Competing against some of the country’s blue chips and premier organizations across the industry in all sectors, Orange Electric secured five Golds including the topmost award, as overall winner in business excellence.
The judging criteria of the National Business Excellence Awards is based mainly on the formula used by the European Federation of Quality Management (EFQM), the standard for Europe, as well as some criterion taken from the Malcolm Baldrige Quality Awards of the USA.
The National Chamber of Commerce has formulated their National Business Excellence Awards, by combining the standards of both Business Excellence models and coming up with one that is best suited for Sri Lanka’s corporate sector.
Indika Weerarathna, Senior Manager, Quality Assurance & Business Excellence of Orange Electric, says that in this model there are seven areas of evaluation including Leadership, and Corporate Governance, Capacity Building, Performance Management, Local & Export Market reach, Financial & Business Results, CSR & Environmental Sustainability etc.
“Out of these seven areas, businesses are evaluated on 80 sub areas, and there were 8 category awards for organizations based on the performances in these main areas.
We were the only Company to win two Gold Awards out of those 8 categories, because it was that competitive.”
The five awards won were ‘Excellence in Corporate Social Responsibility, Excellence in Business and Financial Review Results, Excellence in Manufacturing – Engineering sector, Overall winner in the Extra Large category and the most coveted Overall Winner in Business Excellence.
The expert panel of judges was headed by Professor Uditha Liyanage, Director of the Post Graduate Institute of Management (PIM).
“In addition to the final panel of judges there is a National Business Awards committee led by Mr. Sunil Wijesinghe.
There is also a technical committee led by another set of senior professionals. So there are three committees filtering every application and we go through all these three stages of evaluation.
The awards cover all sectors agriculture, service, banking, insurance etc. Post the evaluation they also do a panel interview, where the top management of the company is interviewed to verify that the submitted application is authentic and no false information is given.
If they are not satisfied with the initial round of interviews they would request a visit to the various plants.
In our case the entire panel was very impressed with what they saw and they were convinced that our results were genuine, so much so that they did not even ask us for a factory visit,” says Indika Weerarathna.
Orange Electric won the CSR award for their Asia Recycling Plant, the only Mercury recycling plant of its kind in the region which allows the safe disposal of CFL bulbs and for their ‘Light for me – Sight for You’ programme to eradicate preventable blindness in the country, a project the company began back in 2007.
The company emerged winner in the Business and Financial Review Results category, based on their growth in revenue in 2014, which was 50 % over the previous year.
Their export sales recorded a growth of over 20 %. The evaluation criteria included revenue growth, operating profit margin growth, net and gross profits as well as sustainability of the business.
Out of all the manufacturing firms in the Engineering sector, Orange won the Gold, based on their manufacturing capabilities and innovation.
Spend on technology, the kind of technology used for innovation were also part of the judging criteria for this award.
Overall winner in the Extra Large category is judged in terms of the size of the business and is defined from revenue, which should be more than Rs. 5 billion or the employee base, which should be over 5,000.
Orange Electric had impressive performances among all the organizations in this category to win Gold and went on to become the Overall winner of the Awards.
Mrs. Thilaka R. Kodituwakku, Chairperson of Orel Corporation who accepted the awards at the ceremony said that she was extremely proud of Orange Electric’s achievements.
“We started as a small industry, went into large scale and now we have gone into Extra-large and all this in my time. I’ve seen this company grow into what it is today and I think it is a great milestone.
A lot of the credit for these achievements goes to the great team we have and the 1500 strong workforce who work in harmony to ensure this success.
We qualified for the Extra-large category and also became the overall winner because of them and their input as a team. That is how we have become a Rs. 6 billion turn over company,” she said.
The National Chamber of Commerce, National Business Excellence Awards is one of the most highly recognised awards in the country and highly recognised both locally and internationally.