All Posts Tagged With: "market performance"
Four Brutal Truths
Milliken & Co. won a Baldrige Award in 1989, the second year the Award was given. A multinational group of textile and chemical companies, Milliken has continued to improve over the last two decades, using its Baldrige experience as a springboard for industry leadership and role model best practices.
It customized the Toyota Production System to its own culture and operations and applied the scientific method to new initiatives, using PDCA to experiment, test, and improve. It succeeds “in the face of four brutal truths that often derail organization improvements, preventing innovation and sustainable excellence,” according to Laurie Haughey, Milliken’s director of education services and marketing (article here):
- The majority of performance-improvement programs fail. Milliken looked to Japan and the process controls taught by W. Edwards Deming to develop a sustainable management system. “More than 100 management employees made four exploratory trips to visit leaders of Japan’s best companies…to learn and adopt performance systems,” writes Haughey.
- Organizations will founder unless they cultivate the trusting environment needed to perform honest self-analysis. First, Milliken adopted zero-based thinking: Its objective is zero, not some acceptable level of failure. Second, it uses value-stream mapping to identify the eight forms of manufacturing waste. Third, it encourages workers to expose problems…
10 Critical Questions: Results
The Baldrige model focuses on results: You don’t transform an organization without a very good reason, and for those organizations that transform themselves through Baldrige, the reason is because it delivers results. Check out some of the results achieved by Baldrige Award recipients in the following areas:
Better yet, read Category 7 in the award application summary of any winner you choose (click here) and you will find impressive results across all six of the areas measured.
The Results Category is the only Category in the Baldrige Criteria that examines your organization’s performance and improvement—but this one Category is worth 45% of the possible points when scoring a Baldrige application because the Baldrige model focuses on results. The best way to evaluate your results is through an assessment using the Baldrige Criteria. You can find out how to do that here. If you cannot do a full assessment but want insight into how to improve your results, here are 10 critical questions to ask and answer:
What are your current levels and trends in key measures of:
- Product performance OR student learning and improvement in student learning OR health care outcomes, health care process results, patient safety, and patients’ functional status?
- Customer/student/patient and stakeholder satisfaction,…
