Dr. Juran was a vocal advocate for the Baldrige program. I interviewed him in 1991 for my first book on the Baldrige model and he was kind enough to write a reference for the book. At the end of the interview, he not only invited me to his annual conference, then called IMPRO, but he offered to pay all of my expenses to attend. Before the conference, Dr. Juran delivered, “Making Quality Happen,” which remains one of the most informative sessions I’ve ever taken part in about the value of a systems approach to quality management and improvement.

I quoted him in my book, The Baldrige Quality System: “Prior to the Baldrige Award, any company that didn’t have a quality revolution was confused. Quality consultants were tugging them in different directions. We lost a decade that way. The criteria can become the focal point around which the renaissance can be built.”

Dr. Juran’s prediction has not come true—yet. While Baldrige still has the potential to inspire a quality and performance renaissance, it has not gained the traction enjoyed by programs such as Lean and Six Sigma, in part because Baldrige is not a program. It does not prescribe the exact path you must take to gain world-class results, but helps you understand all of the things you need to improve to achieve performance excellence. It’s a systems approach to building an effective management system that will help your organization reach its goals, now and well into the future.

Baldrige.com now offers more than 600 articles about this systems approach to world-class performance. I can’t think of a better organization to build on this foundation that the Juran Institute, which integrates the Baldrige model in the services it provides. You will want to bookmark this site and check back frequently for the insights and ideas Juran will be posting.

I want to thank you for visiting Baldrige.com. I have enjoyed sharing what I learn with you and look forward to continuing to learn from the quality leaders at the Juran Institute.

Economists Albert N. Link from the University of North Carolina and John T. Scott from Dartmouth College published their evaluation of 45 Baldrige Award applicants on December 16, 2011. The report is available here (pdf). The Baldrige program asked the 274 organizations that submitted applications from 2007 to 2010 to participate in the study and 45 accepted the invitation. Link and Scott used a counterfactual evaluation method to determine the benefit-to-cost ratio, asking what the private sector would have had to invest to achieve the same level of benefits through the Baldrige program. Benefits were realized in three areas:

• Savings to the applicants in investment costs to achieve the same level of benefits from their performance excellence strategies as they realized from the Baldrige program
• Gains by consumers in greater satisfaction from higher quality products and services
• Gains to the economy from saving scarce resources because the Baldrige Criteria were available

As I understand it, the counterfactual evaluation case made by the study is that organizations that integrate Baldrige increase demand because they offer higher quality products and services and they reduce costs because of more efficient operations. They earn more and spend less.

Link and Scott describe the methodology in their report. They concluded that the ratio of social benefits to social costs among the 45 organizations that responded to the survey was 351:1 while the ratio for all Baldrige Award applicants was 820:1. They also extrapolated these ratios by sector: 456:1 for healthcare, 357:1 for manufacturing, and 119:1 for education. While they cautioned against attaching too much significance to these numbers because of the small sample size for each sector, they emphasized that integrating Baldrige benefits all sectors, arguing that the Baldrige program’s benefits “are not specific to any one sector but reflect benefits realized across all of the sectors.”

In their concluding statement, Link and Scott state: “The Baldrige Performance Excellence Program is a public-private partnership that…creates great value that could not be replicated by private sector actions alone.”

While the public-private partnership equation is changing with the end of federal funding, the value of the program remains the driving force behind those who are working to reinvent Baldrige to continue to bring value to the U.S. economy.

UW-Stout earned the Baldrige Award in 2001. Ten years later it remains passionate about the value of integrating Baldrige. According to Sorenson and Furst-Bowe, “The most important change brought about by our Baldrige experience, which is now part of our culture, was the establishment of an inclusive planning process to ensure that, in Baldrige speak, ‘all arrows are pointing in the same direction,’ and not at cross-purposes.”

Having worked with five Baldrige Award winners, I can attest to the value of aligning processes and people with the goals, strategies, and objectives of the organization. Whether you are in business, healthcare, or education, the ability to focus all activities on shared goals dramatically improves performance and is a major reason Baldrige Award winners achieve world-class results.

Sorenson and Furst-Bowe also state that “the Baldrige model…also led to a number of important innovations, including our e-Scholar or student laptop program, our designation as Wisconsin’s polytechnic university, and our Discovery Center for applied research and economic development outreach.”

Most organizations embrace Baldrige because they want to improve quality and performance and reduce waste. Few think about being more innovative, but “managing for innovation” is a core value of the Baldrige model. As organizations understand and improve their key processes, they build a learning culture that values innovation. “Innovation should be integrated into daily work and should be supported by your performance improvement system,” according to the Baldrige Criteria. “Systematic processes for innovation should reach across your entire organization.”

UW-Stout continues to benefit from its process of integrating Baldrige that began more than a decade ago. Your organization can achieve the same success. Click on the articles below to learn more about the Baldrige model and how it can help your organization excel:

• What Is Baldrige?
• The Baldrige Criteria
• Baldrige Core Values
• How to Integrate Baldrige
• Baldrige Gets Results

From my experience, the introduction to Baldrige often begins with training. Senior leaders need to understand what Baldrige is and how it can help their organizations. They need to know what is involved in a Baldrige assessment so that they can allocate resources, set goals and expectations, and provide ongoing support. And they need to establish processes for reviewing the results of the assessment, prioritizing opportunities for improvement, and developing action plans.

The only way to effectively integrate the Baldrige model is through Baldrige assessments, which means completely and accurately answering the Baldrige criteria questions and evaluating those responses to identify strengths and opportunities for improvement. If you plan to conduct this assessment internally, you will need to train the people who will conduct the assessment in how to interpret the criteria, where to find the answers to the questions, and how to write the assessment.

