No ordinary award

The jury has met and selected the winners from the nominees for the ESPRIX Swiss Award for Excellence. On June 21, 2019, the award ceremony will take place at the 20th anniversary celebration of the ESPRIX Excellence Foundation at the Bürgenstock Resort high above Lake Lucerne. A worthy setting, then, as the three nominated organizations have truly climbed to a peak that cannot be topped easily.

The Swiss ESPRIX business award was launched in 1998. The aim of the prize was and is to promote top quality in all entrepreneurial areas and to motivate the Swiss and Liechtenstein business community to achieve top entrepreneurial performance through competition.

Quality management framework
But how do you achieve such "above-average results"? One instrument for this is the consistent "path of excel- lence" according to the EFQM model. Every year, a wide variety of organisations in Switzerland and the Principality of Liechtenstein take part in the EFQM recognition programme, the European Foundation for Quality Management. This foundation was established in 1988 - with the support of the European Commission - to develop a European framework for quality management. In Switzerland, the EFQM is represented by the ES-PRIX Foundation and the SAQ as professional sponsors. The EFQM Excellence Model helps companies to develop, maintain and increase their performance and competitive strength.

make results verifiable
In principle, any economically active organization can apply the EFQM model. Behind the model is the business excellence approach in the sense of a continuous improvement process on the way to sustainable corporate success. The model leads to excellent results in defined steps and with an increasing level of ambition. The results are checked by independent EFQM assessors and made comparable on the basis of various criteria. In this way, organisations can carry out effective benchmarking and receive concrete indications of potential for improvement.

Dedicated to business excellence
Ultimately, the question is which factors and criteria are decisive for the success of excellent organizations. The three companies we present on the following pages have repeatedly asked themselves these questions. Under the critical eyes and ears of EFQM assessors - who, by the way, mostly work on an honorary basis - they revealed their cards in a process lasting several days and provided insight into the innermost corners of their organizations. Such a view from the outside is probably the most valuable element of the continuous improvement process. For all three, participation in the competition represents a further milestone on the way to becoming a mature - i.e. excellent - organization at a high level. Whoever encounters a company that adorns itself with the EFQM logo can expect exceptional quality that goes beyond the relevant standards.