[Acknowledgements]
To our partners, public and private organizations present in this virtual event, fellow workers in government, ladies and gentlemen, a pleasant good afternoon to all.
We’d like to express our gratitude to Chairman Samuel Dagpin, Jr. and the Governance Commission for Government-Owned or Controlled Corporations (GCG) for partnering with the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) on this collaboration. Today’s signing of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) for the Philippine Quality Award (PQA) Program will not only help us promote performance excellence, but it will also help us develop a culture of quality and competitiveness in the country.
The PQA is more than a national award program. As a global competitiveness template, this program aims to encourage and engage not just private organizations but government institutions as well to strive for performance excellence. It also provides an internationally comparable framework and criteria for assessing organizational performance, being patterned from the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program of the US.
As DTI continues on its aggressive promotion of quality in every sector of the economy as a way to boost innovation and competitiveness, we hope that through the PQA Program, we can create a mindset of quality in every Filipino. This would lead to creating a worldwide brand that benchmarks quality in every Filipino product and service.
Over the past few years, the PQA has developed programs and established partnerships to achieve this goal. In 2019, the PQA developed a separate category for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) for the Award. This initiative helped to redefine the existing PQA Criteria and make it more suitable for SMEs, which would encourage more SMEs to adopt the Performance Excellence Framework.
In the same year, DTI entered into a partnership agreement with the Philippine Association of Colleges and Universities Commission on Accreditation (PACUCOA) in a bid to promote the PQA to higher educational institutions. We also signed an MOU with the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) last October 2020 to further promote performance excellence in the education sector, which would be conducive in this digital economy.
That’s why this partnership of DTI and GCG is another milestone for the PQA Program, committing both institutions to work together in ensuring that GOCCs will maximize their potential to achieve growth and profitability and be future-ready.
This is significant as the business landscape has been changing with the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the economic effects of COVID-19 rippling across every industry worldwide. Fortunately, the core values and concepts of the PQA can serve as a guide for organizations to sustain and improve their operations despite the challenges that this pandemic has created. After all, the PQA encourages organizations to demonstrate creativity, adaptability, and flexibility in attaining objectives that promote crisis-ready performance.
As President Rodrigo Roa Duterte once pointed out during the 2017 PQA ceremony, our efforts toward performance excellence are also aligned with the government’s efforts to make our country more globally competitive. This what we wish to have as a reputation for the Philippines or Philippine products and services: basta marinig ang Pilipinas o Philippines, ang maaalala po nila agad ay kalidad—quality, and excellence.
In conclusion, we look forward to the successful implementation of the MOU and to our future collaboration towards nurturing the competitiveness of our Filipino public and private organizations. Together, let us build back better towards global excellence and quality performance while working towards giving our people a better and more comfortable quality of life in a post-pandemic future.
Maraming salamat po, at mabuhay tayong lahat! ♦
Date of Release: 17 May 2021