or government; they must be central to any organisation’s strategy for sustainable growth and leadership. They are central to our growth too. We are driving the development of new concepts and technologies through collaborative R&D, and our focus is firmly on innovation – to benefit our clients and society’s future.
Shall we talk about the culture of quality in Italy? Lloyd’s Register in a certain sense acts as a guarantor of continuity in qualitative terms. It often happens that companies, in an effort to make savings and manage costs, get rid of their best employees when they arrive at a critical age, and thus they lose the experience acquired over by the years by these employees. Therefore, unless a younger employee has worked side by side with the expert to facilitate the transfer of experience and knowledge, the risk is that all the know-how acquired over time will be lost. If one loses sight of the overall process in concentrating on an individual process, value flows are interrupted, and the risk is that the very quality upon which the success of Italian companies depends will be lost. In the specific case, the handover and succession between an expert employee leaving and a newcomer is crucial and needs to be planned in order to give enough time to the knowledge transfer. Lloyd’s Register often acts as an advisor, supporting the manufacturers or EPC contractors in understanding the importance of ‘end to end’ value process monitoring, concentrating on every single process in the creation of value, but mostly on the overall ‘big picture’ and end result.
What should Italian entrepreneurs be concentrating on, and what strategy should he or she opt for? Concentrating on quality requires things done properly at the first time and proving it through certification. Certification has a cost which is accepted only if it’s a value added. Just think about the value creation process, for example in a power plant construction project. The company which is going to build the plant (EPC contractor) has to consider several phases, their deliverables and related costs. These phases could be seen as Design and Engineering, Procurement, Construction and Installation, Commissioning and Testing and Start Up. Afterwards a performance test period follows, where the end user and the EPC contractor check the parameters which indicate the correct functioning of the whole. Therefore we can immagine a certain number of engineering hours budgeted for that phase, a budget for buying all necessary
materials, components and services in the Procurement phase, costs for man-hours and machinery in Construction, etc. All the process owners of these single processes (the ones who manage and are responsible to deliver in each phase) are pushed to save money or even cut costs in their own process in order to make savings and increase the project margin, but in many cases, normally when inexperienced project managers are acting or in case of companies whose main objective is the financials and not the overall success of the project, including, most importantly customer satisfaction. These uncontrolled cuts are very dangerous, because it makes people loose the focus on the end to end project process and its end result, and can create and avalanche of quality issues and mistakes, which propagate and reach potentially enormous proportions at the end, causing not only a margin erosion but, in many cases, huge losses, due to liquidated damages or penalties for delay and missing deliverables. When this is realized, normally it’s too late. One of the root causes of this issue is that peoples performance is normally measured only on the process they manage, and not also on the end result of the project. Changing this approach by using KPI’s extended to the overall result creates a better quality culture, team spirit, unity, focus on the end client and, very importantly, saves a lot of time and money. The lesson here is that while focusing on the single process we should never lose the focus on the end to end process chain and its final result. Modifying something in a single process could negatively impact the final outcome. The ones who understood this principle are the successful ones.
Lloyd’s Register Lloyd’s Register is unique. At its heart, a charity with a mission to protect life and property and to advance transport and engineering education and research. And funding this is our operating arm, a successful, profitmaking business which relies on the skills, knowledge and experience of our employees – professionals and experts in their fields. We provide independent assurance and expert advice to companies operating high- risk, capital-intensive assets in the energy and transportation sectors. We help our clients to ensure the quality construction and operation of critical infrastructure – ships, oil platforms, power plants, trains. Through our business assurance services we help companies manage their systems and risks across a wide range of sectors.
