A Regional First: RTA Launches Centre for Institutional Readiness and Sustainable Development, Marking APQC’s First Performance Excellence Centre in MENA

Dubai’s Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) has announced a historic milestone in the region’s journey toward organisational excellence with the establishment of the Institutional Readiness and Sustainable Development Centre. In a regional first, RTA has secured a strategic partnership with the American Productivity & Quality Centre (APQC), designating the world-renowned authority as the founding member of the Centre.

This agreement marks the official launch of APQC’s first-ever performance excellence hub in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), placing RTA at the forefront of global process management and institutional resilience.

The Centre’s primary mandate is to empower RTA’s own talent and business practices by standardising internal operations and building a self-sustaining workforce equipped with global best practices in process of architecture and performance management. While the Centre focuses on RTA’s internal development, its successful implementation naturally sets a new high-water mark for organisational maturity across the MENA Region.

"The establishment of this Centre is a strategic investment in RTA’s long-term resilience and our national talent," said Moaza Saeed Al Marri, Chief Executive Officer of Executive Affairs Sector, RTA. "By hosting APQC as our founding member, we are providing our teams with a world-class 'Unified Source of Truth' for our operations that is globally recognised and validated. This Centre is built to evolve, eventually housing a full ecosystem of global standards that will ensure RTA remains the most agile and sustainable transport authority in the world."

Echoing this sentiment, Cathy Hill, Chief Development Officer of APQC, remarked: "We are honoured to join RTA as the founding member of this landmark Centre. RTA had consistently demonstrated a commitment to world-class standards, and by establishing this first-of-its-kind internal excellence hub in the region, they are creating a powerful model for how organisations can work smarter and faster. This collaboration represents a vital step in our shared mission to drive productivity and institutional readiness through proven, validated frameworks."

Utilising global standards to create a common language for managing work processes, the Centre will drive organisation-wide alignment through international benchmarking and best-practice research. This approach validates performance and focuses on internal capacity development, ensuring the RTA remains a world-class leader in process excellence. While APQC serves as the foundational pillar for performance, the Centre is designed as an expanding ecosystem, RTA has signaled future strategic integrations with other world-leading institutes to be revealed in subsequent phases.

The "RTA Way": A Permanent Asset

As a regional first, the Centre functions as a high-performance hub that translates global best practices into a standardised, self-sustaining internal architecture. While many organisations buy excellence as a service, RTA is establishing it as a permanent internal asset. The "RTA Way" thus becomes a globally validated standard that is entirely owned and operated by RTA talent.