Philips Excellence Competition

Philips NV each year sponsors the worldwide Philips Excellence Competition where teams of employees compete showcasing continual improvement projects they have worked on over the year.  Philips Lighting is a division of Philips NV and the Regional Distribution Center located in Memphis, TN is a customer of the University of Tennessee Center for Industrial Services.

Each year over 1,000 projects from North America in are in competition at various levels to get global recognition.  The rules of the Excellence Competition are simple: have an idea to improve the working methods, form a team of three to seven people, follow a structured approach in order to implement and monitor the improvements.  Projects are linked to business objectives.

A local competition which takes place in each office or company followed by a regional competition on the continent where the business unit is located.  Lastly, winning teams participate in a global competition.  In the past the global competition has been held in exotic locations including Aruba, Morocco, Singapore, and Bali.  

Throughout the year UT CIS resource Larry Lynch has assisted and coached the teams in Memphis. Their work culminated in a local competition in January 2015 where UT CIS Solutions Consultant Michael Codega​ participated as a member of the judge’s panel.  Scoring of the teams is based not only on the project implementation, results, and use of CI tools, but on how well the teams used a structured process and how they learned and shared.

All five teams worked to solve important problems improving the business and all presented well.  Judging was very difficult.  In the end, the Productivity Pirates team who worked on improving overall productivity in the lamps product line were judged the local winners.  They move on to the regional North American competition which was held in San Antonio, TX.  Regional winners move on to the global competition to be held in Shanghai, China.

For Philips the competition is a means to express to its employees how they are valued and how important it is to work together in teams.  UT CIS is proud to assist Philips RDC in Memphis and we congratulate all of the teams and wish the best for the winning team in the regional, and hopefully, the global competition.