Modelling and enhancement of organizational resilience potential in process industry SMEs

Abstract

The business environment is rapidly changing and puts pressure on enterprises to find effective ways to survive and develop. Since it is almost impossible to identify the multitude of complex conditions and business risks, an organization has to build its resilience in order to be able to overcome issues and achieve long term sustainability. This paper contributes by establishing a two-step model for assessment and enhancement of organizational resilience potential oriented towards Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in the process industry. Using a dynamic modelling technique and statistical tools, a sample of 120 SMEs in Serbia has been developed as a testing base, and one randomly selected enterprise was used for model testing and verification. Uncertainties regarding the relative importance of organizational resilience potential factors (ORPFs) and their value at each level of business are described by pre-defined linguistic expressions. The calculation of the relative importance of ORPFs for each business level is stated as a fuzzy group decision making problem. First, the weighted ORPFs’ values and resilience potential at each business level are determined. In the second step, near optimal enhancement of ORPFs’ values is achieved by applying a genetic algorithm (GA).