Nestlé Waters Canada and the Guelph and District Human Resources Professional Association (GDHRPA) recently announced the company has been honoured with the association’s Employer of Distinction award in the large employer category for 2013.
The award recognizes local employers who have shaped organizational excellence and raised awareness of the human resources contributions in helping to build and sustain a successful organization.
The company was specifically recognized for its establishment of the Nestlé Continuous Excellence program, a continuous improvement initiative based on LEAN and Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) principles which accelerates performance improvement and ensures sustainability.
“The Nestlé Waters Canada story at its [Aberfoyle] bottling facility is an amazing one, particularly in terms of its level of employee engagement and its commitment to sustained quality and business compliance,” said Stefanie Bradley, president of the GDHRPA board. “The Employer of Distinction Award in the large employer category was well earned recognition for Nestlé Waters this year. We look forward to hearing about further advances in continuous improvement by the company in the years to come.”
Nestlé Waters Canada president John Zupo said, “We are deeply honoured by this recognition. We have made great strides over the past three years when it comes to building a high-performance organization that produces high-quality beverage products for Canadian consumers.
“This award is proof-positive that we are headed in the right direction.”
“Our Guelph plant is setting the pace amongst Nestlé Waters plants across North America when it comes to health, safety and quality processes implementation, leadership development and goal alignment, where employee actions are consistent with business priorities,” explained David Thorpe, director of Supply Chain, Nestlé Waters Canada. “We are deploying a system of quality management that ensures its sustainability independently of changes of management, uses a single validated set of best practices, eliminates duplication of effort and enables sharing of learning on implementation.”
“Through the establishment of NCE, our employees are fully engaged, they understand the value proposition associated with our business, they can effectively evaluate which activities add value – or not – and are working together to eliminate non-value-added activities, and they are continuously improving on the business principle of value creation,” said Bruce Fraser, director of human resources for Nestlé Waters Canada. “We are creating a culture that ensures health, safety and quality guidelines are understood and followed and, further, one that consistently has our team delivering high-quality products and services to consumers in a safe and trustworthy manner.”
