"real-time" in terms of trends can be measured in months and years. Thus having (and using) the journals specific to the individual market segment has to suffice - provided they care at all.

(I know quite a number of SMEs that are solely driven by their customers' requests and not by some trend analysis or - even worse - "trend forecast".

I feel that there is no difference between SMEs and Manufacturing sectors in collecting of real time market data. Standard methodologies for collecting data for marketing data followed by the manufacturing data can be equally used by SMEs. The difficulties in collecting data are encountered in both sectors equally. It depends a lot on the personal contacts and labor input of the data collector to it from both industry and purchasing subjects. This is what I could say at the moment best of luck.

Thanks for your valuable answers. From both of you ,I have noted two points - there is a relationship between manufacturer and SME in sales & purchase where SME asks to manufacturer to supply product as end-user demand.so the situation here win-win for them.So SMEs are raw data collector.

As the majority of SMEs does not manufacture consumer products, these tend to have a close relationship to their respective customers.

small objection: IF SMEs are interested in trends, they tend to consume pre-processed data rather than raw data.

It does not have to be a formal research for SMEs to get data. The questions raised during the actual transactions with clients are equally important with the formal research conducted. In fact in some instances, a formal research is conducted to further clarify/investigate the data gathered from conversations with clients.

Thanks Shaharia For understanding my point of view and positive response

Structuring the informational process for executive decisions in a small or medium-sized enterprise it is always a challenge. Still, it has been increasingly accessible resorting to customized Business Intelligence systems or accessing business associations in which SME are part of. Mostly because they usualy have have specific structures to analyse the industry performance or trends.

Based on my experience working with micro- and small business in the past 17 years, they usually look for "free" resources of information, including observation, mystery shopping at competitors' location, getting feedback from customers and conducting surveys themselves as far as primary research methods are concerned. For industry data and economic trends, they tend to use government-provided data-sets, industry publications, association-provided information, or review of competitors' offerings. I also noticed that they are becoming more sophisticated as far as using online resources to expedite the research process.

Successful SME actually thrive for being able to know their customer needs and how they evolve. I personally know at least a couple of SME that are quite sophisticated in collecting and then keeping customer information. As an example, a small real estate developer conducts a short survey with each and every visitor to their condo apartments on sale. So, even if the people did not buy, they collected interesting information of what they like and did not like, which they could use to improve future designs.