Keeping the promise according to Mahender Patel: I will do my best to live up our values and beyond
This is the eleventh article of the series "keeping the Minerva promise".
It’s always a pleasure talking to Mahender Patel, our Senior Lab technician & Quality team leader.
In this article he elaborates about his role and shares his thoughts about his contribution to the Minerva customer promise. To do his best to live up the Minerva values - and beyond.
Work from the same page
What can you tell us about your role in the Minerva team?
I work at Minerva for two years already. My role is constantly evolving, developing and growing. The opportunities I have are wonderful. We have a splendid team. Looking at 2020 I am focussing even more on quality. At Minerva we do a lot of things well already and our goal is to continue to streamline the process and the way we work. The keyword is “operational efficiency”, the fact that we do what we do to the best of our capabilities, all tied in the Plan-Do-Check-Act-cycle. The implementation of ISO 17025, 2017 version is well on track.
We are now at the phase to publish a new revision. We have scheduled a formal training for the Minerva team on our new ISO/IEC 17025-2017 Management System.
We do this to make the team more aware of the content and make it more applicable, specifically for the lab people. It is very important to work from the same page, that the things we do are repeatable without losing flexibility. We always want to have room to serve customers the best we can also in special and urgent cases. We are going to run some Minerva academy sessions about qualitive ways of working and enriching the product and departmental knowledge to share information.
Freedom to contribute what I know to the company
What part of your job do you enjoy the most?
I am thoroughly enjoying my role at Minerva. What I like best is the opportunity and freedom to contribute what I know to the company. And I must say the management team is really helping to give me the room, and trust to come up with and implement my ideas. The basis is already in place at Minerva, in my opinion I am enriching the culture.
In your opinion, what does Minerva’s promise of "ensuring carefee traceability" mean?
It means an ongoing process of continuous improvement and risk analysis for Minerva. I look forward to doing the things that we do best, even better. There is always room for change or improvement. I think of all activities in our internal working day. We need to continue standardisation of procedures and a methodology in our way of working. Also, we need to invest in product knowledge. After all we need a strong foundation to be able to grow as an organization and live up to our promise.
Improving our ways of working
How do you contribute to Minerva’s promise, “ensuring carefree traceability”?
In my role of being responsible for quality at Minerva I am constantly working on standardisation and procedures for improving our ways of working. For instance, we know that it is important from a customer’s perspective how we resolve the problems that might occur. Recently we implemented a procedure for complaints. Also, we are working on Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) on complaints to enhance ownership at the team members.
What is your personal promise to Minerva’s customers?
I will do my best to live up our values and beyond. And if I will not meet expectations, I will do everything in my power to resolve this.
To ensure we live up to the high standard
Minerva’s core values are integrity, innovative, skilled, involved and service oriented. Could you give an example of each?
For me integrity means standing up for the right thing. It is about having honest intentions on what you do and personal pride. Besides, because Minerva is a measurement house, integrity is very important to ensure we live up to the high standard which is needed.
In my opinion, Minerva is very innovative. We have the industry’s best knowledge pressure professionals. We are innovative in producing products, services and providing consulting and training. Besides, we invest time this year in improving our knowledge in the Minerva Academy, everyone on the team is invited to do it better.
We have excellent reference people
In my view, skilled is a core value that matches Minerva. Skilled is tied in with integrity and innovation. We have a good knowledge base at Minerva, we have excellent reference people.
Involvement from a quality perspective is very important. Every single person is important and brings value. This shows in realizing carefree traceability for our customers. We do our utmost to help them.
And service oriented is very well implemented as a core value I think because of our customer promise. We want to do everything right at the first time for customers and we are willing to learn and are actively open to feedback!
February 20, 2020