| TERF has been Tacis’s largest private sector development project in Russia. Enterprises involved in the project come from different industry sectors and different Regions of Russia. No specific preference was given to any industry sector or Region. Moreover unlike other Tacis projects, TERF did not impose a predetermined specification for the type of technical assistance to be rendered. On the contrary the TERF programme was designed so that enterprises, together with the consultants, chose the type and volume of consulting services the enterprise wanted to receive.
This major initiative was launched in 1998 to provide advisory services to non-state enterprises. During TERF I 25 advisory contracts were agreed with 22 enterprises, selected from about 100 which entered the initial pipeline. The assistance provided covered the full spectrum of restructuring activities including strategy, organisation, human resources, business process engineering, benchmarking, export promotion, marketing, financial management, investment and quality control. The advice provided was tailored for each enterprise and implemented through leading sector experts many of whom have board level restructuring experience with similar Western European companies.
The selected enterprises covered a broad range of industrial sectors including chemicals, footwear, pharmaceuticals, textiles and machine manufacture. A 20% contribution to costs was required from enterprises, though this level was temporarily reduced over the summer of 1998 in the face of the financial crisis in Russia. A wide variety of management consulting services were supplied, with an average cost per sub-project of Euro 180,000. The project involved promoting the restructuring facility, enterprise diagnostics and selection, delivery of advisory services – almost always together with local consulting agencies – and wide dissemination of the results for which there was a substantial budget of Euro 400,000. These have included workshops and seminars held for industrialist; and workshops and large scale conferences held under the auspices of the Ministry of Economy to develop policy implications including the need for regulatory reform/change. The services were delivered by joint EU and Russian teams with Russian input averaging around 40%.
Of the 25 sub projects implemented, 11 were for medium sized enterprises (500-3,000 employees) and 14 for large enterprises (+3,000 employees). The smallest enterprise assisted had 1,100 employees (Unichel – footwear) and the largest, 49,000 employees (Severstal – steel making). 
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