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

• Be a previous Baldrige Award recipient
• Have received the top-tier award from a member of the Alliance for Performance Excellence within the past 5 years
• Have received a Baldrige site visit within the past five years
• Have received a combined scoring band range of 8 or better in the past five years
• Have 25% or more of its employees outside the organization’s home state
• Have no Alliance member program available for your organization

The new requirements “leverage the larger Baldrige enterprise—in particular, the state and local Baldrige-based award programs,” according to Harry Hertz, Baldrige program director. The new requirements will compel first-time applicants to use their state programs unless one is not available, which is currently true for just one state: Utah. You will find a complete list of state and local award programs here.

The change will likely strengthen the state programs while reducing the number of applicants for the Baldrige Award. Fewer applicants should help cut costs for the Baldrige program, which is necessary in 2012 and beyond because a shortsighted Congress ended federal funding for the program. As Hertz noted in his blog post, “the decision by Congress to eliminate our federal funding is causing the Program to adopt a new business model.”

This is our first glimpse into what that new model will look like.

To read more about the Baldrige and state programs, click on these articles:

• America Needs Baldrige
• Support Your Baldrige-Based State Award Program
• Baldrige FAQs: The Baldrige Award

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

According to an email from Debbie Collard, chair of the Foundation, it “is committed to provide funding for FY2013 and beyond, commensurate with a budget-neutral private sector-funded business and financial model which is under development by a team of members from the Baldrige Enterprise.”

To reassure those organizations and leaders who are considering Baldrige or taking the first steps toward integrating it, the Baldrige program is not likely to end because it lost federal funding. The Foundation will provide essential support during the transition that must occur for the program to survive and thrive. In a Blogrige post, Baldrige program director Harry Hertz outlined the steps being taken to ensure the program’s sustainability:

“We are actively working with our Enterprise partners (the Baldrige Foundation, the Alliance for Performance Excellence, and ASQ) to develop an Enterprise business and financial model that looks at Baldrige processes on an enterprise-wide scale, looking for revenue sources and efficiencies that can be gained. At the same time our internal Enterprise Transition Team, composed of five Baldrige staff members, is working on our own business model, as part of the transition to an Enterprise focus…We have benchmarked other award programs, various associations, and successful nonprofits; decided on numerous process simplifications and stop-do’s to get us the bandwidth to work on the new business model; and are working on revenue generation opportunities and financial models.”

It’s misleading to gauge the impact of the Baldrige program by the small number of Baldrige Award winners each year. State and local Baldrige-related programs provide Baldrige consulting and evaluate applications from hundreds of organizations across the country. Thousands of examiners are trained each year. Millions of copies of the Baldrige Criteria are downloaded.

When I wrote my first Baldrige book in 1991, I interviewed Congressman Donald Ritter (R-PA), a member of the House committee that legislated the Baldrige program. I remember his description of a national leader who had been instrumental in promoting the program as “a dog on the bone of quality.” The Baldrige program will continue because it has national leaders who are “dogs on the bones of quality, who have “witnessed the miracles,” as Joseph Juran described it, and become passionate about its value to all organizations. Juran called it “the faith of the true believers.”

That faith will sustain the Baldrige program, which, I believe, will come out of this difficult period more innovative and more valuable to those it serves.

You can support the Baldrige program. I encourage you to donate to the program here. As Collard says, your support “will help ensure that the Baldrige program moves strongly into the future to increase its value to America at a time when hope is so needed.”

• The Henry Ford Health System, a nonprofit organization based in Detroit, has more than 24,000 employees and operates 30 general medical centers and seven specialized medical facilities.
• Schneck Medical Center in Seymour, Indiana, is a nonprofit institution with 114 beds and a staff of more than 800 employees.
• Southcentral Foundation is an Alaska Native-owned, nonprofit healthcare organization serving nearly 60,000 Alaska Native and American Indian people in and around Anchorage.
• Concordia Publishing House in St. Louis is the publisher for The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, offering more than 8,000 products to families, individuals, Christian schools, and congregations.

Gary Meyer, president and CEO of Schneck Medical Center, noted that his organization first implemented the Baldrige framework four years ago. “The Baldrige criteria and our unwavering commitment to quality, satisfaction, and continuous improvement have helped us toward our vision to be an organization of excellence, every person, every time,” he said.

In 2011, 69 organizations applied for the Baldrige Award, of which 11 reached the final, site visit review stage. Six of the 11 were healthcare organizations. Baldrige examiners visited these site visit finalists for several days in October to clarify and verify the content of their application. For example, during four days at Henry Ford, examiners spent time at three dozen medical sites and interviewed executives and more than 1,200 employees. The Baldrige Panel of Judges used feedback from the site visits and the examiners’ evaluation of the applications to recommend award recipients.

To learn more about the Baldrige application process, click on these articles:

• Baldrige Consulting: Building a World-Class Management System
• How the Baldrige Award Works
• Baldrige Gets Results
• 10 Steps to an Effective Baldrige Assessment