Orange Electric sweeps the board at National Business Excellence Awards

Saturday, 3 January 2015 03:12 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

Selected overall winner across Sri Lanka commercial sector The flagship brand of the Orel Corporation, Orange Electric won the highest number of golds at the National Excellence Awards, held at Hilton Colombo last week. Australian High Commissioner Robyn Mudie was chief guest at the event. Competing against some of the country’s blue chips and premier organisations across the industry in all sectors, Orange Electric secured five golds including the topmost award for overall winner in business excellence. The judging criteria of the National Business Excellence Awards are 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 US. 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. Senior Manager, Quality Assurance and Business Excellence of Orange Electric, Indika Weerarathna says that in this model there are seven areas of evaluation including Leadership, and Corporate Governance, Capacity Building, Performance Management, Local and Export Market Reach, Financial and Business Results, CSR and Environmental Sustainability, etc. “Out of these seven areas businesses are evaluated on 80 subareas and there were eight category awards for organisations based on the performances in these main areas. We were the only company to win two gold awards out of those eight categories because it was that competitive.” The five awards won were for 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 Post Graduate Institute of Management (PIM) Director Professor Uditha Liyanage. “In addition to the final panel of judges there is a National Business Awards Committee led by 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. Following the evaluation they also conduct 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 were 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,” said 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’ program to eradicate preventable blindness in the country, a project which 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. Spending on technology, the kind of technology used for innovation, was also part of the judging criteria for this award. The Overall Winner in the Extra Large category was 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 organisations in this category and went on to win gold and emerge as the Overall Winner. Orel Corporation Chairperson Thilaka R. Kodituwakku, who collected the awards at the ceremony, said that she was extremely proud of Orange Electric’s achievements. “We started as a small industry, became 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 should go to the great team we have and the 1500-strong workforce which works 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 turnover company,” she said. The National Chamber of Commerce National Business Excellence Awards is one of the most highly recognised awards in the country and is renowned both locally and internationally.