A company committed to Lean Six Sigma training for its employees won the 2019 Dubai Quality Award, an honor given to companies that demonstrate excellence in leadership, customer service and other key business areas.

The award went to Dubai-based Transguard Group, which provides companies cash, security, manpower and integrated facilities services. This is the third major business award for Transguard in 2019. The company’s leaders attribute the success to the establishment of a Centre for Excellence, a learning and innovation center that focuses on training Transguard’s 65,000-plus employees – including training in Lean Six Sigma.

Transguard Group Managing Director Greg Ward told MEP Middle East, “At Transguard, continuously improving all aspects of our business is at the forefront of our strategy, and our people are the foundation of our success.”

Centre for Excellence and Lean Six Sigma

The Dubai Quality Award is given by the Dubai Department of Economic Development to recognize business excellence. It is based on the Excellence Model from the European Foundation for Quality Management. Businesses are evaluated in many different categories, including leadership, strategy, people, partnerships and resources, processes, products and services, customer results, people results, society results and business results.

Those familiar with Lean Six Sigma may see where the methodology’s tools and techniques can play a major role in these categories.

Transguard has made Lean Six Sigma training a vital component of training offered through its Centre for Excellence. In an interview about the Centre for Excellence, Ward said that continuous training has been important for him since entering the Ford Training Centre in Dagenham, United Kingdom, when he was just 16 years old.

“Even though I didn’t know it, we were being trained all the time,” Ward said. “That was the ethos at Ford, whether it’s Lean Six Sigma, accountancy skills, tradesman skills or project management skills, there is continuous training and a commitment to lifelong learning for everyone.”

The lessons learned there drove him to continue that philosophy at Transguard.

Applying Lean Six Sigma

Transguard offers a good example of a company committed not to just training its employees in Lean Six Sigma but preparing them to apply the methodology in real-life situations.

Transguard’s training and development program involves Lean Six Sigma training for every worker at the company’s headquarters in Dubai, as well as training for its site-based staff through the Centre for Excellence. The training focuses on using real-world scenarios to teach employees how to put process improvement theory into practice.

The facility has carried out 800,000 hours of training since 2017.

Transguard specifically says the goal of its training is that employees apply it in their daily work processes. Such a commitment is key to making process improvements sustainable, which is one of the most important aspects of Lean Six Sigma.

The earlier awards in 2019 won by Transguard are the Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum (MRM) Business Award and the MRM Business Innovation Award. Both recognized how Transguard’s attention to improving employee’s daily processes have paid off with big rewards.