Performance evaluation (ISO 9001:2015 Clause 9)

When our local swimmer and fly specialist Joseph Schooling won a bronze at the swimming World Championships in 2015, it was considered a sensational moment in Singapore sport. Two years later, the same medal colour carries far less shine.

The one-sided result – the winner Caeleb Dressel was almost a second faster than Schooling and the Singaporean's time was 0.44sec off his personal best. In swimming, every split second counts and our poster boy has failed to repeat his stunt after winning last year's historic first Olympic gold for our country.

Schooling acknowledged his podium finish in Saturday's 100m butterfly final as "a setback" as he went into this meet with high expectations (targeting wins in the 50m fly, which he finished fifth, and the 100m fly which he finished third in a tie with British swimmer James Guy).


Schooling’s coach, Eddie Reese, the 76-year-old head coach at the University of Texas, where Schooling studies and trains should be busy right now analysing his charge’s performance and determining what had gone wrong and draft the next course of actions. This is akin to a post-mortem after an internal or external audit to determine the action plan to fix an organization’s quality management system.

Performance evaluation should be a continuous process to evaluate the effectiveness of an organization’s quality management system. The Standard states clearly the requirements for organizations to determine what, when, how to measure performance. The only issue is ‘who’ is responsible to do this as this clause does not specify who?

The simplistic solution to above issue is to document a plan (Clause 6.2.2) to achieve quality objectives established. The requirements for this plan has all the elements of what will be done, what resources will be required, who will be responsible, when will it be completed and lastly, how the results will be evaluated.

Without doubt, the performance of an organization’s quality management system depends on how well its quality objectives are relevantly defined at critical functional levels and key processes. While it’s relatively easy to set objectives, organizations should consider setting leading indicators than lagging ones as these help organizations to implement and take actions to prevent unwanted events, accidents, high scraps, etc. Someone has to be appointed and responsible to analyse performance results and take appropriate actions.  

Who is this person in your organization?

External Providers/Suppliers’ Evaluation: Quality vs Price

Questions have been raised on the PIE (Pan Island Expressway) work site collapse of a 40m segment of a viaduct being constructed at Upper Changi Road East, killing one worker and injuring 10 others on Friday morning, 14July. 

While the authorities are investigating the accident, many questions have been raised about the tender process and the award of the project to contractors.

One critical question asked was: Why did the Land Transport Authority (LTA) award the contract to build the PIE-TPE viaduct to Or Kim Peow (OKP) Contractors? Was it based on OKP's lowest bid?

According to reported news, OKP submitted the lowest bid of S$94.6 million for the tender for the Design and Build contract in November 2015, which was 27 per cent lower than the next lowest bid of S$129.7 million by Yongnam Engineering.

Although an LTA spokesman said it considered more than just pricing alone in assessing tender proposals, citing other "quality aspects", such as the relevant experience of the participating contractors, their safety management systems and practices, track record, project-specific technical, risk management and resource management proposals.

For all construction tenders, LTA said the price-quality method is used by agencies as a framework. The price-quality weighting used for Design and Build projects before January last year is between 60:40 and 70:30.

Obviously, LTA’s price-quality methodology is questionable as it places higher weightage on pricing than quality. Sad to say, this is nothing new as such practices are still commonly practiced in many industries and projects in many countries.

After years of working in factories and manufacturing facilities, I observed that such practice rose from different objectives of various functional departments. The buyer buys at the lowest cost, the quality department wants to receive the best product quality that meets the specifications and the safety department demands zero accident from their contractors working inside their workplaces. More often than not, the department with the loudest voice and willpower wins.

 

Unless and until all functional departments are given common key performance indicators (KPI) on quality and safety aspects on service providers, suppliers and contractors, many would continue such practice with severe consequences like the accident illustrated here.

 

As top management are more concerned with bottom lines than other aspects of operations, the purchasing function is viewed more as a “cost-saving” function compared to “expense” functions of quality and safety roles. Until top management understand and learn the lessons of using the cheapest supply source, and faces the consequences of using incompetent providers, nothing would change.         

 

Read full article from The Straits Times, dated 16-07-2017

PIE work site collapse: Questions loom over collapse of viaduct segment

http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/questions-loom-over-collapse-of-viaduct-segment?xtor=EREC-16-1[ST_Newsletter_AM]-20170716-[PIE+work+site+collapse%3A+Questions+loom+over+collapse+of+viaduct+segment]&xts=538291

 

ISO 9001:2015 Quality Management System: Release of products and services (8.6)

Speak Mandarin Campaign and NDP organisers apologise for linguistic errors

A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Straits Times on July 12, 2017, with the headline 'Language gaffes: Two event organisers say sorry'.

One embarrassing mistake was in the use of the wrong Chinese character in a rostrum signIn a gaffe at Monday's launch of the Speak Mandarin Campaign, instead of using the Chinese character for "read", the character for "to show disrespect" was used on a sign that featured prominently.

In the NDP case, there were typographical errors in the Tamil translation of the theme #OneNationTogether, printed on the NDP publicity pamphlets given to Primary 5 pupils from 162 schools before they attended the NDP's National Education (NE) shows. The translation was supposed to read as "Let's come together as one nation". But in that translation, some letters were in the wrong places, while others were missing, making the words unintelligible.

