Time relevance within companies’ non-bankruptcy insolvency proceedings. Evidences from Eastern Sicilian Courts

This research focuses on the role played by the «time» during the whole life of a firm. More in details, the paper examines the time vari-able within specific steps of a company life cycle: the origin, determi-nation and consolidation of crisis. The paper argues that time plays a strategic role – both from an in-ternal and external perspective – in the success of turnaround process-es that a company can undertake in order to overcome its «crisis stage». According to the data available, it emerges that many companies are now trying to overcome the crisis through the submission of «non-bankruptcy voluntary proceedings» under to judgement of their credi-tors and of Italian Courts. Starting from these evidences, the research investigates which is the average time needed by judicial procedures for the resolution of enter-prise crisis and, at the same time, if this duration can be considered «coherent» with the residual possibility of a company to get back to creating value. The study sits in the field of business administration theories within which the time factor has assumed crucial relevance from several per-spectives (strategy, management, accounting, organization). It proposes some preliminary evidences on the role played by the time variable in the «judicial resolution» of enterprise crisis, obtained from the analysis of the s.c. «non-bankruptcy voluntary proceedings» submitted during the period 2009-2014 to some Italian Courts (region-al data provided by the Courts of East side of Sicily, Italy).