Fijian Competition & Consumer Commission chief executive officer Joel Abraham receives the award from the Fijian President His Excellency Jioji Konrote at the 2019 Fiji Business Excellence Awards.

The Fiji National University’s (FNU) National Training and Productivity Centre (NTPC), which manages the Fiji Business Excellence Awards, has concluded its 2021 evaluation process for organisations that had applied for recognition this year.

The Fiji Business Excellence Awards (FBEA) is a set of prestigious national awards designed to improve productivity and quality for organisations in Fiji. The FBEA was introduced in Fiji to promote business excellence by providing a Framework or Criteria for assessment that is based on similar principles as other Business Excellence (BE) or Quality Awards throughout the world. As such, it is the most prestigious award that promotes business excellence in Fiji.

The levels of recognition for the 2021 applicants were finalised by the Panel of Review (POR) at the virtual meeting held last month.

Manager Quality Awards Bob Mitchell said this year his team took a different approach due to the COVID-19 pandemic, where they had to use online mediums to evaluate organisations.

“It was a rigorous process where the team dealt with the challenges brought by the pandemic. The virtual online evaluation included meetings with the senior executive teams, middle management and staff, including sighting relevant documents. This is the new method we have used to assess the organisations, and it was a success,” Mitchell said.

“The virtual evaluation process has also significantly reduced the expenses involved with training and face-to-face evaluation, and this pandemic has provided us the opportunity to think outside the box and be able to sustain the FBEA process.”

Mitchell said, with the FBEA setting the trend on the online evaluation process, it is also the first to introduce new benchmarks in organisational performance assessments carried out online by a team of professional and experienced evaluators engaged from various organisations by the FBEA Secretariat.

“The FBEA Secretariat looks forward to next year’s process with improvements in the coordination of the process, and we acknowledge all the organisations that participated this year. The Secretariat is now focused on the awards and will be sending an update in due course,” he said.

“The Secretariat acknowledges all the FBEA Evaluators who participated in the 2021 FBEA virtual evaluation process, the team leaders for their mentoring and guiding the team and working within the time frame to complete the process. We also acknowledge the Panel of Review members who went the extra mile to ensure the meeting continued and the evaluation process completed.”

NTPC Director, Dr Isimeli Tagicakiverata, commended his team for standing firm despite the challenges of the pandemic to ensure that the processes were carried out to recognise the hard work by the organisations this year.

“We did not host the FBEA in 2020 because we were conscious and empathetic to the efforts of organisations and businesses in Fiji as they adapted and stabilised after the initial wave of Covid-19. The process would not have been possible in 2020, but we are glad that this year, we have received interest from sixteen organisations,” he said.

“NTPC has plans to have the Awards later this year, and currently, we are in discussion with our team and stakeholders about how and when we can make it happen. The vision of the Fiji Business Excellence Awards Secretariat is to create world-class organisations and to bring about a better quality of life for our workers and people.”

Over the past 22 years, 131 organisations have been recognised at different levels since the Fiji Business Excellence Awards, formerly known as the Fiji Quality Awards.

The Fiji Quality Awards (FQA) was launched in 1998, and in 2004, the Fiji Quality Awards was rebranded as the Fiji Business Excellence Awards (FBEA).