Background and Objectives
A critical Component of the current Philippine administration's National SME Development Agenda is the development of a Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) database. This will enable the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) to consolidate the assistance that is different bureaus and agencies provide SME's, thereby improving its over-all quality of service to the SME's through more effective means of monitoring SME growth. The database will provide inputs to enable various bureaus to customize their assistance effectively for each SME. Eventually, it should be the fundamental source of data used by DTI to support its activities and programs, particularly those related to SME development.
Presently, various DTI bureaus and agencies maintain their own databases on SMEs for the specific services that they deliver to their respective clients, with no central database to track and monitor the performance of SME's on a per-account basis. Consequently, reports and tailor-fit according to services rendered by each bureau, but lack the perspective on how individual SMEs have been performing.
A shift to monitoring the specific SME accounts on a centralized database has been made possible by the conceptualization of the Philippine business Registry (PBR). Although the project is currently led by the DTI, the PBR is an inter-agency web based portal, which is envisioned to harmonized registration processes among different government agencies. It will be the primary repository of all relevant business registration datasets required in business registration, accreditation and business facilitation. It will allow sharing and access of data to other regulatory and relevant agencies. But in order to do this, it will need to have a core of information about businesses, and the logical starting point will be the DTI databases.
It is therefore imperative that a harmonized and centralized SME database system be developed so that the data from this system can flow to the PBR portal when the latter is developed. Thus the DTI embarked on the development of an improved SME database system with financial assistance from ADB through JFICT 9070-PHI - Developing the Philippine Business Registry with an initial fund of $200, 000.
