All Posts Tagged With: "financial"
A Unique Healthcare Delivery System
For the 55,000 Alaska Native and American Indian people it serves, Southcentral Foundation (SCF) has cut costly emergency room and urgent care visits by 50% and reduced specialty care by 65%, primary care visits by 36%, and hospital admissions by 53%. Such impressive results helped SCF win the 2011 Baldrige Award.
Of those SCF serves, 45,000 live in the Anchorage, Alaska, area and 10,000 live in 55 remote villages accessible only by plane. SCF serves them through a unique health care delivery system, the Nuka System of Care, that focuses strategies and processes on wellness. The system is owned, managed, directed, designed, and driven by Alaska Native people, which SCF calls “customer-owners.”
These unique ownership and health care delivery systems are producing impressive results:
- Customer-owners can see their primary care providers on the same day if they call by 4 p.m. and arrive by 4:30. Seventy to 80% of appointment slots are open at the start of each day.
- Alaska Natives and American Indian people experience diabetes at twice the national rate. Since 2009, SCF’s performance levels for diabetes care have exceeded the 90th percentile of the Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information set.
- SFC manages key performance data through DataMall where it is collected, aggregated, trended,…
Baldrige Systems Perspective
How do you make the argument for integrating Baldrige at your organization?
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.…
3Oct2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedBaldrige: As American as Fast Food
In 2002, Rudy’s “Country Store” & Bar-B-Q increased the sales of its breakfast taco by 91% by following K&N Management’s Product Offering Identification Process shown on the left.
A 2010 Baldrige Award winner, K&N operates Rudy’s and Mighty Fine Burgers, Fries and Shakes in the Austin, Texas, area. The company has 450 employees and annual revenues of $50 million.
The Mighty Fine concept itself came out of this identification process. K&N’s owners needed a new concept to grow the company. According to the company’s award application summary, available here, “After conducting industry research, senior leaders identified the burger market to attract new guests and grow the organization for the following reasons:
- The core competencies of K&N could easily be transferred to a premium hamburger concept.
- Industry trends indicated a premium hamburger concept would meet shifts in guest preferences.
- We wanted to be one of the first fast-casual operations in Austin to feature a premium hamburger.”
They developed a strategy to design, build, and open the new concept, using the same process that boosted sales of the breakfast taco. A test kitchen allowed them to develop a menu, test products, and refine recipes with input from employees, suppliers, and guests. As a result, Might Fine has better…
14Apr2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedSmall Business Fundamentals
Small business owners and leaders must wear many hats. With fewer employees than a big company, they are closer to the action, their days filled with pivotal moments when decisions must be made and steps taken that could alter the fortunes of their company.
In such a challenging environment, it helps to have a management system that can guide your decisions and support the steps you take. The Baldrige model provides such a framework.
Twenty-two small businesses have won the Baldrige Award, including three in 2010. While a company may have up to 500 employees to qualify for the small business category, several winners have had fewer than 100 including Stoner, the smallest company ever to win. Stoner had 43 employees when it received the Baldrige Award in 2003.
I worked with Custom Research, which had 75 employees at the time, when it won the Award in 1996. I remember the tension that the Baldrige framework created by requiring formal processes in a few key places, like strategic planning, where informal approaches had served the company well. Custom Research strengthened its processes and, to the Baldrige program’s credit, Baldrige examiners received specific training on how to better evaluate small businesses.
The small business leader…
24Jan2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedCost Is One Factor
If you were going to build a 70,000 square-foot headquarters for 325 workers, where would you construct it? New York or Sioux Falls, South Dakota? San Francisco or Little Rock? Minneapolis or Oklahoma City?
What factors would you consider in your decision? The availability and educational level of potential workers might be an issue. Quality of life could be important. Access to global markets, major transportation systems, research universities, large customer groups, or diverse employee candidates may be valuable.
Another factor is cost. For those narrow-minded organizations that think cost is all that matters—or that cheaper trumps everything—Boyd Co. Inc. has a list for you. According to Boyd, the most expensive U.S. cities to put 325 employees into a 70,000 square-foot headquarters are New York, San Francisco, Stamford (CT), San Jose, and Newark. The cheapest are Sioux Falls, Little Rock, Virginia Beach, Oklahoma City, and Columbus, South Carolina. The difference between New York, the most expensive at $30.7 million a year, and Sioux Falls, the cheapest at $21.1 million, is significant. And yet more companies choose New York than Sioux Falls because, as noted, cost is just one factor in the equation.
By the way, Minneapolis ranked fifteenth on the list of 50…
12Apr2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Best Way to Measure Company Performance
OK, I stole the title. John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison posted on this very topic on the Harvard Business Review today. And then they spent the entire time dissing return on equity and touting return on assets in its place.
Hello? I understand the whole “business-exists-to-make-a-profit-and-nothing-else-really-matters” position, but are ROA or ROE really the best ways to measure company performance? I thought the balanced scorecard came along because our obsession with financial performance wasn’t working. Apparently, a lot of folks can’t stop obsessing.
Case in point: HuffPost Business. If you visited its home page today you would find articles on Goldman Sachs, predatory lending, Hank Paulson, the Treasury Department, AIG’s bonus cutbacks, robber barons, financial crisis, financial innovation, bank bailouts, Federal Reserve, credit card blacklists, financial reform, economic oracles, Citigroup, China, more on the Federal Reserve, home sales, jobs bill, dollar vs. euro, Greece bailout, still more Federal Reserve, etc. About the only articles on the home page that weren’t about money were about health care and fast cars.
It shouldn’t be HuffPost Business; it should be HuffPost Finance. And they’re far from alone. Pick any random site that purports to tell you what’s happening in the business world…
5Mar2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Financial Impact of Integrating Baldrige
Business leaders have long sought proof that embracing the Baldrige model, implementing Total Quality Management, or applying for Baldrige Award or state quality awards pays. Does it make our company more profitable? Does it return value to our shareholders? Is it worth the effort and changes involved?
The answer to all three questions is, “Yes.”
Dr. Vinod Singhal of the Georgia Institute of Technology and Dr. Kevin Hendricks of the College of William and Mary did a five-year study of more than 600 quality award winners. They compared the financial performance of these winners with a control sample of companies similar in size and operating in the same industries. Singhal and Hendricks tracked both groups for ten years: six years before the award winners won their award and four years after.
Their study revealed that, over a five-year period starting one year before the winners won their first award, the award winners averaged significantly larger increases in several key measures of financial performance:
- 44% higher stock price return
- 48% higher growth in operating income
- 37% higher growth in sales
When Singhal and Hendricks separated the independent award winners (Baldrige and state quality award winners) from those companies winning supplier awards, the results were even more dramatic:
- 61% increase…
