Sysco LABS Sri Lanka celebrates challenging year with Annual Awards Night

From Left: Sysco LABS CEO and Managing Director Shanil Fernando, 10 years long-service award winners Chinthaka Gamage, Kushani Kalpage and Schezarnie Racip, Compere for the evening Trishma Pinto, along with the Hall of Fame Winner for 2021: The Cloud Pricing Team, and General Manager and VP of Shared Services Rasika Karunatilake.

Sysco LABS’ Awards Night 2020 – a virtual awards event – was held on 17 March. The event celebrated the achievements of the past year and outlined the vision for 2021 and beyond.

The Sysco LABS Awards were introduced in 2014 to recognise the most outstanding engineering artefacts as well as significant achievements in the preceding year. The awards are primarily a way in which associates across the organisation celebrate excellence and reward multiple attributes that are core to Sysco LABS’s culture and values.

The event featured keynote addresses from Co-founder, Managing Director Sri Lanka, and Senior Vice President – Engineering Shanil Fernando, who congratulated the team on powering through a challenging year and continuing to deliver best-in-class, innovative solutions which helped Sysco Corporation support their customers around the world amidst the pandemic. In his speech, General Manager and Vice President – Shared Services Rasika Karunatilake, presented key findings from the company’s annual survey and commended the teams that contributed towards achieving excellent results. 

Introduced to recognise outstanding engineering excellence and reward engineering teams for their invaluable contributions to Sysco LABS, the Hall of Fame awards were presented to the recipients by the leadership team with the Special Recognition award going to the Sysco Shop team, second runner-up awarded to the Sysco Delivery team and the first runner-up award going to the Pay Plus team. The winner of the Hall of Fame award for 2020 was the Cloud Pricing team.

This year’s event also saw the presentation of the Shared Services Excellence award which was presented to the People Operations, Marketing and Corporate Communications, Finance, Talent Acquisition, IT, Property and Mobility Division heads, in recognition of their outstanding contribution in 2020. Next on the agenda were the service awards where long serving associates were recognised for their loyalty to the company for five and 10 years, respectively. Ashaff Hussain, Prabhath De Silva, Daham Pathiraja, Vijayindu Gamage, Meuru Muthuthanthri, Shiran Weerakone, Mohamed Rifad, Amith Wijayasooriya, Randula Wedanda, Manoj De Silva, Eshan Liyanagama, Malsha Nagahawatta, and Buddhika Karunatilleke were the recipients of the five-year long-service award while Kushani Kalpage, Schezarnie Racip and Chinthaka Gamage were recognized for 10 years of loyalty and dedicated service. 

Based on Sysco LABS’s three focus areas – Customer First, Business Influencers and Precision Engineering, the Sysco LABS Value Awards were next presented to the teams that embodied these values throughout the past year. Teams from Sysco LABS’ core verticals – Digital, Foodservice, Corporate Technology, Customer Experience, Commercial, Canada and Europe along with the infrastructure vertical – were recognised for putting the customer first and acting as business influencers. The event featured varied, exciting performances ranging from the electrifying drumbeats of Naadro, the soulful tunes of Yohani and the popular favourites of Sanuka which kept the virtual audience engaged and entertained throughout the evening.