Sustainable Resource Development

Hinton Training Centre

Sustainable Resource Development's Hinton Training Centre has added to its accolades for delivering quality service to clients.

The Centre, which provides wildfire and forest management training courses, was recently named a bronze recipient of this year's Canada Awards for Excellence by the National Quality Institute.

Earlier this year, the Centre received a bronze award from the Premier's Award of Excellence program in Alberta and Service Excellence Recognition from Ron Hicks, Deputy Minister of Executive Council.

"In speaking with our external clients, we know that quality service is a big reason people keep coming back to the centre," says Provinicial Wildfire Training Co-ordinator Ferenc Scobie.

The Canada Awards for Excellence is an annual program that recognizes commitments to innovation, productivity, healthy workplaces and ethics. Recipients must demonstrate sustainable measures of continuous improvement.

Documentation for the national awards program was the same as the Centre submitted for the provincial Premier's Award of Excellence received earlier this year.

"Our vision is, we're a centre of excellence dedicated to exceptional client service," Scobie explained. "We commissioned a client satisfaction survey to identify areas where we could improve that are important to clients, and we found the satisfaction level is high already."

Along with providing training courses, the Centre serves as a venue for events focused on knowledge transfer, including conferences for research organizations such as Foothills Model Forest and the Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada, as well as meetings of the executive at Sustainable Resource Development.

The Centre also facilitates public education and outreach through its museum, interpretive trail, demonstrations in the Cache Percotte Forest and through development of Junior Forest Ranger curriculum.

"We continually work on the things clients expect from us - good courses, quality food, binder prep, last-minute photocopying requests, and so on."

The national award will be presented to Hinton Training Centre representatives at a ceremony to be held October 24 in Toronto. The ceremony will honour 20 organizations in the private and public sectors.

"These organizations are outstanding role models of organization effectiveness, and are making enormous contributions to the standard of living of Canadians and the growth of the Canadian economy," said Allan Ebedes, President and CEO of the National Quality Institute and Canada Awards for Excellence program.

Ebedes notes that award recipients have reported expanded market share, increased efficiency, enhanced international competitives, reduced costs, higher employee retention and increased productivity as a result of their commitments to excellence.