James Harrington on performance improvement

Dr. James Harrington is one of the most cited guru on quality management. He is the person who has been authoring the philosophy of quality.

Source Harrington Institute

Many quality professionals claim that quality and productivity are two sides of the same coin. That is not true. They may overlap, but they are very different in nature. You can drive your organization bankrupt by focusing too much on quality and never getting the product out and you can also drive your company into bankruptcy by pushing productivity and shipping bad products. What you really need to do is focus on performance improvement.

Performance improves under three conditions and three conditions only:

• When quality remains constant and productivity goes up
• When productivity remains constant and quality goes up, and
• When quality and productivity go up together.

Of course, what we're trying to accomplish is to bring up quality and productivity together. But when you think about it, quality, productivity, cost and cycle time are only secondary considerations. What management is really interested in is performance improvement. Typically, management measures performance improvement in:

• Return on Assets (ROA) Changes in this measurement indicate how an individual program impacts profitability.
• Value Added per Employee (VAE) Changes in this measurement reflect how an individual program improves productivity.
• Customer Satisfaction (CS) Changes in this measurement are key indicators of sustained long-term performance
• Market Share (MS) Changes in this measurement indicate how well the organization is performing compared to its competition.

Loss of Power was finally noticed by the P&I

It was years ago that I was a 3rd mate and we experienced blackout at the approach. I was the OOW on the bridge with Master present and a rating at the wheel. It happened while ship was approaching Santos PS, we were changing over from shaft generator to diesel generators. Classics of the case.

From that moment I hated shaft generators. Today, when a shaft power take off is a must, moreover, when it is exacerbated by the compliance with the LS fuels changing over requirements, the loss of power cases began appearing in the lame-light of the maritime managerial hangout.

UK P&I conducted a study and presented a worthy report with statistics of 700-some cases. Still report implies that the actual figures may be higher as many chief engineers allegedly do not report (admit) the near-misses at the approach.

I recommend reading the full report quoted right below.