An alternative is to hire outside expertise to do the assessment. This is especially useful with the first assessment, which can be a challenge because it requires people who are likely unfamiliar with the Baldrige model to understand what the criteria are asking, find the best answers, and tell the organization’s story well. An experienced Baldrige consultant can guide the organization through the first assessment by conducting the research and writing the assessment. This gives the organization a solid document upon which it can build future assessments and helps prepare internal Baldrige experts by involving them in the interviewing and reviewing processes.

It’s important to remember that no organization can integrate Baldrige with one assessment: This is a commitment to conduct an assessment annually for at least three years. Many organizations set a goal to apply for the Baldrige Award or a state award at some point in their journeys to sustain the momentum of the process and to benefit from an external evaluation of their strengths and weaknesses. State award deadlines vary; you can learn more about your state programs here. Applications for the 2012 Baldrige Award are due on May 15, but you must submit eligibility certification packages by February 28 (with a nomination for a Baldrige examiner position) or April 3 (without a nomination). You can learn more about the 2012 Baldrige application process here.

To find out more about Baldrige consulting, click here.

To read about integrating Baldrige, click on these articles:

• How to Integrate Baldrige
• Baldrige Core Values
• The Baldrige Criteria
• 10 Steps to an Effective Baldrige Assessment
• Baldrige Gets Results

• Get the results you want: It will help your organization achieve performance excellence whether you are in healthcare, manufacturing, service, education, nonprofit, or government.

• Learn about all aspects of the Baldrige model. Just click on one of the tabs at the top of this page to learn more about these key areas.

• Find out how to integrate Baldrige. Any type or size of organization can achieve world-class results by integrating the Baldrige model. We explain how to do it.

• Identify your top opportunities for improvement. A Baldrige assessment gives you a detailed snapshot of your entire management system, exposing your opportunities for improvement. We describe how to conduct an assessment and provide consulting support, if needed.

• Close the gaps. Baldrige.com has hundreds of articles about specific areas of concern. For example, you will find more than 75 articles about leadership alone, not to mention the free report on Baldrige Award-Winning Leadership now available (sign up on the right of this page).

• Become a valued expert. An organization is a complicated system with many moving parts. Baldrige.com can help you identify, organize, and improve those parts to reach your personal and organizational goals.

Thanks for making Baldrige.com the #1 source for “the information you need to build the organization you want.”

The study confirms what similar studies of business performance have also shown. No matter what their organizations do, leaders need to consider these results and, if their organizations are not integrating Baldrige, ask how they, too, can achieve similar high rates of improvement.

Thomson Reuters uses independent public data to measure hospital performance and identify the national benchmarks for balanced excellence. It publishes the best 3% in an annual list of 100 Top Hospitals. For this study, it measured the association between 38 Baldrige hospitals (Award winners plus site-visit hospitals that gave permission) and 100 Top Hospitals on key indicators of performance and improvement. The analysis showed:

• Substantial agreement between the results of the Baldrige process and the Top 100 Hospitals award: Baldrige hospitals are significantly more likely than their peers to win a 100 Top Hospitals award.
• Baldrige hospitals were significantly more likely than their peers to display faster five-year performance improvement.
• Baldrige hospitals were about 83% more likely than non-Baldrige hospitals to be awarded a 100 Top Hospitals award for excellence.
• Baldrige hospitals outperformed non-Baldrige hospitals on nearly all of the individual measures of performance used in the 100 Top Hospitals composite score including risk-adjusted mortality, risk-adjusted complications index, patient safety index, CMS core measures score, severity-adjusted average length of stay, and adjusted operating profit margin.

You can read the Thomson Reuters report here.

You can read how businesses achieve similar stellar results here, here, and here.

These studies validate the value of integrating the Baldrige model whether your organization is a hospital, small business, manufacturer, service provider, government agency, nonprofit, or school. The data provide tangible evidence of the efficacy of using the Baldrige process because it delivers “significantly higher rates of improvement in balanced organizational performance” compared to competitors who do not use Baldrige.

To learn more about how your organization can use the Baldrige process to achieve similar results, click here.

Those of us who have “witnessed the miracles,” as Joseph Juran described it, know that integrating Baldrige can help any organization achieve its goals. Organizations that have fully integrated the model and received the Baldrige Award in recognition of their efforts have produced world-class results in key customer, quality, employee, and financial measures.

So start there, with the results. Senior leaders seek improvement in the measures of the organization’s – and of their – success. Figure out which measures matter most and show how similar organizations achieved excellence by integrating Baldrige.

Next, identify the critical goals and strategic objectives for senior leaders and the obstacles or issues that stand in their way. Chances are, these obstacles fall into common categories:

• Not clear what customers or markets want
• Quality, cycle time, and/or cost need to be improved
• Need innovation in products and services
• Processes do not produce needed results
• Employees not engaged
• No consistency or alignment with what’s really important

All of these issues will be addressed by integrating the Baldrige model, and that’s a key point to make: All of these issues will be addressed, not just the top one or two and not just the most visible obstacles. Every organization functions as a system. You can make tremendous improvement when you understand how your system works and make changes with that systems perspective.

For more information about integrating Baldrige at your organization, click on these articles:

• Study Confirms: Baldrige Gets Results
• How to Integrate Baldrige
• 10 Steps to World Class
• Baldrige Model Item by Item
• 80 Critical Questions