Gold Sponsor

Introduction

The BEST PRACTICE Awards, now in their ninth year, are the most widely recognized symbols of excellence in the management of best practice knowledge. They are fiercely contested and highly valued within the business world. We have received nearly 300 entries in the past eight years.

They are a showcase for organizations that have demonstrated the vision to achieve excellence to reap real business benefits. The awards demonstrate that the business proposition for deploying best practice is very sound, as evidenced by the number of well-conceived and highly successful cases submitted as entries.

Last November nearly 360 finalists, members of the press, and guests attended the awards presentation at the Langham Place Hotel.  In 2008, the awards presentation will be held on Thursday, 6 November.

THE BEST PRACTICE AWARDS CATEGORIES

Corporate Social Responsibility
We are looking for companies which demonstrate a strong sense of corporate social responsibility, those with corporate policies aligned with their various functional entities, such as purchasing/sourcing and human resources, community involvement, and how leadership encourages CSR.

Customer Experience Management
Customer experience management (CEM) has gained tremendous importance and growth as a strategy in recent years. The basis of the CEM movement is the fact that it is more expensive to acquire new customers than it is to retain old ones.  With this in mind, the world’s leading companies are pioneering new strategies to improve customer intimacy and establish lucrative, long-term relationships.

Employee Involvement
We are looking at employee satisfaction as a key measurement, what companies do to make employees empowered, what results are achieved, how impactful are these results, and sustainable measures in place.

Enterprise Governance
This is the entire accountability framework of the organization, combining corporate governance (which spells out rules and process, cultures and systems for making decisions on corporate affairs) and performance (strategy and value creation through the adoption of best practice tools and techniques such as scorecards and strategic enterprise system).  Good corporate governance that is linked strategically with performance management enables companies to focus on the key drivers that move their business forward.

Leadership by Example
We are interested to see how leaders practice what they preach. What are they doing to build excellent teams? What do employees say about them? Do they articulate mission, value and strategy well, and challenging the status quo and finding better ways of doing what the company does?

Process Innovation
If you are not innovative your product is bound to falter at some stage or another. Innovation helps you gain the edge over your competitors for existing products and services as well as providing you with a virgin market for a new product or service. In today’s times if you are not innovative you cannot survive.

Project Leadership
Successful project leadership is essential to success as companies realize everything they do, from improving processes to delivering operational results, are projects that require skilled management. We are looking for evidence that the project’s customers are satisfied and there is a discipline of leaders who use the project-leadership mindset to manage their organizations. In particular, we are looking for managers who develop such a mindset in their people.

Supply Chain Integration
Supply chain integration is about ensuring customer information, sales, inventory management, transportation and human resources are in tandem to reduce operational costs and get goods to market faster.

Technology Deployment
We look at how companies deploy technology to their best advantage. How effectively do companies use technology as a tool to boost productivity? How well articulated is the strategy, so employees don’t simply try something because it’s new, but rather because it may improve how they work and how they serve their customers?

Training and People Development
In the war for talent, training and people development is a key process and does not end with the recruitment and initial training of the candidate. Every employee -- senior or junior -- needs continuous development to ensure employee productivity and hence capital gains and customer satisfaction.

Program Agenda