All Posts Tagged With: "Cargill Corn Milling"
2008 Baldrige Awards Presented Today
Three organizations will receive their Baldrige Awards from Vice President Joe Biden today in a ceremony in Washington, D.C. I attended such a ceremony about ten years ago as a guest of Custom Research, at which President Clinton handed out the Awards, and they are exciting events for the winning organizations.
The 2008 Baldrige Award recipients are:
- Poudre Valley Health System, a not-for-profit health care organization with a service area of 50,000 square miles in northern Colorado, Nebraska, and Wyoming. PVHS has some of the highest clinical outcomes in the country for mortality rates, complication, and infection rates, and patient satisfaction and financial performance well within the top 10% of all organizations nationally.
- Iredell-Statesville Schools, a K-12 public school system serving nearly 21,000 students in southwestern North Carolina. Its per-pupil operations expenditures are among the lowest in the state at the same time that it is ranked academically in the state’s top 10 school systems.
- Cargill Corn Milling North America, a business unit of Cargill Inc. that manufactures corn- and sugar-based food in nine manufacturing facilities throughout the U.S. CCM’s earnings after tax nearly tripled from 2003 to 2007. From 2006 to 2008, CCM saved more than $15 million from ideas generated by employees.
You…
2Dec2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedKEYSTONE: Customer Knowledge
An organization exists to serve customers whether they are called customers, clients, patients, students, constituents, or another name given to people who come to you for your products or services. A key measure of your success is how well you meet your customers’ requirements: Meet or exceed them and you improve satisfaction and loyalty with the benefits these provide; fail to meet their requirements and you lose customers, revenue, or support.
The first order of business, then, is to make sure you know exactly what your customers require. Most organizations don’t. They think they know. After all, they interact with customers every day. They may even be able to produce a list of customer requirements, which should really be called a list of assumptions about customer requirements because few organizations take a systematic approach to identifying, validating, and communicating key customer requirements.
I once worked with a manufacturer that was the worldwide leader in its industry. After completing its award application, I was asked to share my feedback on the application with the senior leadership team. My first bullet said: You do not have rock-solid understanding of customer requirements.
Boy, did they lay into me! “We’re the market leader,” one said, “of course we know…
22Oct2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
