Business brilliance
New Zealand is known for outstanding people with innovative ideas. Now, the powers behind the innovators are being celebrated in the AUT Business School Excellence in Business Support Awards
Now in its eighth year, the AUT Business School Excellence in Business Support Awards recognise and celebrate organisations and individuals that contribute to New Zealand business.
Founded by now Director of Business Relations at AUT Business School Sarah Trotman in 2005, the Awards aim to provide support to and enhance business excellence in New Zealand, and allow organisations to become more competitive and sustainable.
The AUT Business School partnered up with Mike Watson, chief executive of the New Zealand Business Excellence Foundation, to evaluate entrants using the international Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence.
The criteria assesses how effectively organisations achieve business excellence in leadership and planning, customer and market focus, provision of business support, evaluation and improvement, and business results.
Site visits were also conducted to give the evaluators a better understanding of the organisational structure and to verify that written submissions accurately reflected systems and processes.
This year’s Awards were held at the Langham Hotel in Auckland on September 5, where more than 700 key figures from the business, government and non-profit sectors gathered for a memorable evening.
A total 41 finalists were nominated for awards across twelve categories, including the Supreme Award, which was presented to Kiwibank Business Markets by the Hon Steven Joyce.
Dr Mark Le Fevre, Head of AUT Business School’s Management Department and overseer of the evaluation process, says Kiwibank Business Markets thoroughly deserved the accolade.
“The quality of entries was extremely high, but there was one standout winner and that was Kiwibank Business Markets.
“If you apply management theory as it’s meant to be applied, it’ll increase your chance of success.
“When we evaluated Kiwibank it was very obvious that they were applying theory to practice and doing it well.
“They were also doing some things beyond what you’d find in academic literature – they had taken the tools and said, ‘We can do more’,” he says.
Watson says Kiwibank demonstrated “robust, welldeployed approaches, coupled with a comprehensive suite of business results, showing market leadership in a number of areas”.
Kiwibank chief executive Paul Brock says, like the Awards, Kiwibank is dedicated to New Zealand businesses, and this can be seen in its recent focus on helping SMEs in particular to make the day-to- day process of banking much easier.
“Critical to our success has been to really listen to our customers and build an offering to both reduce their pain points and help them succeed – ultimately contributing to the success of New Zealand,” he says.
“We’re really proud of what we can offer our business customers and we really look forward to helping many more Kiwi businesses in the future.”
Kiwibank also won the Crowe Horwath Large business $10m-$100m turnover award.
Other winners included Canterbury Employers’ Chamber of Commerce chief executive Peter Townsend, who took the Fuji Xerox Individual Leadership Award for helping set up Recover Canterbury immediately after the 2010 earthquake.
Intellectual property firm AJ Park won the New Zealand Trade and Expertise Export Support Award for helping Australasian companies identify, develop, protect and exploit their IP rights throughout the world.
Dean of the AUT Business School Dr Geoff Perry says all the finalists of the Awards are making a huge difference to New Zealand business.
“We congratulate all our winners and finalists who are doing a tremendous job delivering quality products and services to help New Zealand businesses maximise their potential. As a business school it’s important for us to celebrate the organisations that contribute to the economic development of our country.”
The Awards were recognised with a silver award for accessibility by social change initiative Be.Accessible.