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Jason Krupp

Grand Award
Productivity and Quality
Hong Kong and China Gas
In any business, there are two areas that companies need to get to grips with quickly if they want to succeed in today's competitive marketplace - productivity and quality.
So what do you do if you have already set a significant milestone for yourself in these areas and have the trophies in the cabinet  to prove it? The answer, if you are Hong Kong and China Gas  (Towngas), is to set the bar higher even higher.
This is exactly what it has done at the Hong Kong Awards for Industries, taking home the productivity and quality grand award.
This success can be traced back 10 years when the company set a productivity and service benchmark for itself when it was recognised at the 1998 Hong Kong Awards for Services.
The company did this by establishing an employee-to-customer ratio of 1:504, making cost savings of HK$22 million that year. This was done without sacrificing service, with the company receiving 216 complimentary letters from customers and only 52 complaint letters.
All in all, it was a notable achievement and a difficult one for Towngas to beat, but this is exactly what it has done.
Over the past decade   the company has also driven significant productivity improvements. These include a 70 per cent improvement in the employee-to-customer ratio, now at 1:858, and cost savings of HK$263 million, up more than 10 times from 1998.
In addition, it has significantly improved its service, with complimentary letters up 20 times to 4,520, and a corresponding 67 per cent fall in complaint letters to only 17 last year.
'For us the measure of success is customer value, which we work out by comparing our quality and service against the cost and time it takes to deliver our product to the end-user,' said James Kwan Yuk-choi,   executive director and chief operating officer at Towngas.
'It's a simple formula but an effective one that is easy to convey to employees, and one that we have found works.'
A large part of this success is due to Towngas's superior quality service programme.
While such programmes are quite common in the market, what sets Towngas apart is that its scheme has been running for more than a decade, whereas most typically lose steam after 12-months.
Mr Kwan credits this staying power to the biannual rotation of the company's chairmanship, which continually injects new momentum into the programme and shifts the focus on to new areas within the company.
Effective communication channels and recognition for good work were also vital factors that helped the company win the award, according to Mr Kwan.
'Frontline people treasure recognition and this mechanism has been built into the programme, with rewards for outstanding teams and departments.
'Creating a sense of competition is really important in order to have a quality and service culture,' he said.
Having won the award, Mr Kwan believes the next challenge is  to ensure that Towngas  continues to push productivity boundaries, regardless of how challenging they are.
'Although we are a high performer, we have to continually improve on these levels and reach new heights despite each step being more difficult,' Mr Kwan said.



Bigger goals for top performer