LEADER COLUMN MAY 2012

The 2012 Westpac Northland Business Excellence Awards are now open for entrants and details of categories and timings can be viewed on the Award’s website http://northlandbusinessawards.co.nz/. New Zealand Chambers of Commerce Northland urges all Northland businesses to seriously consider entering and we are willing to do all we can to assist businesses in the process. It is free to enter and is open to any Northland businesses not just those who belong to the Chamber of Commerce. The big change with this year’s Awards is that we will no longer be clustering entrants based on the sector they represent but will be grouping them based on the size of their business. In the past there has been feedback that businesses would prefer to be evaluated against businesses of a similar scale as they believe that this would give them a better comparative indication of how their organization is performing. We will be running a series of workshops to assist potential entrants understand the evaluation process and what is required from them when completing their entry form. Following these workshops, the Chamber will also be in a position to provide additional tutoring to entrants if required. All entrants receive feedback from the judging panel focused on identifying areas of their business that may benefit from being revisited and improved. Westpac Northland Business Excellence Awards provide a great opportunity for businesses to celebrate what they have achieved to date and to plan where they want to be in the future. They are also a great business development tool. In recognition of the business development component of the Awards, all entrants will be eligible and encouraged to participate in a training needs assessment undertaken by Northland Business Grow Team. Following this assessment an action plan will be prepared for that business and in some cases the individual businesses may be able eligible for funding to assist in developing their business capability. The entrants will, be evaluated using a modified Baldrige criterion based closely on a standard developed by the New Zealand Business Excellence Foundation. The judging process combines a desk-top business study followed up by on-site judging from the Westpac Northland Business Excellence Awards judging panel. While every business person will ultimately judge the success of their own business on its bottom-line, past entrants have consistently commented that, the entry process provides real value to systematically examine their businesses and identify opportunities to improve what they do.