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…

“Lean-ing” Your Workforce

Building facilities and sending jobs overseas has not abated, but recent articles in business publications like Bloomberg BusinessWeek point out that the pace has slowed as more American companies are deciding to do in the U.S. what they had almost automatically been deciding to do in other countries.

One reason is the cost of labor, which has risen enough in other countries to negate one of the biggest reasons to ship jobs overseas. Another is the threat to supply chains made painfully visible by the recent earthquake in Japan. A third reason is the productivity of American workers, which is largely responsible for the rise in profitability despite recessionary pressures and high unemployment.

One of the key drivers of profitability among American manufacturers has been the implementation of Lean. In an IndustryWeek article available here, author Gregg Gordon says, “Companies that practice Lean rely on their employees who know the process best to identify unproductive activities and replace them with productive ones. This additional productive time results in higher output with the same pace of production using the same capital expenditures.”

Gordon’s analysis explains why profits have soared without noticeable impact on the unemployment rate. In Lean Labor: A Survival Guide for Companies Facing Global…

Enemies of Innovation

I don’t drink coffee, but I am intrigued by the new coffee machines that brew a cup from coffee capsules. It sounds like a very profitable razor/razor-blade model: If you can convince people that the coffee machine is the way to go, the company will make a boatload of money on the capsules. I didn’t realize that the idea, first introduced by Nestle with the Nespresso, has been around for more than twenty years.

In “Innovation’s Hidden Enemies” (HBR, April 22, 2011), Alessandro Di Fiore describes what Nestle did to popularize the Nespresso. “As we all know,” he writes, “organizations and cultures rebel against innovations, especially when they are first conceived.” Nespresso became Nestle’s fastest growing new business in the 2000s because its leaders tackled three hidden enemies to innovation:

1. Market research. At first, the company marketed the Nespresso to offices, but the Nespresso team believed that the product would appeal to households. The market research didn’t support its belief, suggesting “a perceived consumer value of just 25 Swiss centimes versus a company-wide threshold requirement of 40 centimes.” Failure to reach such a threshold usually dooms a project, but the team made its case to senior leadership, which took a risk by backing the…

Building a Baldrige Community

Joseph Juran called it “the passion of the true believers,” which describes the behavior of most organizations that have won the Baldrige Award: They’ve “witnessed the miracles” in the results they have achieved by integrating Baldrige (here) and they want others to share their success.

Larry Potterfield is a true believer. The founder and CEO of MidwayUSA, which received the Baldrige Award in 2009, Potterfield has rallied other leaders in his hometown of Columbia, Missouri, to pursue performance excellence through a Baldrige Performance Excellence Group (BPEG).

Imagine living in a Baldrige community where all of the local organizations that touch your life—businesses, schools, clinics and hospitals, and city government—are integrating the best model in the world for pursuing performance excellence. Imagine being an employee or customer or supplier of organizations that value visionary leadership, customer-driven excellence, employees and partners, agility, innovation, societal responsibility, and results. That not only value these things, but are taking concrete steps to embed them in the fabric of the organizations and the community.

Columbia, Missouri, is leading the way by partnering with the Baldrige Program and the Excellence in Missouri Foundation. You can learn more about its efforts by clicking here. The site offers a BPEG booklet developed…