Malcolm Baldrige Criteria – A Business Excellence Model

Is there similarity between Total Quality Management and Malcom Baldrige Criteria ?

One may be wondering in real life application, whether there is any different ? Many may argue that there are different and otherwise.  Before you make any conclusion, lets look at the facts.

Briefely, Total Quality Management is a set of philosophy  adopted by business organizations, government bodies even indivuals to perform their goal. It has a set of TQM principles by which it operates. It deal with Leadership, employee involvement, customer satisfaction etc aimed to management your business in a more holistic perspectives.

On the other hand for Malcolm Baldrige Criteria, it is a set of criteria or guidelines to judge if an organization is meeting business excellence level.  The criteria are grouped into seven categories. Each of them clearly states its objectives and set out their respective criteria or guidelines.  The seven Categories are:-

On the other hand, you may take note that the Malcolm Baldrige Criteria are build upon a set of core values and concepts and they are quite similar to the TQM Principles. There are eleven core values and concepts listed below:-

1. Visionary Leadership
2. Customer-Driven Excellence
3. Organizational and Personal Learning
4. Valuing Employees and Partners
5. Agility
6. Focus on the Future
7. Managing for Innovation
8. Management by Fact
9. Public Responsibility and Citizenship
10. Focus on Results and Creating Value
11. Systems Perspective

 
These Core Values and Concepts are embodied in detail Malcolm Baldrige Criteria  which are grouped into Seven Categories mentioned above. Each category has laid up its own set of criteria to the highest standard. While the values and concepts in the Malcolm Baldrige Criteria remain quite unchanged, the detail criteria for each category has changes every year. The idea to review and change the criteria is to keep current to the business changes and needs.

The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, sometimes known as the Baldrige Award, is an award program aimed to recognized organizations in achieving business excellence via the Malcolm Baldrige Assessment. The assessment is based degree of fullfilment to the Malcolm Baldrige Criteria which as build upon its values and concepts and Assessment Guidelines. The Malcolm Baldrige Criteria is written and revised every year by a committee consist of Baldrige Assessors. Most of them are practitioners and had vast experience in implementing Malcolm Baldrige Criteria in various industries such as Small, Medium and Big scale Manufacturing, Heallth and Education.

The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award was created by Public Law 100-107, signed into law on August 20, 1987. The Award Program, responsive to the purposes of Public Law 100-107, led to the creation of a new public-private partnership. Principal support for the program comes from the Foundation for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, established in 1988.

The Award is named for Malcolm Baldrige, who served as Secretary of Commerce from 1981 until his tragic death in a rodeo accident in 1987. His managerial excellence contributed to long-term improvement in efficiency and effectiveness of government. The Findings and Purposes Section of Public Law 100-107 states that:”

1. the leadership of the United States in product and process quality has been challenged strongly (and sometimes successfully) by foreign competition, and our Nation’s productivity growth has improved less than our competitors’ over the last two decades.
2. American business and industry are beginning to understand that poor quality costs companies as much as 20 percent of sales revenues nationally and that improved quality of goods and services goes hand in hand with improved productivity, lower costs, and increased profitability.
3. strategic planning for quality and quality improvement programs, through a commitment to excellence in manufacturing and services, are becoming more and more essential to the well-being of our Nation’s economy and our ability to compete effectively in the global marketplace.
4. improved management understanding of the factory floor, worker involvement in quality, and greater emphasis on statistical process control can lead to dramatic improvements in the cost and quality of manufactured products.
5. the concept of quality improvement is directly applicable to small companies as well as large, to service industries as well as manufacturing, and to the public sector as well as private enterprise.
6. in order to be successful, quality improvement programs must be management-led and customer-oriented, and this may require fundamental changes in the way companies and agencies do business.
7. several major industrial nations have successfully coupled rigorous private-sector quality audits with national awards giving special recognition to those enterprises the audits identify as the very best; and
8. a national quality award program of this kind in the United States would help improve quality and productivity by:

a. helping to stimulate American companies to improve quality and productivity for the pride of recognition while obtaining a competitive edge through increased profits;
b. recognizing the achievements of those companies that improve the quality of their goods and services and providing an example to others;
c. establishing guidelines and criteria that can be used by business, industrial, governmental, and other organizations in evaluating their own quality improvement efforts; and
d. providing specific guidance for other American organizations that wish to learn how to manage for high quality by making available detailed information on how winning organizations were able to change their cultures and achieve eminence.”

source: http://www.baldrige.nist.gov/Improvement_Act.htm

Although the Baldrige Award is offered to US organization in the States of America, the Malcolm Baldrige Criteria is nevertheless adopted by many countries outside the States of America. Example are countries like Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia etc. These countries who adopted the Malcom Baldrige Criteria uses it for their national levle quality award schemes. Most of them adopted the same revision frequency of the Baldrige Criteria by the Malcolm Baldrige Award secretariat.

In order to be successful in your business ventures, adopting to the implementation of the Malcolm Baldrige Criteria can be a head start to your business excellence.

Discover how organizations in Malaysia implement Malcolm Baldrige Criteria to retain profitability during Financial Crisis and Economic Down turn

Malcolm Baldrige Criteria is a key guidelines for Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. To quality for this award, organization has to go through an assessment conducted by a group of assigned Baldrige Assessor. These assessors used the Malcolm Baldrige Criteria and Assessment Guidelines as a benchmark to gauge the performance level of the organization in relation to the scoring guidelines of the criteria.

The question is would implementing Malcolm Baldrige Criteria make an organization achieve business excellence ?Although their is no direct linkage between the Malcolm Baldrige Criteria and Business Excellence, evidence shown that a Baldrige winner could proved its business sustainability as a result in implementing the Baldrige Criteria.

if you study the Malcolm Baldrige Criteria and its respective revisions, you may realize that the criteria is build upon a set of core values and concepts in which they are quite similar to the principles used in Total Quality Management (TQM). Therefore, by implementing the Macolm Baldrige Criteria effectively, it certainly able to show high level of competence in terms of business excellence.  

Recently, I made a research into several Asean organizations how they could ride over the Financial Crisis in 1997 and how they cushion the impact of the current global economic crisis. All of them have one thing in common that is, they all implemented the Baldrige Criteria over the years though the level of implementing the criteria varies. Although they are not a Malcolm Baldrige winner because they are not American organizations, all of them use the Criteria as a benchmark for their Business Excellence journey.

You can do your own research into all the Malcolm Baldrige winners in the performance, you will notice that all of them are subjected to the economic challenges as well as global competitions. But they exhibits strong Leadership; Fluid Strategic Planning, Excellent Customer and Market Knowledge with integrated Information system. And they have strong Human Resource Development and Management and a robust Process Management which drove them into strong business results. All these elements by the way are the seven categories of the Malcolm Baldrige Criteria.

It is however, by no chance that these ASEAN organization has any advantage over their competitors. All of them faced with similar challenges. What the difference then? These organizations implemented the Baldrige Criteria not only among the leaders or management team but to the shop floor level staffs to some degree.

Do a research yourself to the Baldrige Criteria and take one of them to implement it. You will be surpise how rigorous it can be and the benefits you will get from implementing the Baldrige Criteria. Even you are not subjected to the Baldrige Assessment, there is not harm to set up your own internal assessment team to following the Baldrige Style of assessment against the Baldrige Criteria.