All Posts Tagged With: "quality"
A Baldrige Legend
Bob Galvin died last week at the age of 89. He ran Motorola, the company his father founded, from 1959 to 1988, transforming it from a national company with sales of $290 million to a global corporation with sales of $10.8 billion.
Galvin helped launch the Baldrige program. Under his leadership, Motorola had become a global quality leader. Six Sigma became a systematic approach to quality improvement at Motorola, where Galvin notoriously demanded 10x improvements in quality and cycle time from one year to the next. In a Financial Executive report, he bragged that “we hardly take a serious interest in less than a 50% improvement” in cycle time. To make his point, he described a Motorola pager that had taken 44 days to make to customer specifications that, through quality and cycle time improvements, was being delivered in less than two hours.
He took these improvements personally. I interviewed him at his office in Schaumberg, Illinois, in 1991 for my first Baldrige book. He talked about lobbying for a national quality award, Motorola receiving one of the first Baldrige Awards given in 1988, and serving on the Baldrige Board of Overseers. But his eyes really lit up when he described his company’s…
17Oct2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedBaldrige 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 | ContinuedSmart Question #2: How Do We Know That?
(This excerpt is from The Baldrige Edge, an e-Guide from Baldrige.com. You can learn more about the guide by clicking on the black-and-red box on the right.)
Next to blaming people for process problems, making assumptions is a surefire way to miss the right solution. Which of these scenarios is more common in your organization?
(a) Options are debated based on what people think about a problem or issue and how they think it should be handled; or,
(b) Options are debated based on reliable data and information that illuminate the nature and causes of the problem or issue and point to possible solutions.
Most people act as if “a” is really “b”: My assumptions are based on experience and they’re as good as facts. They’re wrong. Guessing that you know what’s going on is not the same as actually knowing what’s going on, and the only way to know what’s going on is to collect and analyze relevant data and information. That’s where the second smart question comes in: How do we know that?
You have to be careful how you ask this question. If your boss says, “We’re getting customer complaints about how long they have to wait for service so we need…
1Feb2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedWhy Health Care Needs Baldrige
There are at least two reasons health care organizations account for roughly half of all Baldrige Award applications: Health care in the U.S. is expensive and the quality is poor. Health care organizations that recognize the need to lower their costs while improving quality see the Baldrige model as a systemic tool for accomplishing both.
The scope of the problem is brilliantly described in two 10-part series by Aaron Carroll on The Incidental Economist.
In the first series, “What makes the US health care system so expensive,” Carroll makes the point that, indeed, health care in the United States is very expensive when compared to the 30 countries in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Those 30 countries are bunched together between spending 6 and 11% of their Gross Domestic Product on health care. The one outlier, at 16%, is the United States.
Some argue that we should be spending more on health care. Carroll agrees:
“We are richer, and it is appropriate that we therefore spend more. We would expect to get better outcomes for that extra spending, which would also be appropriate. But as you can see [in Figure 1—click on “continued” at the end of this article to view it], every other…
2Nov2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedThe “New” Malcolm Baldrige Award
The Malcolm Baldrige Award is the new name of the Award, shortened by the Obama Administration and the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program’s Congressional oversight committee—and, yes, that’s a new name for the program as well. Gone is the word “quality,” not because the focus on quality has lessened but because more than quality is needed for an organization to excel.
The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award came into being by act of Congress in 1987 at a time when the quality of many American products suffered by comparison to that of the Japanese. The criteria for the Award aligned with the teachings of great quality gurus like Deming and Juran. The goal was to improve quality so that American businesses would be more competitive.
Today, the Baldrige criteria address all of the elements that contribute to an organization’s success and sustainability, including quality, and are not limited to use by businesses. In fact, business accounted for just over 14% of this year’s Award applicants. Perhaps the new name will cause business leaders to consider Baldrige the latest, newest, coolest program and inspire them to give it a try. (I remain an optimist.)
The name change precedes changes to the Baldrige criteria that the…
5Oct2010 | Steve George | 2 comments | ContinuedThe Value of Lean
The Baldrige model is not prescriptive—it doesn’t tell you how to do all of the things you need to do to run your organization effectively—but if it was prescriptive, it would prescribe lean.
Lean is a perfect fit for a management model that values process. While it is fundamentally about reducing cycle time by eliminating waste, the organizations that have implemented lean have also found that it improves quality, delights customers, engages employees, and lowers costs.
If you want to learn more about the potential of lean to help your organization, I suggest reading The Antidote by Anand Sharma and Gary Hourselt, who have built a stellar consulting practice on their ability to help organizations with lean. The book (click here to order it) uses real-life examples to describe the benefits of lean and how to implement it.
You can read about one company’s experience with lean in “What We Have Learned on Our Lean Journey” (IndustryWeek, Adrienne Selko, September 29, 2010). Correct Craft, which makes boats, started its lean journey in 2007 by making sure top management was on board with the initiative. The next step was to hold Kaizen events where teams of four floor employees took one day to redesign the problematic parts of a…
30Sep2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
