LAHORE: Chief Executive Officer of the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Authority (SMEDA) Yousaf Naseem Khokhar, has pledged to continue pro-active role of his organization in strengthening collaboration with International agencies for development of Pakistan's SMEs.

He was addressing the closing ceremony of a two-day workshop on Process Control for Engineering Sector organized by SMEDA in collaboration with CBI (Centre for the Promotion of Imports from developing countries), an agency of the Netherlands Ministry for Development Co-operation the other day at a local hotel.

The workshop was conducted by two international Experts from Netherlands; Mr. Wouter Put (Entrepreneur/Management Consultant), Mr. Staf Henderieckx (Quality Systems and Foundry expert) along with Mr. Imtiaz Rastgar the local CBI Expert for Pakistan Chapter.

CEO SMEDA, in his concluding remarks said that Pakistani SMEs cannot explore the opportunities available in Global market without enhancing the quality of HR as well as the production systems. He told that SMEDA was taking the best possible efforts to bridge this gap in collaboration with various international technical cooperation agencies including JICA, GTZ and CBI.

Commenting on the current workshop, Mr. Khokhar was confident that participants had gained the international experience and knowledge through CBI experts to exploit the full potential of value addition in their engineering concerns. He hoped the participating companies would be able to sustain production of high Quality Products at Competing Costs that will help them penetrate into on the EU Market.

CBI experts expressing their comments in the concluding ceremony appreciated the zeal of participants to learn modern knowledge and urged SMEDA to avail of the future programs to be launched by CBI for south Asia. They said that the customers in the international market are knowledge customers, which have turned the world economy as to the knowledge based economy.

The CBI experts advised that the indigenous manufacturers have to induce the contemporary knowledge to remove bad-influences from their processes in order to reduce the cost of manufacturing besides improving quality.