Who Can Benefit

All types and sizes of organizations use the Baldrige Criteria to assess and improve performance. For example, in the past 19 years I have provided Baldrige services to healthcare organizations, manufacturing companies and subsidiaries, service companies as small as 75 full-time employees, college departments, military installations, a district court, K-12 school districts, and a group of business leaders in Indonesia.

The list of Baldrige Award winners, available at www.quality.nist.gov, provides some sense of who can benefit from the formal Award process.

The Baldrige management model has been refined annually to incorporate the latest thinking on performance excellence and to make the Criteria relevant for the broadest range of organizations. The best way to determine if the Criteria can help your organization is to read through the Criteria, consider how you would answer the questions they pose, and think about how formally responding to these questions might help your organization identify and address critical areas to improve.