NRG, the Total Document Solutions group, has won the prestigious Ricoh Quality Award established by its Japanese parent company, Ricoh, setting a new industry standard in quality management across Europe. The Ricoh Award was bestowed upon NRG’s operating company, NRG Group Benelux in March for its outstanding levels of quality management across all aspects of its business from financial performance to customer satisfaction.
Ricoh, a world-leading manufacturer of office automation equipment has a long established reputation for excellence in quality management. In 1975 it was the first company in the office automation industry to win the Deming Prize for excellence in quality control and in 1999 it won the prestigious Japanese Quality Award (JQA) in recognition of its business excellence throughout the entire group. To build on this success Ricoh established the Ricoh Award in 2000 to recognise its most successful organisations in terms of the quality of management and to promote them as role models of excellence across the Ricoh group of companies, and the industry at large.
Over 50 departments of Ricoh Company Limited and 89 Ricoh group companies implemented self-assessment quality programmes which would establish the standard of quality achieved. Out of these, a total of 32 companies achieved a score of over 500, allowing them to enter the Ricoh awards. NRG Group Benelux was recognised above all other entrants for their continuous efforts towards innovation and improvement in management quality.
NRG Group Benelux’s triumph follows the successful implementation of the European Foundation for Quality Management’s (EFQM) model. Used as a tool to identify strengths and areas for improvement, the EFQM model provided the framework for NRG Group Benelux to achieve business excellence in all aspects of its operations from customer satisfaction to investment in its people and success in its financial performance.
NRG Group Benelux, already a market leader, looks set to reap the rewards as Michel De Bosschere, Managing Director for NRG Group Benelux explains: “We are all very proud of our achievements to date. Implementing the EFQM model has helped us to focus on each and every aspect of the business and through a process of continuous self-assessment we have achieved a high standard of business excellence. Winning the Ricoh Award is the ultimate accolade and a welcomed recognition of our achievements.“
NRG Group Benelux entered the award having previously scooped Ricoh’s International Marketing Group’s (IMG) Quality Award at the end of 2001. The IMG, which markets Ricoh’s overseas operations, established the award in 2001 and is designed to recognise the most advanced company in terms of the quality of its management. Like the Ricoh Award, the selection of candidates is based on scores achieved in an assessment process based on the criteria of each region’s Excellence Model. In the case of Europe this is the European Foundation for Quality Management’s (EFQM) model, introduced across the NRG Group in 2000. Winning the IMG Quality Award meant that NRG Group Benelux automatically became a candidate for the more stringent Ricoh Award.
NRG’s accolades were further compounded, as NRG Germany’s Managing Director Uwe-Jens Nonnsen collected an IMG recognition award for Best Practice in November 2001. NRG Germany’s winning entry was ‘The NRG Academy – an approach to personnel development’. The best practice prizes are engineered to recognise excellent practices and to encourage the sharing of these methods across the IMG companies. The judging was handled by one representative from each of Ricoh’s IMG’s five international regions (Hong Kong/China, Asia Pacific, the Americas, Ricoh Europe and NRG Group) with a head judge from Ricoh’s IMG in Japan. The judging criteria are based on a combination of the European Quality Award (EQA), the Malcolm Baldrige Award (MBA) and the JQA models recognised throughout the world.
NRG’s Group Total Quality Management Director, Paul Wilkinson, explained, “these awards recognise and reward those companies that are outstanding in terms of the quality of their management and best practices. They encourage the cross fertilisation of ideas and systems for achieving continuous improvement. They stimulate a spirit of healthy competition between our companies across the globe in the race to excel in fulfilling the needs, and exceeding the expectations of investors, customers, employees, business partners and society as a whole.”
Simon Sasaki, Chief Executive Officer of NRG Group, said: “We aim to achieve world-class business excellence and these quality awards are definitive indicators of our business success in every aspect from financial performance, customer satisfaction and people to our organisation’s role in society. We wholeheartedly believe that the quality initiatives that we have implemented in our organisation will continue to help us to be THE Winner In The 21st Century today and into the future.”