Addressing Maritime Industry Feedback For Continuous Improvement: A Process Model

Abstract

Stakeholders’ satisfaction is essential for sustainability. It provides opportunities for learning the strengths and weaknesses of an institution or organization to design and improve the quality of its services to promote goodwill and effective partnerships with the industry and the community. This descriptive study discusses and illustrates how a leading maritime university implements a process model for addressing industry feedback in the Philippines based on a trend of data gathered for nine consecutive years (2011 – 2019). This paper also mentions the actions taken by the University to address the issues and concerns raised by the industry stakeholders represented by shipping company Presidents, Crewing Managers, and Training Officers, particularly on the quality of graduates that it produces vis-à-vis the expectations of the industry. This study used the mixed methods of gathering data. The results revealed a trend in the level of satisfaction of the industry stakeholders, which point to a consistently high level of satisfaction with minimal declines at certain points from the quality of students that the school is producing to the quality of services provided over the years. Certain factors have been discussed as possibly influential in the decline of the stakeholders’ level of satisfaction. After implementing the work processes to address industry feedback, it was found to be working well and is now being considered by the administration as one of its best practices. To date, the University is continuously maximizing all strategies possible to sustain its performance in meeting the industry’s expectations.