product (GDP).

This study offers unique empirical findings on how decision makers in MSMEs maximise profits through optimal ICT investment levels depending upon the firm size in an emerging economy like India. There is evidence in the study to conclude that ICT is a need of MSME and has implications for firm performance.