The Art Of Surving A Crisis : Strategic Crisis Management in Manufacturing SMEs

Nowadays, there is a growing need to consider crisis management in organizations due to an increased occurrence of crises in our society. Manufacturing organizations are often affected by crises due to their supply chain reliance and many small-medium sized enterprises (SMEs) do not have the resources to work with crisis management. There is an identified lack of research regarding how manufacturing SMEs work with crisis management and how the particularities of the manufacturing industry and the specific characteristics and reliance of resources of SMEs can affect crisis management. The purpose of this thesis is to increase the understanding of strategic crisis management in manufacturing SMEs. The thesis outlines different strategic crisis management models which includes the crisis processes of detection, occurrence, and recovery. To understand the practices of manufacturing SMEs, a qualitative study was conducted through 8 eight semi-structured interviews with respondents from Sweden and Switzerland. The thesis discuss the findings of the crisis management carried out by the manufacturing SMEs and existing crisis management models for SMEs and Chinese large- and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises (CLMMEs). The paper concludes that manufacturing SMEs are affected economically by the Covid-19 pandemic crisis. The most common impacts include a decrease in orders and delivery delays. Furthermore, the research provides a contribution to the understanding of how manufacturing SMEs deal and work with crises. The most identified practices were market diversification, active communication with stakeholders, cost reduction and crisis recap.Findings also showed that manufacturing SMEs worked with pre-event planning as an essential part of their crisis management. The paper further proposes a strategic crisis management model for manufacturing SMEs