# The Impact of Information Systems Implementation in the Greek Manufacturing Enterprises
## 3 Research Methodology and Data Collection  
The study was conducted on manufacturing companies--public and private--that are active in North Greece on the districts of Macedonia and Thrace. The population for the study was based on the companies which are active--producing--on those Greek areas. The list of the companies was obtained from ICAP's Greek Financial Directory of the year 2017 [35], volume 1: industry [35]. ICAP's directory includes detailed listings of manufacturing companies--Greek and multinationals--in Greece. The questionnaire was sent to several enterprises of that list, excluding those that according to ICAP's directory [35] were listed as \"Very Small\". A total of 184 companies were instructed to answer the questionnaire that was sent to them. We received 96 replies by the end of January 2019. According to the authors in [36], the questionnaire was short in order to achieve the maximum response rate. The questionnaire consisted of 15 questions, 13 of which were closed-ended questions and the last two of them were open questions that the respondents could fill with additional comments. The objective of the penultimate question was to determine the respondents' job title on the company, while the last question was asking about their thoughts regarding IS and Supply Chain (SC) in Greek industry. Of the 13 close-end questions, the first two were addressed to all respondents. The second question tried to determine whether the enterprises were using a form of Information System (IS) or not. Depending on the answer of that second question--yes or no--the respondents were instructed to either follow the natural course of the questionnaire or to proceed to the tenth question--its objective was to determine which reasons would prevent a company from investing in an IS. The survey instrument was developed based on the extensive review of the current literature, which was delineated in Section 2. In order to assess the questionnaire's clarity, comprehensiveness, and overall suitability, the questionnaire was e-mailed in a pilot sample of five experts regarding IS in order to pretest it.The authors of this study took into consideration their suggestions for the few amendments that were applied on the questionnaire. After those changes it was ready to be sent to the manufacturing enterprises. The questionnaire, which was accompanied by a cover letter, was sent in November 2018 to 184 manufacturing enterprises to be filled out on the web. The cover letter provided a brief description of the research project, and in addition, it provided assurance that any information obtained from the companies that would participate in the study would be treated as confidential. The majority of the e-mail addresses were found in the ICAP directory, while the rest were found on the General Commercial Registry's site [37], as well as the Exporters' Association of Northern Greece's site [38]. All the companies were contacted by phone to verify the e-mail addresses we had found but also to inform them about the research. Three weeks after the first invitation, the questionnaire was sent again--via e-mail--to the companies that had not responded and they were also informed again by phone, in order to improve the response rate. The same procedure was followed after the Christmas holidays once again. Strict checks were performed in the returned questionnaire in order to ensure its completeness and consistency. According to the checks, the total amount of the questionnaires that were answered in a way found to be valid and usable for further analysis put the overall response rate at 52.17% percent. The sample was also checked for representativeness with respect to industry sector and also the district being facilitated. Regarding the industry sector, the \(X^{2}\) goodness-of-fit test shows that the sectorial representation of the sample does not differ significantly from that observed in the total population of manufacturing enterprises in North Greece; the \(p\)-value of the test was 0.813.