For the first time, the New Zealand Business Excellence Foundation has selected two Gold award winners in the same year.
The Gold award is the highest accolade the foundation can bestow to a business or organisation that is benchmarked against the Baldrige criteria, the only internationally calibrated, organisation-wide measure of business excellence.
The Gold Awards have been to Spectrum Care Trust and the Western Bay of Plenty District Council.
Foundation chairman Neil Whittaker, managing director of Fuji Xerox NZ, has named a total of five winners in what is the country’s toughest business awards.
Their significance is reflected in the fact that the awards are internationally calibrated and only four other Gold awards have been awarded in the past 17 years, he says.
This year, Waipa District Council won a Silver award and, in a first for a district health board, the Bay of Plenty District Health Board won a Bronze award.
The Bay of Plenty District Health Board Clinical Trials Unit won a NZ Business Achievement Award.
The NZ Business Excellence Foundation chief executive Mike Watson says the awards represent an aspiration to world class levels of performance.
“While some other award programmes use highly abridged versions of the US Baldrige criteria, these are the only ones to use the complete international best practice criteria.
“The award evaluation process takes over four months with each applicant subjected to over 500 hours of assessment by a national evaluator teams with an extensive feedback report provided to each applicant upon completion.”
Applicants are evaluated and awarded points out of 1000. A score of 650 or above is required for Gold, 500 or above required for Silver and 400 or above required for Bronze.
To put this into context, the average New Zealand organisation scores around 230 points, based on data from many hundreds of assessments conducted over the past 20 years, Mr Watson says.
NBR staff
Sat, 30 Nov 2013
Sat, 30 Nov 2013
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Two rare Golds awarded in country's toughest business competition
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