Towards Sustainable Governance: Beyond Traditional Quality Management

The term “Quality management” is defined as “ensuring excellence in activities within the organization and final outputs, and consistency of collaborative methods and practices.” As for “sustainable governance,” it refers to a set of written and unwritten rules of linkage among ecological citizenship, governance systems, and norms. Concerning the Global Reporting Initiative’s (GRI) principles on sustainable governance, the focus lies on how organizations define their management responsibilities and supervise sustainable activities and performance.

As Taiwan's number one, and one of the world's top 100 turnkey engineering groups, CTCI Group has always attached great importance to corporate governance. The company has long regarded this as its responsibility to care for employee well-being, safeguarding human rights, emphasizing social responsibility, and ensuring safe and long-term operations. At the same time, it also strives to meet international quality management standards, emphasizing topics such as risks and opportunities, fulfilling needs by providing necessary resources, and encouraging active participation of customers, employees, investors, and governments. By doing so, CTCI ensures that the needs of stakeholders are considered and included in the company's decision-making process as well as its operational goals.

To meet the standards, CTCI aligns with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and continuously improves its business governance requirements. Through quality control verification at each stage, such as engineering, procurement, and construction, CTCI can assist clients around the world in achieving “green engineering” that considers both environmental friendliness and economic development. Furthermore, it continues to introduce innovative management strategies, systematically upgrade existing management mechanisms, strengthen organizational development flexibility, and optimize the PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) Cycle management model towards the vision of being “the most reliable engineering service team” around the globe.

Paving the Way to Sustainable Management: Four Aspects of Quality Management

1.Implement quality assurance and improve customer satisfaction

Since the introduction of the international quality management system standard ISO 9000 series in 1996, CTCI has gone through three standard revisions and entrusted an impartial organization to perform third-party quality verification. Currently, it has passed the ISO 9001:2015 version certification, which has enabled all employees to evolve their concept of quality from inspection of quality management and manufacturing quality management, through design quality management to a total quality management (TQM). By improving the quality management mentality of all employees to meet customer expectations, CTCI continue to pay attention to customer feedback, and establish mutually beneficial cooperation with suppliers and customers. For quality assurance, our team focuses on supervision and scientific data, avoiding subjective guesswork. By doing so, we implement continuous organizational improvement and optimize corporate governance effectiveness through high-quality service output. This approach ensures a win-win situation with stakeholders, thereby ensuring brand credibility and sustainable governance performance.

2.Optimize construction quality control and implement risk prevention and control 

CTCI aims to avoid common malpractices in the domestic engineering industry, such as improper engineering planning, poor review mechanisms, poor construction quality, etc. and effectively prevent inspection (test) fraud, inaccurate quantity declaration, low project quality caused by illegal activities such as cutting corners, poor training, etc. These preventions can also actively lower performance risks such as delayed project schedules and waste of derivative costs. 

The Group has launched a variety of innovative solutions to improve quality control mechanisms: self-sourcing bulk materials for civil engineering projects, entrusting laboratories to handle experiments tests and chip implantation in concrete specimens. These innovative ideas are used to optimize the comprehensive efficiency of quality management to meet customer needs and continue to improve construction technology as well as other measures to optimize quality management synergies and services for high-quality and sustainable projects.

3.Intensifying intellectual property rights protection while enhancing corporate governance

In terms of intellectual property (IP) rights management, CTCI has established relevant management and control regulations and procedures. Regular assessment and lectures were held regarding IP awareness for all employees, fortifying protection against IP leakage, while relative intellectual property management policies and objectives were announced on July 13, 2023.

Regarding the requirements of the "Code of Practice for Governance of Listed Companies" and the "Corporate Governance Code of CTCI ", CTCI will continue to strengthen its intellectual property rights protection activities to enhance competitiveness, including:
(1)  Review the company's current relevant policies, implement intellectual property management objectives linked to the operating strategy, and establish a systematic approach to intellectual property management.

(2)  Formulate an intellectual property management plan and introduce Taiwan Intellectual Property Management Standards (TIPS) to ensure that the Group’s intellectual property management plan meets TIPS requirements. The management plant is also link to the corporate governance assessment, further perfecting the protection on intellectual property.

(3)  Reinforce training on intellectual property rights protection and dissemination to enhance employees' understanding of proper intellectual property protection and legal compliance at all levels, thereby minimizing the risk of infringement incidents. This effort will also facilitate knowledge sharing, foster market competition, and bolster the company's competitiveness.

4.Meeting global standards while engaging sustainable governance

CTCI echoed to the SDGs Goals number 9 and number 17, as well as GRI Standards number 204, 308, 401, and 402 by emphasizing on several aspects such as: paying attention to customer feedback, intelligent supply chain management, and strengthening global partnerships. In the future, CTCI will continue to strengthen in the following directions to respond to sustainable governance and lead the environment friendliness and social responsibility:
(1)  To raise employees' awareness that sustainable governance of a corporation involves a comprehensive understanding of its quality culture, the Group utilizes effective communication and courses available on the CTCI University learning system to convey these messages. By deepening the concept of quality assurance responsibility among all employees through training and dissemination, colleagues can respond properly when facing risks, leading to continuous improvement, and laying the foundation for sustainable management of enterprises with responsible governance.

(2)	Reinforce the customer-oriented principle to enhance project efficiency and add value by meeting proper quality requirements, offering better services, providing transparent information, and ensuring reasonable delivery times. This approach not only creates value for customers but also builds resilient organizations capable of meeting sustainable governance requirements. 

(3)	In response to the prevention of infringement and rights protection of innovative technologies (such as AI), the company will refer to "ISO 56005 Innovation Management-Intelligent Property Management Guide" to establish the regulations/procedures that should be followed to ensure that customers are provided with safe, reliable output and improve the sustainable operation efficiency with high quality corporate intellectual property management, , and implement CTCI’s efforts in sustainable operations.

Building Quality and IP Culture for Resilient, Sustainable Operations

Quality management and IP rights protection are indispensable key factors for enterprises to move towards sustainable operations. Looking forward to the future, CTCI will continue to improve the quality management system, fortify mechanisms of intellectual property management, and continuously strengthen employees' understanding of the quality and IP management culture. This will hopefully enhance the company's resilience in facing risks and create distinctive advantages, thereby enhancing the confidence of stakeholders, while steadily striving towards the goal of sustainable governance.