Financial statement analysis for enterprise network design

Abstract

Cooperation and collaboration is something already widely discussed in literature and several different types of Enterprise Network Management (ENM) models have been proposed, highlighting a certain degree of maturity of the literature on this topic. Nevertheless, the increasing demand for collaborative forms to face up to the actual market imposes the development of a systematic methodology. The aim of this methodology is to select the most appropriate ENM model for the pool of potential partners, following an engineered process of network design and implementation. In literature, studies on the appropriateness of different analytical frameworks for designing the most suitable ENM model for specific collaborative businesses have been formulated exclusively based on the analysis of non-financial dimensions of the companies; for example the investigated non-financial aspects are related to the purpose or the function of the collaboration, to the companies’ degree of organization, to the market type or business model, to the pros and cons of the different legal forms, to the soft issues management and to many others. This paper extends the current research and introduces a decisional framework that integrates some of the previous listed endeavors with a quantitative Financial Statement Analysis (FSA) approach in order to guarantee a repeatable, reliable and reproducible selection of the most appropriate ENM model. Finally, the framework is tested in a case study with the aim of validating the methodology.