Best-practice evaluation of award winning UK companies to stimulate business excellence in UAE

January 17th, 2008: Dubai Quality Group (DQG), a non-profit organisation committed to improving the performance level of UAE-based businesses, has announced that it will send a number of its members as delegates on a benchmarking exercise to the United Kingdom, in order to learn from and compare best practices of world-renowned organisations.  The activity, being held from January 27 - 30, 2008, in collaboration with Excellence Mentors and Sheffield Hallam University, will include a visit to Siemens Automation and Drives Group and Capita UK, where members will discuss People Management and People Results criteria of the Excellence Model with senior managers of the two EFQM award-winning UK companies.

Benchmarking, which is an integral part of Total Quality Management, stimulates continuous performance evaluation and refinement to achieve optimal operations. By encouraging companies to compare processes, products and services with other global high-performing counterparts, benchmarking is regarded as one of the key management paradigms of the 1990s; outlasting and outperforming various other management tools and techniques. Benchmarking is also thought to be a highly profitable investment, as studies by the American Productivity and Quality Centre reveal that the average return of benchmarking is five times the cost of the study.

"This exercise partly fulfils DQG's mission of promoting business excellence in the UAE, as it exposes our organisations to new methods, ideas and applications to streamline their effectiveness and boost competitiveness. Our experiential approach offers immense learning and development opportunities for our valued members, and will ensure that this trip is not treated as a one-off event, but rather as a continuous process for our organisations to challenge their methods," said Marwan Al Sawaleh, Chairman of DQG.

The visiting team will undergo four phases of the benchmarking activity, including a preparation workshop, where participants will be introduced to the EFQM Excellence Model, the RADAR scoring system and Benchmarking; a pre-visit workshop, which will discuss best practices and leadership theory; the actual site visits, which will explore the People Management and People Results experiences of senior managers; and a post-visit workshop, which will focus on identifying People Management and People Results differences and formulating strategies for improvement. The trip is headed by well known project experts and facilitators from Excellence Mentors.

"Our previous benchmarking trip was very successful, as the experience taught delegates how to make more informed decisions and think outside the box, as well as how to plan and manage change. We hope that this ongoing search for best management practices will create multi-layered results of boosting the competitiveness of our members, while also nurturing a more sustainable economy built on best-practices in the UAE and in the Arab World," Al Sawaleh concluded.

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© Press Release 2008