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By T. K. Sahid Ossan, Assistant Director (Marketing and Promotion), Co-ordinator and Examiner, Sri Lanka National Quality Awards, Sri Lanka Standards Institution.

Criteria Purposes

The criteria are the basis for organisational self-assessments, for making awards and for giving feedback to applicants. In addition the criteria have three important roles in strengthening Sri Lankan competitiveness:

* to help improve organisational performance practices, capabilities and results.

* to facilitate communication and sharing of best practices information among Sri Lankan organisations of all types.

* to serve as a working tool for understanding and managing performance and for guiding organisational planning and opportunities for learning. Criteria for Performance Excellence Goals

The criteria are designed to help organisations use an integrated approach to organisational performance management that results in:

* delivery of ever-improving value to customers, contributing to marketplace success

* improvement of overall organisational effectiveness and capabilities

* organisational and personal learning Core Values and Concepts

The criteria are built upon the following set of inter-related core values and concepts:

* visionary leadership *customer-driven excellence

* organisational and personal learning

* valuing employees and partners

* agility

* focus on the future

* managing for innovation

* management by fact

* social responsibility

* focus on results and creating value

* systems perspective

These values and concepts are embedded beliefs and behaviour found in high-performing organisations.

They are the foundation for integrating key business requirements within a result-oriented framework that creates a basis for action and feedback. Visionary Leadership

An organisation's senior leaders should set directions and create a customer focus, clear and visible values and high expectations.

The directions, values and expectations should balance the needs of all your stakeholders. Your leaders should ensure the creation of strategies, systems and methods for achieving excellence, stimulating innovation and building knowledge and capabilities.

Customer-Driven Excellence

An organisation's customers judge quality and performance.

Thus, your organisation must take into account all product and service features and characteristics and all modes of customer access that contribute value to your customers.

Organisational and Personal Learning

Achieving the highest levels of business performance requires a well-executed approach to organisational and personal learning.

Organisational learning includes both continuous improvement of existing approaches and adaptation to change, leading to new goals and/or approaches. Learning needs to be embedded in the way your organisation operates.

Valuing Employees and Partners

An organisation's success depends increasingly on the knowledge, skills, creativity, and motivation of its employees and partners.

Valuing employees means committing to their satisfaction, development, and well-being.

Increasingly, this involves more flexible, high-performance work practices tailored to employees with diverse workplace and home life needs.

Agility

Success in globally competitive markets demands agility - a capacity for rapid change and flexibility.

All aspects of e-commerce require and enable more rapid, flexible, and customised responses. Businesses face ever-shorter cycles for the introduction of new/improved products and services, as well as for faster and more flexible response to customers. All aspects of time performance now are more critical, and cycle time has become a key process measure. Other important benefits can be derived from this focus on time; time improvements often drive simultaneous improvements in organisation, quality, cost, and productivity.

Focus on the Future

In today's competitive environment, a focus on the future requires understanding the short-and longer-term factors that affect your business and marketplace. Pursuit of sustainable growth and market leadership requires a strong future orientation and a willingness to make long-term commitments to key stakeholder - your customers, employees, suppliers and partners, stockholders, the public, and your community.

Managing for Innovation

Innovation means making meaningful change to improve an organisation's products, services, and processes and to create new value for the organisation's stakeholder. Innovation should lead your organisation to new dimensions of performance. Innovation is no longer strictly the purview of research and development departments; innovation is important for all aspects of your business and all processes.

Organisation should be led and managed so that innovation becomes part of the culture and is integrated into daily work.

Management by Fact

Organisations depend on the measurement and analysis of performance. Such measurements should derive from business needs and strategy, and they should provide critical data and information about key processes, outputs, and results. Many types of data and information are needed for performance management. Performance measurement should include customer, product, and service performance; comparisons of operational, market, and competitive performance; and supplier, employee, and cost and financial performance.

Social responsibility

An organisation's leaders should stress responsibilities to the public, ethical behaviour, and the need to practice good citizenship.

Leaders should be role models for your organisation in focusing on business ethics and protection of public health, safety, and the environment.

Protection of health, safety, and the environment includes your organisation's operations, as well as the life cycles of your products and services.

Focus on Results and Creating Value

An organisation's performance measurements need to focus on key results. Results should be used to create and balance value for your key stakeholder - customers, employees, stockholders, suppliers and partners, the public, and the community. By creating value for your key stakeholder, your organisation builds loyalty and contributes to growing the economy.

