Winning a Global Business Excellence Award will raise your profile, enhance your reputation, help to attract new business and instil that vital ingredient for success - trust.

The awards aim to recognise and reward business excellence across all sectors, private, public and charity. Open to organisations of any size and individuals, based anywhere in the world, entries are encouraged from those that feel they are working smarter than their competitors to create a business edge. Entrants to the Global Business Excellence Awards do not have to be conducting business globally, many past winners operate nationally or regionally in just one county. You may enter your own organisation for an award or nominate a third party.

Entrants compete against organisations or individuals based in the same country. Therefore be sure to specify in which country your principal office is based when applying.

When you enter you will automatically be emailed a 2013 nominees logo relating to the category you are entering. This can be used on your website and other marketing material. Here's an example:

There are four opportunities to enter the Awards each year, the last working day of February, May, August and November so organisations can enter when the time is right for them. The judges then consider all entries during the first two weeks of the following month and winners are notified personally within six weeks. We pride ourselves on a slick and prompt judging process because we know you want to find out the outcome as soon as possible. All winners hold their title for 12 months.

The judges want to hear about the great work you are doing so you need to send them a written submission of up to 1,000 words explaining what you or your organisation has done that makes it stand out from the crowd. The judges then score all entries against a set of key criteria as appropriate - financial results or customer / employee / community / investor benefits.

An independent, bespoke, judging panel reviews each entry. The panel includes a large pool of past winners and judges are carefully selected to review each individual submission based on their personal knowledge and strengths. More about the judges.

Due to the global nature of this awards programme, there is no awards presentation event. This also means that you won't feel obliged to take a table if shortlisted in the hope that you may win, which is of course, the case with most other award formats. Instead, winner's are notified individually and are listed on this website. All winner's then have the option to purchase a winner's pack if they wish and in the full knowledge that they have actually won.

The Global Business Excellence Awards are an independent awards programme not affiliated to any magazine or newspaper. They are marketed and administered by Awards Intelligence, the UK's largest provider of business awards and personal honours support services, news and information to progressive organisations and accomplished individuals.