Browsing by Author "Bandara, M"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3

Open Access
Influencing Factors of Resilience of Construction Supply Chains: A Case of SMEs in Sri Lanka
(SLIIT Business School, 2023-12-14) Manchanayake, M; Bandara, M; Sandhakirani, C; Bandara, W; Madhavika, N; Jayasinghe, M; Ehalapitiya, S
This research paper aims to explore the factors influencing supply chain resilience in Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) operating within Sri Lanka's construction industry during economic crises. The study employed a qualitative approach. Data were collected using purposive sampling with a sample size of eight SMEs in the construction sector registered under the National Enterprise Development Authority of Sri Lanka. Using structured interviews, data were collected, and the responses were analysed using the Manual Thematic analysis procedure. The study findings states that collaboration, entrepreneurial orientation, internal integration, and outsourcing have been the main factors that have contributed to making the Sri Lankan construction supply chains resilient during Economic crisis. Therefore, it is recommended for the construction firms to focus and improve the presence of these factors in their respective supply chains, to make the supply chains more resilient. This study's significance lies in its focus on construction SMEs in Sri Lanka, offering insights from the perspective of manufacturers, which has been relatively unexplored in existing resilience related research. Although some research articles do touch upon this area, mostly these studies have been conducted in developed nations. Thus, this study contributes to the scant Sri Lankan supply chain resilience literature. Sri Lanka is making strong efforts to support its economy to combat the economic downturn and stabilize. Therefore, the findings of this paper will undoubtedly be useful for the Sri Lankan construction sector while aiding the country to flourish again.
Embargo
Navigating economic crisis: Factors shaping resilience in Sri Lankan constructionSME supply chains
(Taylor and Francis, 2024-10-05) Madhavika, N; Bandara, M; Manchanayake, M; Perera, C; Bandara, W; Jayasinghe, P; Ehalapitiya, S
In today’s construction industry, supply chains are subject to much greater disruption than they were inthe past, resulting in a greater need for resilience. However, there is a gap in the literature that examinesthe resilience of construction small and medium scale Enterprises (SMEs) specifically focusing on develop-ing countries. This article is a step towards identifying the factors influencing the resilience of construc-tion SME supply chains taking the case of Sri Lanka: a developing country which is currently amidst amajor economic crisis. This research study adopted a mixed-method approach, employing 08 structuredinterviews with employees ranging from executive level to top level management of 08 constructionSMEs followed by a questionnaire survey considering a sample of 195 construction SMEs also with execu-tive level to top level management of each construction SME. The findings indicated that Collaboration,Entrepreneurial Orientation (EO), Internal Integration, and Outsourcing have a positive significant impacton the resilience of Sri Lankan construction SMEs’ supply chains during an economic crisis, while‘collaboration’ and ‘EO’ are the most influential factors respectively. Therefore, construction SMEs mustprioritize and enhance collaboration and EO when devising supply chain strategies to strengthen resili-ence during economic crises. This paper contributes to filling the research gap by investigating factorsinfluencing construction SME supply chains in a developing country during an economic crisis. Moreover,it contributes to the knowledge by being one of the latest empirical studies focusing on the constructionSME supply chains in Sri Lanka. The findings provide a valuable reference for both policymakers and prac-titioners seeking to improve the resilience of construction SME supply chains
Unknown
Overlay community detection using community networks
(IEEE, 2018-11-18) Bandara, M; Weragoda, S; Piraveenan, M; Kasthurirthna, D
Community detection is useful in understanding the structure of a social network. One of the most commonly used algorithms for community detection is the Louvain algorithm, which is based on the Newman-Girman (NG) modularity optimization technique. It is argued that the close spatial proximity of nodes may increase their chance of being in the same community. Variants of the NG modularity measure such as the dist-modularity attempt to normalize the effect of spatial proximity in extracting communities, causing loss of information about the spatially proximate communities. Other variants of NG modularity such as Spatially-near modularity, try to exploit the spatial proximity of nodes to extract communities, causing loss of information on spatially dispersed communities. We propose that `overlay communities' on existing `community networks' can be used to identify spatially dispersed communities, while preserving the information of spatial proximate communities. The community network is formed by reducing a community into a node using a proximity dimension, which are connected by intercommunity links. The overlay communities are the community pairs that have relatively high normalized link strengths, while being relatively apart in selected proximity dimension. We apply this method to the Gowalla and soc-Pokec online social networks and extract the spatially dispersed overlay communities in them. We select the geographical space and the age of the nodes as the proximity dimension of these two networks, respectively. Detecting spatially dispersed overlay communities may be useful in application domains such as indirect marketing, social engineering, counter terrorism and defense.