Baldrige Model: How do you design, manage and improve your key work processes?

Item 6.2 in the Baldrige Criteria asks key questions about how you design, manage, and improve your key work processes. The following processes, best practices, and problem areas look at critical issues in this part of the Baldrige model.

Your organization needs processes for:

• Designing efficient and effective work processes to meet all key requirements, including incorporating new technology, organizational knowledge, product excellence, and the need for agility
• Determining and meeting key process requirements
• Managing your supply chain including evaluating supplier performance
• Improve processes to achieve better performance, reduce variability, and improve products and services

Best practices to consider:

• Process thinking is a cultural attribute of the organization.
• Every key process and its key requirements has been identified, the processes have been mapped, in-process and end-of-process measures have been identified, and data from these measures are analyzed and used to continuously improve the processes.
• Supply chain management involves suppliers in improving quality and cycle time.

Common problem areas:

• When problems occur, people look at who to blame rather than where a process failed.
• The organization has never tried to identify its key processes or determine their requirements.
• No systematic approaches are in place to manage and improve key processes.
• Few in-process measures are taken and few end-of-process measures are used to improve performance.
• Suppliers are not treated as partners to assist in reaching your organization’s goals and objectives.

To read more about process management, click on these articles:

• Smart Question #1: What’s the Process?
• The Benefits of Process Thinking
• Ask What, Not Who
• What Process-Centered Looks Like
• 3 Steps to Finding Your Key Processes
• Keys to Successful Process Improvement

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In-Process Measures

One of the obvious differences between Baldrige Award recipients and organizations new to the Baldrige model is their use of in-process measures: The latter are often unclear about what in-process measures are, what they have, and what is actually useful.

In-process measures track the performance of a process as it is unfolding, providing real-time feedback that can be acted upon without waiting for the process to end, at which point end-of-process or outcome measures tell you the results of that process. In a perfect world, in-process measures align with end-of-process measures. Most of the results in Category 7 of a Baldrige application are for end-of-process measures. The alignment allows an organization to predict how it will perform on those end-of-process measures and fix problems during the process to get better results.

You can pick any result in any Category 7 Item, identify the process or processes that produce that result, and determine the in-process measures that will predict that result. For example, on-time delivery of a product or service is a common end-of-process metric. In-process measures that predict your performance on on-time delivery might include time to enter an order in the system, time to produce a product or service, and time to deliver that product or service to the customer. The time it takes for every step in the process can be measured and these in-process measures will predict your performance on on-time delivery.

The Baldrige Criteria ask about in-process measures in two places:

• 4.1a1: How do you select, collect, align, and integrate data…