Many organizations look at national award criteria and think that they are too hard or beyond their capacity to win. Yet, the models themselves represent integrated frameworks for how to run a business; the criteria provide the tools that support it.

Our model for business excellence is the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. It features an approach to creating a world-class organization using the Baldrige criteria for excellence in business performance.

The criteria describe principles that characterize world-class performance, yet they don't define how these principles should be carried out. This encourages companies to develop strategies and practices based on their own respective cultures and business realities.

THE FOCUS IS ON ORGANIZATIONAL EXCELLENCE AND NOT SOLELY ON WINNING!

It's not a question of whether or not an organization can win the award. An organization is a winner if it even applies for the Baldrige or, as we recommend, a local or state-sponsored award. You are the winner because the model helps you to create an integrated, results-oriented framework for managing company operations.

It links action to objectives. It is a "holistic" approach, with individual parts linked to represent relationships between programs and concepts within the system.

The Business Excellence Model will help drive your organization toward becoming world class in business management processes. It progresses from the creation of a strategic framework to identifying linkages between initiatives across the entire organization. These linkages unite individual programs into a coherent, integrated approach. An approach that looks at your business with a very keen lens from the standpoint of the following criteria:

• Leadership
• Strategic Planning
• Customer and Market Focus
• Measurement, Analysis, and Knowledge Management
• Human Resource Focus
• Process Management
• Business Results

This provides you with.

• A point-in-time diagnosis of your organization's success in implementing your strategies,
• A realistic self-assessment targeting key gaps and priorities for improvement,
• The selection and use of appropriate tools for improvement,
• Sharing best practices at all levels of your organization and communicating new and better ways to conduct business and serve customers.

You will look at your business in ways that you may never have done before and will help you deliver ever-improving value to customers, improve your overall effectiveness, and, most of all, your business results.