Fisherman and ISO 9002

During my student days in Kuala Lumpur, I travelled around West Malaysia. Like most other students at that time, I travelled from place to place and hitchhiked most of the time, as student's budget was always limited.

One day, I landed at Tregganu and headed towards the beautiful beach with intention to put out a night on the beach. After all, I had brought alone my raincoat, in case it rained and I had only simple belonging. Anyway I could not afford to stay in hotel.

While enjoying the beauty of the beach and the sea and the clear sky, I met a middle age Malay fisherman repairing his fishing net. The fisherman with his colourful "sarong" smiled at me and we had good talk. He explained to me how the net was repaired. With my broken Bahassa language, I managed to learn some lesson from him on his fishing experience. When he knew that I intended to sleep on the beach that night, he protested and insisted that I should sleep in his house. He explained that it was dangerous to be alone at night on the beach, as there were sometimes gangsters, drug addicts around. I went to his house and he offered me drinks and some delicious home made cakes.

As I recall now, I did not see any mission statement, nor shared values declared in his house. He did not wear any badge on quality, nor stickers with words like ... "We are committed to treat visitors like our family members, to make them feel at ease, safe etc. while they are in our Kampong." "We believe in team spirit, co-operation, community spirit and we want to spread and share such values to others..."

Certainly there was no procedure that spell out how to treat visitors, how to prepare meals for valued visitors.

However, certification of the fisherman standard practice to ISO 9002 should be easy, with his family as an entity and his quality product in term of providing good traditional Kampong hospitality, services to visitors, the valued customers. It is because the fisherman's behaviour towards visitor is somehow part of the operating culture. What is needed is just a writer to document his consistent practice in a structured manner.

In a larger organisation where the business process can be fairly complex with many interacting parties, of different experience, background, and speciality, a larger amount of input and preparation work is needed for ISO 9002 certification. It has to be recognised that most organisations have pyramid type of hierarchy. Such hierarchy has brought stability, good span of control mechanism to help in the business performance. Hence departments of various functions are a common structure. But at the same time, excessive dependence on such structure can lead to some other un-intended complication. For example, general behaviour becomes too department-focus, resulting in consideration towards more departmental goal, interest or objectives and less on interface or process-related in other departments. Such behaviour is understandable and can be expected due to the inherent hierarchy structure.

It is useful then, for organisation to introduce and define internal customer concept, to be built into the ISO 9000 structure. In this way, the benefits of the old hierarchy are maintained, but also reinforced and improved by inter-dependency and inter-relationship of internal customers / suppliers.

In a structured and documented manners, staff are to be made aware of their contribution and work output, in what ways these are linked to the larger business concern. The identified internal customers will help to shift their focus from serving the boss to provide service to the customers. In will help the boss to make full use of their wisdom and intelligence towards overall improvement of the quality system for better business performance. The staff will, and can directly respond to the requirements, suggestion or complaints of the identified customers instead of referring to boss for instruction most of the time. The boss will then play the role as coach or mentor, more and more, to impact their wisdom and knowledge to their staff.

End.