These are but real examples of quality management system lapses causing embarrassments to the organizers. Generally, people cannot accept such lapses and anyone concerns about quality management processes can learn from such blunders.

One way to prevent such error is to adopt a quality management system like ISO 9001:2015 and implement processes to meet the standard’s requirements. One of the requirement, Clause 8.6 Release of products and services states precisely:

“The organization shall implement planned arrangements, at appropriate stages, to verify that the product and services requirements have been met.

The release of products and services to the customer shall not proceed until the planned arrangements have been satisfactorily completed, unless otherwise approved by a relevant authority and, as applicable, by the customer.”

The organization shall retain documented information on the release of products and services.”

In this context, the artwork supplier and providers would need to define their processes to deliver the final products. Normally the final artworks must go through internal and external checks and approvals before launching the printing and manufacturing processes to produce the final products. Records are maintained to include evidence of verification for conformity with acceptance criteria and traceable to the person(s) authorizing the release of the product. When a robust quality management system is effectively implemented, sources of error could easily be spotted, traced and fixed prior to delivery of the final product to the customer.  

Where all planned verification and checks have been carried out at various steps and yet nobody has spotted such errors, the only aspect for investigation to such lapses falls on the competency of personnel performing such verifications and checks. When personnel are not effectively trained to be competent to perform their roles and duties, lapses would occur. This competency aspect stipulated as another requirement in the ISO 9001:2015 Standard.

Clause 7.2 Competence in the ISO 9001:2015 Standard is an important element in the quality management system. It’s beneficial to read the content and understand its requirements for effective quality control.  

Quality Management System: addressing risks and opportunities

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another blunder from our national health institution in recent times.

It has been widely reported in the media on National Dental Centre of Singapore (NDCS)’s sterilisation misstep.

 

The NDCS said that 72 patients received treatment with dental instruments that were not fully sterilized. A staff member discovered the lapse on June 5 and the packs were recalled from the clinics. The instruments—such as probes, mirrors and orthodontic pliers—had gone through machine washing and thermal disinfection, but had not completed the final step of steam sterilization before they were taken for used.

 

The centre said the risk of infection is “extremely low” given that the first 2 steps of the sterilization process remove 99.99% of organisms, including virus. Everyone knows low risk doesn’t mean no risk, no?  

Preliminary internal investigations showed “the origin of the incident was human error”, this is obviously a case of a major lapses of NDCS’s quality management system. The effectiveness of a quality management system is as good as its weakest link in the whole process. Unless the 3-step sterilisation process is fully automated, the risk of human error continues to be critical factor in this process-step, especially when it relates to safety and health of the patients (customers). Infections take time to develop, but the free consultation and medical coverage period in case these patients develop symptoms were not clearly defined by NDCS.  

  

While NDCS said the short-term solution was to put 2 staff to check the sterilization process to ensure it is fully completed before releasing the instruments for use, this is not sustainable and non-productive. The crux of the matter is really to determine the root to this problem and address all the risks and prevent such incident from recurring.

 

In this country, people are “tamed” and do not create public outcry for such health and safety incident and demand answers from the top management. Based on my observations, investigation outcome and corrective/preventive actions for such lapses in public health institutions are never published. Only those insiders know exactly what had happened and what actions had been taken.

 

While most people would accept this as “bad luck” or being out of the statistical bell-curve at the wrong time, I can never accept such blunder in our public and private health institutions. Our well-beings are at stake and at the mercy of these providers when we need to use them one day.  

 

Customer Satisfaction, who really cares?

  

Customer Satisfaction, who really cares?

Customer satisfaction should be a top priority and constantly in the mind of business owners who are doing whatever feasible to make the customer happy and keeps them coming back to buy more. Well, this isn’t true for all money-making businesses.

One thing for sure, monopoly organizations and airlines are the least to worry about and spend little resources on improving customer satisfaction. Why do they need to? Their customers keep coming back and are always in the queue to buy their products or services.

This airline was in the news in recent weeks after a video showed security officers dragging a bloodied passenger off an overbooked flight in Chicago to make space for a member of staff. The result was backlash on social media, billions of dollars wiped off their market share and a seriously tarnished reputation, for now.

Following the news and a few quick checks uncovered the fact that this airline is a very good company to work for. Why? It’s corporate policy is to put Employee First, not Customer First. Even in their corporate ‘shared purpose’ statement, ‘employees’ come before ‘customers’. So do they really monitor and measure customer satisfaction? I guess probably not. This is the least to worry about on this CEO’s mind. Their pre-tax profit was 3.8bn in 2016 and consumers are buying their services even if they are not happy.

Although most airlines declare they are ‘customer focused’ and monitor customer satisfaction and service quality standards via ground surveys and focus-group discussions, I have neither participated nor seen one being conducted. Perhaps arriving passengers are in a hurry to answer questionnaires but surely, they have lots of time to kill when they are in the air. Nobody is doing it.

Customer satisfaction is one element in the new ISO 9001:2015 Standards and organizations must determine the methods for obtaining, monitoring and reviewing customers’ perceptions of the degree to which their needs and expectations have been fulfilled. Unfortunately, the airline industry does not subscribe to this standard.

So what service quality everyone is talking about these days?

Either you take it or leave it. Someone is always queuing behind you to take up their offer.