The awards recognise outstanding achievements made by Australia’s private and family businesses.

“We recognised the seismic shifts occurring across all of Nepean’s industries early, and reinvented the organisation as 14 stream specialised businesses,” Nepean managing director and CEO Miles Fuller.

Each business has focused on strategy, getting costs down to a globally competitive structure, building sales volume to get contribution margin up, helping customers to win, and having reliable execution.

Fuller said the company had invested heavily in developing its people and building a culture of excellence through the “Nepean Leadership Academy”.

His vision was to develop all of its managers by bringing them a Harvard Business School style experience.

For the past three years Professor Boris Groysberg from Harvard Business School has worked with Fuller on a program to achieve Nepean’s objectives.

Since 2015 the Nepean Leadership Academy has been extended to more than 100 of Nepean’s customers.

“We are passionate about building great businesses with amazing, well trained and passionate people,” Fuller said.

“We are also passionate about making long term investments in our customers. We are truly delighted that the program that has helped Nepean succeed is now helping our customers succeed.”

Fuller said Nepean could deliver high value, innovative and sustainable solutions for the world's leading mining, construction and transport companies.

“We are absolutely committed to manufacturing in Australia, and think it is necessary to have a strong manufacturing sector in the country,” he said.

“The level of risk we take is counter-cyclical to the trend our competitors are taking to off-shore, but we strongly believe and our financial results show that there is a place for manufacturing in Australia in the 21st century global economy.”