This document discusses the importance of quality and customer satisfaction in business. It emphasizes that companies must satisfy customer needs to survive, as the customer is the top priority. It also stresses that quality must be the cornerstone of a company's culture, and that this requires clear responsibilities, staff training, management participation, and focusing on continuous improvement. The overall message is that prioritizing quality service and meeting customer expectations is essential for business success.

1. Quality as the
cornerstone of a
company's culture
Pavlo Lukash
VAAM-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.

2. 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.

3. MANAGEMENT LEVEL
In 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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!

8. TOTAL QUALITY
MANAGEMENT
Within 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.

9. 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.

10. „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.

11. • '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. ´