To excel in something is to surpass in accomplishment or achievement. To do a superior job compared to known standards or to a set of peers. At Elite we want to be superior and excel in the eyes of our customers, and this means that we want to beat their expectations and their standards to win their mind and their heart. This is the path to our success.The process to achieve excellence is well known but not easy. It is well known because we can derive the necessary steps, routines and behaviours from people and companies who excelled in a particular field, but It’s not easy because these steps and behaviours are not easy to replicate. The way to excellence requires passion to fuel the journey, resilience to go through the pain of mastering the basics and a thirst for continuous improvement to go beyond what is expected.Excellence is not new to Elite. Since I joined and whenever our top management went to meet one of our big customers, the feedback was that Elite was doing an excellent job. Moreover, now and then we receive some amazing customer reviews praising the excellent job of our Customer Service colleagues.However, the challenge with Excellence is that it is a moving target. What makes the customers happy today easily becomes the norm tomorrow and we have to constantly do more to amaze our customers.That’s why we need Excellence to be in our DNA, to be a constant quest. We want to be pioneers of the next level of standards that will amaze the customers in supply chain services. This requires more than individual prowess. It needs an adequate environment, a strong culture and a collective effort. In one word, an ecosystem.This is exactly what we are building together: We have an ambitious vision to be passionate about, we are reinforcing together the fundamentals of the company including the adoption of the core values, we are implementing best practices in all our departments and we are devising a holistic program for learning and development to be able to innovate and progress.Our people are already embracing the culture of Excellence. Some elements that underscore this status is that they are always raising the bar for themselves and for their teams. They are facing the challenges together and constantly seeking to improve. The bar of standards is being raised almost everywhere in the company.Our Finance team is challenged to adopt fast billing and monthly closing. Our IT colleagues are enhancing their skills and proudly posting their new certificates on LinkedIn. Our Sales team is embracing the challenge to meet their goals even in challenging times like Ramadan. Our operations team is taking new initiatives almost every week to enhance productivity and reduce costs.Head of Departments (HODs) have their fair share of challenges as well. Every two weeks they are being challenged by their peers and by the CEO to improve their respective department’s performance in a process called “Bar-raiser”. If you have never heard about it, just ask your Head of Department or Country Manager. HODs are also challenged to prepare a 6 page narrative for all important initiatives they want to implement and to deliver on time.We are at the beginning of our Excellence journey and we are on the right track…. Soon with the contribution of every Eliter we will be delivering Excellence day in, day out.