System Perspective

The SLNQA criteria provide a systems perspective for managing your organisation to achieve performance excellence. The core values and the seven SLNQA Categories form the building blocks and the integrating mechanism for the system. However, successful management of overall performance requires organisation-specific synthesis, alignment, and integration.

The system's perspective includes your senior leaders' focus on strategic directions and on your customers.

It means that your senior leaders monitor, respond to, and manage performance based on your business results.

The system's perspective also includes using your measures and indicators to link your key strategies with your key processes and align your resources to improve overall performance and satisfy customers. Thus, a systems perspective means managing your whole organisation, as well as its components, to achieve success.

Criteria for performance excellence framework for the year 2003

There are seven criteria of evaluation with a 1,000-point scoring system used.

The Core Values and Concepts are embodied in seven criteria (Categories), as follows:

1. Leadership (120 Points)

2. Strategic Planning (85 Points)

3. Customer and Market Focus (85 Points)

4. Measurement, Analysis, and Knowledge Management (90 Points)

5. Human Resource Focus (85 Points)

6. Process Management (85 Points)

7. Business Results (450 Points)

The figure provides the framework connecting and integrating the categories. From top to bottom, the framework has the following basic elements.

Organisational Profile

Your Organisational Profile (top of figure) sets the context for the way your organisation operates. Your environment, key working relationships, and strategic challenges serve as an overarching guide for your organisational performance management system.

System Operations

The system operations are composed of six SLNQA Categories in the centre of the figure that define your operations and the results you can achieve.

Leadership (Category 1), Strategic Planning (Category 2), and Customer and Market Focus (Category 3) represent the leadership triad. These Categories are placed together to emphasise the importance of a leadership focus on strategy and customers. Senior leaders set your organisational direction and seek future opportunities for your organisation. Human Resource Focus (Category 5), Process Management (Category 6), and Business Results (Category 7) represent the results triad.

Your organisation's employees and its key processes accomplish the work of the organisation that yields your business results. All actions point towards Business Results - a composite of customer, product and service, financial, and internal operational performance results, including human resource and social responsibility results. The horizontal arrow in the centre of the framework links the leadership triad to the results triad, a linkage critical to organisational success. Furthermore, the arrow indicates the central relationship between Leadership (Category 1) and Business Results (Category 7). The two-headed arrow indicates the importance of feedback in an effective performance management system.

System Foundation

Measurement, analysis, and knowledge management (Category 4) are critical to the effective management of your organisation and to a fact-based system for improving performance and competitiveness. Measurement, analysis, and knowledge serve as a foundation for the performance management system.

Evaluation process

* At least 4 members of Board of Examiners evaluate each application individually.

* A team of (approximately 5) Examiners evaluates each application through a consensus process.

* A Review Committee studies the Consensus Evaluation Reports. Organisations that should receive site visits are selected.

* Site visit evaluations/assessments conducted by a team of Examiners.

* Review Committee studies the Site visit Evaluation reports. Organisations that should receive Awards are recommended.

* Panel of Judges chaired by a retired judge of the Supreme Court or of the Court of Appeal, reviews data and recommendations and Award winners are decided. The other members of the Panel of Judges are the Secretary to the Ministry of Economic Reform, Science and Technology, Secretary to the Ministry of Industry, Secretary to the Ministry of commerce and consumer affairs, the President-Ceylon Chamber of Commerce, the President, Federation of Chamber of Commerce and Industries of Sri Lanka. Chairman-SLSI, Director General-SLSI and Deputy Directors General of SLSI. Decisions of the panel of judges are final and not subject to appeal.

* Finally every applicant for the SLNQA receives a feed back report written by the examiner team, assigned to evaluate that company. The report lists the strengths in the applicant companies quality management systems that were observed by the team. The feed back report also includes a listing of the potential areas for improvement in the applicants quality management systems that were identified by the team.

Announcement of award winners

After finalising the Award Winners and the Merit Winners by the Panel of Judges, SLSI announces the winners on the World Standards Day (14 Oct 2003), which falls within the National Quality Week. The winner of the first ever Sri Lanka National Quality Award is the directories Lanka (Pvt) Ltd. (Service Medium Category) in 1995.

The year 2002 Award Winner is Hidramani (Industries) Ltd. (Manufacturing Large Scale).

Quest for excellence conference (winner's conference)

The winners will share their quality achievements and quality management strategies with other interested organisations at the "Quest for Excellence Conference".

At this conference, the winner representatives and senior members of the examiner board will discuss the award criteria their implementation and the quality results at the winning companies have achieved, since embarking on their quality initiatives.

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