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The award process may be a reward by itself

— FILE PHOTO

QUALITY CONSCIOUS: M. Chidambaram, Director, National Institute of Technology, having a look at the equipment kept inside the quality control laboratory at the Indian Oil terminal in Tiruchi.

In the age of globalisation and competition, Indian companies have marched ahead in securing national and international recognition for their standards, excellence and quality. Starting from the early ISO 9000 series, and moving on to the 14,000 series, dozens of companies have gone through the processes to qualify for certification.

More recently, India Inc. has been put through a series of American, European, and Japanese certification processes in their adoption of best practices and system, with many of them coming through successfully, and others learning from the inspection and assessment process that they went through.

Member companies of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) say that though many of them have passed the test in some of the foreign processes, the CII-Exim Bank Award for Business Excellence has remained a tough nut to crack. It is based on the excellence model of the European Foundation for Quality Management.

Going through the process of this award itself seems to be an achievement as it spans a three-year period, which provides a roadmap to the organisation to put in place a set of enablers to achieve high levels of performance.

These enablers represent the core of the company taking care of leadership, policy and strategy, people, partnerships and resources, and processes.

To ensure that systems get into place and the organisation achieves holistic development, this model evaluates a company based on a minimum three-year study of its practices and performance.

According to former CII Director General and a member of the Advisory Board of the CII Institute of Quality, N. Srinivasan, “The robustness of the entire process and the rigour of the assessment have meant that while the CII-Exim Bank award was instituted 14 years ago, there have been only six award winners and one prize winner. But the true success story is that around 150 applicant companies have received the commendation for strong commitment to excel or significant achievement.”

The objectives of this award are: to provide an external perspective of the current status on the organisation’s performance and practices; give insight into organisational performance beyond financial performance; help measure progress on the journey towards excellence; facilitate learning opportunities and professional development for managers; accelerate the improvement of efforts, and provide motivation to the managers. The process of assessment has been described to be “most rigorous, transparent, and internally benchmarked.”

What has been satisfying to the CII and those running the process has been recognition by the Indian CEOs of the intrinsic merit of the business excellence model, and the roadmap it provides to the companies to march towards excellence.

Mr. Srinivasan explains: “Tata Steel, recognised as a global leader in steel today, took four years to reach the pinnacle of the award. Its then CEO, Jamshed Irani, understood the tremendous benefit his organisation could derive from the process and hence decided to stay the course.” Both private as well as public sector companies have sought an assessment under this award, even if some of them did not achieve it. It is not just for the large industries or leading corporates. Small and medium enterprises have also used the model to their advantage. ACE Designers was one of them to “mature as an organisation and increase our capability to meet the challenges of the rapidly growing market,” according to its Managing Director, Shrinivas Shirgurkar.

It is obvious that companies will not volunteer to go through this process unless it confers certain benefits and advantages. In the competitive market, such tags and labels open the doors to new markets and provide an edge over others. After all, quality does retain its shine and hold in the market.

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