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1 2 -ICIT : 05-0 8. Organizational Excellence Journey: Critical Success Factors of Engineering Firms in Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates. Dr Hesham Magd, Dr Abdel Moniem Ahmed E-TQM College, Dubai, UAE & Mr Salah El Din Adam Hamza SOFCON, Consulting Engineering Co. Saudi Arabia
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Organizational Excellence Journey: Critical Success Factors of Engineering Firms in Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates Dr Hesham Magd, Dr Abdel Moniem Ahmed E-TQM College, Dubai, UAE & Mr Salah El Din Adam Hamza SOFCON, Consulting Engineering Co. Saudi Arabia 12th ICIT Conference, Taiwan April 9-11, 2007
Contents • Introduction • The engineering sector • Organizational excellence • Research Problem and objectives • Research methodology • Findings • Critical success factors • Conclusion and recommendations • Q & A
Introduction • Organizations are faced with major challenges on daily basis such as: • Making sense of conflicting priorities • Allocating limited resources • Understanding the impact of the organizations actions • Comparing performance with competitors and responding to customer needs in innovative ways • Balancing organizations efforts are daunting task, unless a systematic way is utilized • Organizations started moving the utilization of business excellence, as it enables organizations to: • Understand the complexities of the conflicting demands placed on organizations • Learn how to continuously improve the utilization of resources • Critical success factors are the concrete for achieving business excellence
The engineering sector • The engineering sector is booming in the Gulf region but is faced: • With constraints at scheduling • Workability • Constructability • the government is utilizing various techniques to enhance this sector through: • Encouraging alliances • Encouraging affiliations with international organizations
Organizational excellence • The engineering sector is focusing currently on business excellence, but what are the critical success factors that will enable the sector to achieve excellence • Critical success factors has covered many industries and there are various ones • The identification of the critical success factors early enough during the front end assessment of the engineering projects is vital for successful project completion
Research problem and objectives • Research problem • The availability of different critical success factors • It lacks the provision of a specified set of critical success factors applicable to the needs of the engineering firms in the Gulf region • These organizations are facing difficulties to meet external customer requirements • Current research objectives • The identification off appropriate critical success factors to engineering firms in order to enhance their performance and excellence
Research Methodology • Survey questionnaire was utilized • Permits use of large samples of respondents • Provides highly specific and precise numerical data • Results in high reliability • Allows for generalization from the sample • Sample of 256 engineering firms in Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates were targeted • Research population consisted of managers, directors and owners • Usable data received from 114 manufacturing organizations representing 44.5% response rate
Organizational characteristics • Majority of the surveyed organizations (66%) had more than 10 years experience in the engineering sector • 92% of the surveyed organizations were ISO 9000 certified • 90% of the surveyed organizations were large organizations
Top Critical Success Factors in Achieving Organizational Excellence • Tier 1: Crucial factors • Technical resources • Internal communications • Planning and scheduling • Project management • Top management support • Leadership
Top Critical Success Factors in Achieving Organizational Excellence • Tier 2: Important Factors • Personnel • Project mission • Customer communication • Monitoring and feedback • Employee empowerment • Information technology • Training
Top Critical Success Factors in Achieving Organizational Excellence • Tier 3: least Important Factors • Urgency of the project • Power and politics
Conclusions • The engineering sector is booming in the Gulf region currently • The engineering sector is facing problems and various challenges • The identification and determination of critical success factors is believed to help alleviating engineering firms from their problems and help them to achieve organizational excellence • Several critical success factors were identified from the literature • These factors were tasted within a sample of engineering firms in Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates • The level of importance of these factors were classified in three tiers • Tier one which is the most crucial for achieving organizational excellence seem to focus on the traditional factors without paying much attention to the importance of the soft factors.
Recommendations • To ensure future success of the engineering sector within the gulf region, they should focus on the soft factors as they are crucial in achieving organizational excellence