Small- and medium-sized enterprise post-disaster reconstruction management patterns and application

Earthquakes have become more frequent in the past few decades causing significant impact to regional economic development. Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), as a key component of modern business, often suffer more severely because of their vulnerability. This article proposes a common SME post-earthquake reconstruction management pattern. This pattern focuses on SME post-disaster reconstruction work, adopts corporate social responsibility as a management philosophy and applies a principal component analysis to analyse the SME operational situation in the pre-earthquake phase. Then, a SME hierarchical classification based on the cluster analysis method is presented according to extent of the earthquake damage, and an optimal time control for SME reconstruction is proposed. The SME post-disaster reconstruction implementation pattern includes self-help, hybrid and external help approaches. After theoretical research, the SME management reconstruction pattern is applied to businesses in Wenchuan. Through investigation, 182 SMEs were chosen from Chengdu, Ya’an, Guangyuan, Aba, Mianyang and Deyang as samples and were classified into 4 classes: minor damage, heavily damage, severely damage and completely destroyed. Applying the optimal time control model, the shortest time was calculated to be 36 months. For each class of damaged SMEs, the proposed three approaches for the SME reconstruction pattern were implemented separately. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013