Productivity Awards
Productivity SA offers productivity awards as a supportive tool that assists in spurring on productivity. The broader objectives of the awards are:
- To promote productivity within South African industry
- To raise awareness about the potential role of productivity in growing and developing our economy.
- To promote Productivity SA programmes and its outcome based solutions in place to assist ailing companies
- To increase South Africa ‘s competitiveness
The concepts of the awards are based on the premise that developing productive capacity, in a broader social context, is concerned with how well we employ all available resources in South Africa to generate well-distributed wealth (both tangible and intangible). As such, all South Africans (not only workers in the formal sector) are central to this process.
South Africa faces major challenges, for example how to create employment opportunities, stimulate economic growth and reduce poverty. If South Africa is to reduce unemployment and poverty, and increase its economic growth, its emphasis should be on developing productive capacity in all sectors of the economy. We need to focus on critical growth sectors and on making our enterprises more competitive. Moreover, there is an urgent need to address job creation and ensure that previously neglected sectors have access to knowledge, skills, resources and technology.
It is from this perspective that Productivity SA would like to demonstrate that productivity is not only an efficiency measure in terms of inputs and outputs. It is fundamentally a drive to add more and more value – in the individual, organisational and social contexts.
Productivity SA believes all South Africans have a role to play in developing the country’s productive capacity. From an economic perspective, productivity is a wealth-generating process that drives economic growth. At the organisational level, wealth generation offers distinct strategic opportunities in terms of distributing such wealth to all stakeholders. The wealth could be used to compensate investors, offer higher wages and salaries to the suppliers of labour, or hold down selling price increases to the consumer.
Improving productive capacity in South Africa is the true source of a competitive advantage that would create longterm economic viability and a better standard of living for all.
Productive capacity reflects the willingness and ability of individuals, departments or organisations to optimise the resources at their disposal (in a collective sense) in an endeavour to produce products or services that offer value to the end user, the customer or the consumer. Building productive capacity is therefore about creating a conducive environment, systems and processes that enable people to identify, harness, develop and optimise the use of resources at their disposal to their fullest potential.
This is brought about in many ways. Producing improved products and services (effectiveness) would for example stimulate demand and better use of fixed capacity. Productivity could be improved by better management or better allocation of resources and a subsequent higher rate of conversion (efficiency) or increased utilisation of resources. A ll of these in turn may be driven by factors such as innovation, quality, customer-perceived value of products or services through (say) branding, employee attitudes, and even environmental conditions.
Since the inception of the awards in the mid seventies, Productivity SA has recognised and awarded more than a 100 different enterprises both in the public and private sectors for their efforts in improving and sustaining productivity.
Since those days a lot of changes have transpired but the fundamental existence of the awards remain based on the premise of inspiring a competitive and productive South Africa.
The awards are divided into four categories of:
- Corporate Sector
- Public Sector
- Emerging Businesses Sector
- Cooperative Sector
For more information on the Productivity Awards contact us.
