All Posts Tagged With: "process management"
Baldrige Process Model
“Companies that combine the right operating model with superior execution are winners in good times and bad. They not only ride out recessions more successfully, they also emerge from them more quickly. As companies resume the quest for profitable growth and high performance in the upturn, they can no longer afford to ignore the role of process is delivering value to their customers.”
The quote comes from a report by Accenture on the results of a Web-based survey completed by 178 companies in the US, UK, and Germany. The authors could have been advocates for Baldrige: Companies that have integrated Baldrige have shown that combining the right operating model with superior execution delivers world-class results.
A key reason for that is that Baldrige does not allow you to ignore the role of process. The Baldrige model is a process model. Integrating it compels leaders, managers, and all employees to identify their key processes, understand those processes’ requirements, and design, manage, and improve their processes to deliver results, which include value to their customers.
The authors of the report, David Toth and Hundley Elliotte, suggest four steps to improve process performance:
- Link strategy with execution. Identify which processes differentiate your company from your competitors and work on…
Baldrige and Lean in Healthcare
For the last few years, nearly half of the Baldrige Award’s customers have come from healthcare, which is not surprising: Healthcare costs continue to rise without a related improvement in healthcare results.
Hospitals and medical centers embrace the Baldrige model for the systems perspective it provides. Senior leaders who have integrated Baldrige attest to the new knowledge it gives them about how their organizations operate, which means they gain greater control over the levers of success. In healthcare, where so many factors conspire to increase costs and decrease performance, understanding and controlling those factors is priceless.
One example is described here. Advocate Condell Medical Center, a 350-bed Level 1 trauma center in north Chicago, turned to Baldrige and Lean to tackle serious challenges at the hospital and its imaging business including:
- Ranking in the bottom quartile of patient satisfaction
- High percentage of denials and bad debt
- Negative growth
- 30% of calls abandoned or lost
- Report turnaround time of 16 hours
- A 6% no-show rate
- Cumbersome registration process
- Long patient wait times
- Low staff and physician morale
Baldrige provided the management framework for aligning and integrating strategies, plans, and activities. Lean improved process flow and eliminated waste by involving staff in identifying and eliminating wasteful steps and streamlining processes.
One year after launching the…
22Aug2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedBaldrige and Superior Execution
The answer: The Baldrige model.
The question: How do you solve the top CEO challenge identified by The Conference Board for the last five years?
That challenge is superior execution. According to an article by Accenture in June 2011, available here: “As companies resume the quest for profitable growth and high performance in the upturn, they can no longer afford to ignore the role of process in delivering value to their customers.”
The Baldrige model is a process model. Six of the seven categories in the model ask how you do what you do and what you do to manage and improve those processes, and the seventh category asks for the results of your processes. Companies that integrate the Baldrige model have identified their key processes, understand their value streams, align work with strategy, focus on what is truly important for success, and continually improve their processes. They use Baldrige to achieve what Accenture believes is a four-step journey to process management:
- Link strategy with execution. The Baldrige model demands alignment of processes with stakeholder requirements, action plans with strategies and objectives, and strategies with the company’s mission and vision. If you want first-hand experience with the power of alignment, read the application summary of a…
Make Change Happen: 10 Questions
Bob Murphy of Studer Group, a 2010 Baldrige Award winner, recently emailed ten questions to use when beginning a new process or evaluating an existing one. The focus of the questions is as much on changing behavior as it is on process improvement. Studer likes to talk about “hardwiring excellence” in healthcare. These ten questions can help any organization in any industry improve performance:
- Have we set clear and high targets? Will the target cause us to change our behavior?
- Have we provided education/training to all involved in designing or improving the process? Are we over-communicating the “why” behind the intended behavior or improvement?
- Has leadership made it clear that the behavior or new/improved process is mandatory, not optional? Studer Group research of over 2000 healthcare leaders indicates that when you use the word MANDATORY, 98% of employees understand that they MUST do the behavior (or follow the process). When you use the word REQUIRED, only 68% recognize that they MUST do it, and when you use the word EXPECTED, only 26% understand that they must do it. So be clear: This is mandatory!
- Are leaders being role models of the desired behavior? Not modeling it gives employees permission not to follow it either.
- Have…
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…
Baldrige Model: How do you design, manage and improve your work systems?
Item 6.1 in the Baldrige Criteria asks key questions about how you design, manage, and improve your work systems. 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 your work systems
- Capitalizing on your core competencies
- Determining which processes will be internal and which will be external
- Determining work system requirements
- Managing and improving your work systems to deliver customer value and achieve organizational success and sustainability
- Control costs of your work systems including preventing defects, service errors, and rework, and minimizing the costs of inspections, tests, and process/performance audits
- Ensuring work system and workplace preparedness for disasters or emergencies
Best practices to consider:
- Unlike most organizations whose work systems evolve over time, role model organizations make a deliberate effort to identify their work systems, design or redesign them to better accomplish the work of the organization, and manage them to achieve strategic objectives and goals.
- The organization uses its strategic planning process to determine how to capitalize on its core competencies and to identify needed competencies for the future.
- The organization uses specific criteria to determine whether key processes will be internal or external, including cost/benefit analysis, internal capabilities and capacity, and the availability of…
One Team’s Systematic Approach to Improvement
A recent case study published by ASQ tells the story of how FirstSource Solutions used tools and processes that are common among Baldrige Award winners to tackle a single problem—reducing the turnaround time (TAT) to approve applications for a retail mortgage client—with impressive results.
The client was in the United Kingdom. Here’s a synopsis of how Firstsource tackled the problem:
- It used data to define the problem: Over a nine-week period, the client offered mortgage loans in 14 days or less 69% of the time, well short of the 75% target.
- A financial benefit estimation exercise determined that improving performance on TAT to 80% would increase revenue by six million pounds annually, create a more efficient process, and provide faster service to applicants.
- Firstsource formed a team to improve TAT. The team received training on the Six Sigma DMAIC methodology and quality tools.
- The team started with a supplier-inputs-process-outputs-customer (SIPOC) exercise to create a high-level process map and identify stakeholders.
- The team produced a three-stage analysis road map to assess the current situation and identify possible root causes and improvement activities. It used the road map to agree on five causes of the longer TAT.
- The team brainstormed possible solutions and then assigned a relative rating for…
