Reinier Brongers
Making a company swing and being successful is where my passion and strength lie.
In the early stages of my training as seafaring officer we already learned that to measure is to know. Good seamenship requires to check and double check. What use is a well build stabilisation loading programm with poor input? What is the situation in the ballast tanks, fuel bunkers, what is the deadweight of the cargo and where is it stowed? Only correct assesment of all these factors will lead to a relaiable result where lives depend upon!
“To measure is to know” is simply burned into my system. Life is all about taking risks, but they should be well within the range of calculated risks.
While working on many ships I learned to appreciate the different cultures and work as a team within a confined space where there is no need to be friends but a healthy respect for each others proffesionality. This 24 hours per day up to 6 months continuously. This also requires empathy, all of us are human, we all are fallable. These lessons teached me to help people perform better and streamline business and production processes.
Following my offshore life I started in commerce and over the years rolled into general management. Most of my professional life I worked on improving communication, internal logistics, troughput times and the products themselves. Allways with focus on operational staff and my roll as manager to facilitate them towards an optimal working environment. Seeing the results provides me with far more energy than the effort it takes to get there.
The people I worked with, outclassed me by great distance as it comes to craftmenship, being it an aluminum maker, Solid board operator, a galvenizer, engineer, a chicken butcher, ship builder or even a cardiac catheter constructor. This kind of knowledge is mostly available in the companies. My role is to connect all the disciplines, make people feel good at work and provide the correct tools and training. With business administration skills we together indicate bottlenecks and elimiate them, no matter the work field.
In 2003 I was introduced to ProMISe. By its days a very comprehensive improvement toolkit. What struck me was not a fancy layout and well looking graphics, but the sober lean functiality and workflow that really serves the people and organisation. The implementation, supported by a thorough and well thought-out training programme combined with the personal commitment of the implementation consultant make me decide to go for this toolkit.
Since then I used this improvement method within several companies to improve the performance by the priniple “to measure is to know”. I found that ProMISe simply works!
The most challenging part is to show to the staff that this toolkit is not a thread, not an additional means of control, on the contrary, it is a user friendly tool to help each other to improve processes, eliminate unnecessary staff efforts, reduce waste and raise efficiency in an open and tranparant manner. An opportunity to grab!