Quality as the cornerstone of a company's culture

Pavlo LukashVAAM-15

There is no such thing as a difficult customer - just someone, like anyone else, who has particular needs. Your company must satisfy these needs: there is no choice - it is a matter of survival. Companies have to attract customers with services that meet their expectations. They must inspire confidence and have a strong image.

MANAGEMENT LEVEL• Management practices for the 21'st century have to be based

on supra-national regulations and agreed objectives. The western world needs synergy to start some recovery if it is tilt the world trade balance in its favour again.

• Customers want services that meet their specific needs. Know-how, determination and positive action can provide these.

• Companies must adandon makeshift and individualistic ways of working in favour of shared knowledge and teamwork.

MANAGEMENT LEVELIn shipping the customer is of course the shipper who wants cargo delivered safely and on time. In the majority of cases the shipowner is attempting to satisfy the needs of several different cargo owners who are using the ship to transport their goods.There are two principles that will provide the foundations for Future prosperity:• Winning customer loyalty, by providing quality services• Making adequate profits for continual investment in product research

and new efficient equipment while giving fair returns to shareholders, and fair wages to those who contribute to company success.

However this socio-economic approach would ultimately be incomplete and ineffective unless actions were taken on an internal management level, to ensure similar personnel loyalty. Staff must be made to believe that quality service is the only acceptable way of managing a business.

CLEAR ACTIONS• The company must be clear about duties assigned to each but also

encourage ideas for stimulating projects, to be reviewed annually by the company chairman in person.

These duties and projects should enable everyone to contribute according to ability, and assess their own contribution, in the context of team working.

All company departments need to be involved: sales, operations, technical, purchasing, finance, personnel, chartering, insurance and claims

• Quality must become the cornerstone of a culture that will unite the personnel: having learnt the merit to work properly, they will want to do so. For such an approach to be successful, essential steps have to be taken.

STAFF TRAINING• Staff training is a way of making the work-force efficient, and

keeping it so throughout the technological developments needed to improve quality. The company must also show concern for the personal development and fulfulment of its workers, in line with their aspirations and potential.

• People are born with motivation: it is an inner force. Why not try and reconcile corporate and individual aims?

• The company must maintain this attitude by giving staff regular information at all levels, with proper attention to individual concerns.

• Rapid and reliable information will contribute to the action to prevent failures and errors.

MANAGEMENT PARTICIPATION

• Employees judge managers not on their worlds but on their deeds. Thus is where they will decide how important quality is for their employer, and place it accordingly among their own priorities.

• Those who have genuinely contributed to improve quality must be rewarded .

• What matters is to mark an achievement, acknowledge it and make it known to all those contributing to objectives.

SUCEEDING QUALITY CONCEPTS• Economic: The company must make a decent profit in order to

consolidate its achievements, make the investments needed for further expansion, and offer a fair return to those that show their confidence in it by investing in its future.

• Technical: The ideas and creative energies which are reflected through innovation and the ability to offer new products and services.

• Social: Every company possesses a human potential for creativeness, too long untapped, and in which it must invest for the ·future. ·

A more recent concept is total quality management. It is based on human relations, and aimed at releasing the firm's creative potential by involving every sector of the personnel in improving quality. It is the attempt to achieve 100 percent performance!

TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENTWithin the framework of total quality management, the work-force must be trained before introducing self-monitoring as a way of giving responsibility to all staff. Internal quality auditing by company management must become a routine practice, even before quality circles are set up.

«God gave us two ears and only one tongue, so that we must listen twice as much as we talk.»

You must have one ear for the client and one ear for the personnel. Both have good ideas for improving our performance.

KPI in SHIPPING'Key Performance Indicators - KPI‘:

A set of quantifiable measures that a company or industry uses to gauge or compare performance in terms of meeting their strategic and operational goals. KPIs vary between companies and industries, depending on their priorities or performance criteria.

• The Shipping KPI System is a global shipping industry tool for defining, measuring and reporting information on operational performance.

• It uses a unique standard of 64 different key performance indicators (KPIs) to allow the most specific and accurate comparison of ships – across different types and sectors – that is currently available.

• The data collected is anonymised, so it does not compromise commercially sensitive information.

„The Customer“ MANTRA• 'The customer is the most important person in our business,

whether he reveals himself in person, by letter or by phone.'• 'The customer is not a nuisance, he does not interrupt our work, he

is an end in himself.• 'The customer does not depend on us, it is we who depend on him.• 'The customer informs us of his wishes; we are never doing him a

favour by listening, or advising him. It is he who does us a favour by offering us an opportunity to meet his needs.

• 'We have to help him define his needs and transcribe these, despite their full subjectiveness, in clear, precise terms in order to meet them.

• 'Everyone one of us, in every job and ·every department, has to do our work properly the first time in order to avoid delays and extra cost.

• 'A satisfied customer i our best advertisement; His satisfaction contributes to our brand image, in other words recognition of the know how of our personnel. ´