The Baldrige Excellence Framework

– Have you ever won an award for doing a high quality job? If you have, you know how great that feels. In the United States, the highest quality award an organization can receive is the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. But the point of the Baldrige program is for you to understand how you manage quality, not to win an award, and it works. You learn while you apply for the award because you assess your own processes and improvements over time. Notice what I said there. You are evaluating yourself. Now, before we get any further, I want to let you know that I’ll only be discussing a few key aspects of the Baldrige Excellence Framework here. But you can download the full list of criteria, values, and measurements in the exercise files, and I’d recommend doing that. And the framework starts with the seven critical areas where you should strive for excellence. For the sake of time, we’re only going to look at one, customers. From there, you can work to evaluate and improve your company’s processes in three distinct stages. Stage one is to review the list of core values that are found in high performing companies. Then, decide which one applies to your customers since that’s the critical area you’re looking to improve. I think you’ll agree that delivering value and results definitely applies to your customers. Let’s pick that one. During stage two, determine which of your key processes apply to delivering value and results to your customers and evaluate those processes from four different perspectives. To do this, first look at how your organization does business with your customers. This identifies key processes. Then, evaluate how consistently you use those processes across the different departments. Next, analyze how much you’ve improved the processes and how you share improvements within your company. And last, evaluate how well your key processes are integrated throughout the organization. You want to ensure, for example, that purchasing practices support delivery procedures that lead to customer satisfaction. The Baldrige Framework views your organization as a system so key processes must be integrated. Last, you evaluate your results. You can compare your results to industry standards and companies that are best in class in quality processes. You should also look for positive trends over time. For example, are you getting better or worse at sharing improvements across all parts of the organization? When you complete this evaluation, you’ve identified your key strengths, and you can build on those strengths. Maybe more importantly, you now understand areas where you can improve even more. Test out the Baldrige Framework on a small scale. Pick one of the seven critical areas, like customers or operations. Do a quick analysis of the core values and processes that apply to your work area. A better understanding of your processes just might lead to a company-wide quality improvement program. quality improvement program.