Customer-driven Process Improvement in a Shipping Line Company

摘要

Business operations can be broken down into development phases which require multiple business functions and processes to make a new product or service a reality. Success in one customer-driven design process is not sufficient unless every other phase of the operations is analyzed from a customer expectations point of view. That way, successful process can take root within an organization. Quality Function Deployment (QFD), a known requirements analysis technique for service/product design, can be also useful for redesign or reengineering business operations and processes. Despite the increasing studies being focused on QFd applications in service processes nowadays, there is a lack of literature explaining the application of the QFD in shipping industry. The main scope of this study is to analyze the operations of a commercial shipping line company to identify improvement opportunities. This paper reports a detailed requirements model of the operation process and improvement areas based on a 'gemba' analysis of internal customers and critical incident reports by external customers.