Baldrige Award Research Articles

The Future Role of Statistics in Quality Engineering and Management (with Discussion)

Statisticians are concerned that the business world does not regard statistical literacy, or statisticians, as important. Little progress has been made in spreading the belief in the power of statistics to the non-statistical. This problem is as strong in the context of supporting organizational and product quality improvement as it is elsewhere. We summarize the effect of Genichi Taguchi's work on industrial experimentation, as well as developments in the use of statistical process control, statistical reliability requirements and other statistical approaches to quality. The effect of developments in quality systems standards, such as BS EN ISO 9000, the European Business Excellence Award Model and the Baldrige Award, are also discussed. We argue that statisticians' attitudes to non-statisticians and the use of their discipline will have to change if statistics is to realize its potential in supporting quality improvement. Re-education is necessary not just for the non-statistician but for the statistical community as well.

A self‐assessed quality management system based on integration of MBNQA/ISO 9000/ISO 14000

With the proliferation of several quality awards and standards, many organisations have taken their initiatives to employ different awards and standards in one form or another to sustain competitive edge. The ultimate objective of a self‐assessed quality management system (SQMS) is to assist the organisation in its quest for corporate performance, business results and financial health. It can be achieved through proceduralising organisational activities and increasing uniformity and conformity of repeated tasks. This paper presents the compatibility of assessment criteria of the Baldrige Award with the conformity requirements of both ISO 9000 and ISO 14000. A SQMS is built upon these criteria and requirements. The core concepts and skeleton of the system are explained, and its applicability is illustrated with reference to an implementation case in an engineering organisation in Hong Kong.

Toward Defining the Quality Culture

This research examines the relationship between TQM and organizational culture. To accomplish this, a questionnaire was developed, based upon the competing values model of culture and the Baldrige Award criteria, to define both the organization's culture and quality management position. This questionnaire was then sent to 1000 members of the American Society for Quality. A total of 219 usable responses were received and analyzed. The results indicate that higher Baldridge scores tend to be significantly related to the adhocracy and group cultural types.

Baldrige Award Winning Quality

Baldrige Award Winning Quality

Focus on the Classroom: Using the Baldrige Award Criteria to Teach an MBA-Level TQM Course

The Council of Competitiveness (1995) asserts that the Malcolm Baldrige Award Criteria for Performance Excellence provide the best framework of total quality management (TQM). The criteria maintain currency and relevance through an annual improvement process that utilizes input from all stakeholders—the U.S. business sector, Baldrige Award examiners, judges, and staff. As such, each year the criteria reflect the most recent developments in business thinking. For these reasons, then, the criteria afford themselves as an excellent, state-of-the-art tool in teaching an MBA-level TQM class. This study describes the key elements of the criteria and their use as the principal instructional tool in teaching the class. This approach utilizes the Baldrige Award case study (new each year), and promotes critical thinking, active learning, teamwork, written and oral communication, and integration of the business disciplines.

An Empirical Study of the Minnesota Quality Award Evaluation Process

Increasingly, organizations are using the Baldrige Award criteria and Baldrige Award-like self-assessment processes as a management framework to guide continuous improvement. Little empirical evidence exists, however, regarding the effectiveness of the self-evaluation processes. This article reports on a study of the Minnesota Quality Award evaluation process. The study focuses on the impact of examiner experience and scoring process on evaluation of the application.

Baldrige Award announcement and shareholder wealth

The value of winning the Baldrige Quality Award to the shareholders of the firm has been the subject of a debate motivated by bipolar perceptions and an opposing set of viewpoints held by both industry leaders and academic professionals. One of the key concerns that must be addressed to place the impact of the Baldrige Award in a proper perspective (and thus contribute to the resolution of this debate on the issue of the value to the shareholders of the winning firms) is the short‐term negative effect imputed by the views and the actions of the critics, especially the short sellers who see the announcement of the award as an opportunity to make profits by short selling the stock. In this study, we focus on this concern and examine the short‐term impact of the Baldrige Award announcement on the shareholder wealth by applying a rigorous statistical methodology to analyze the stock price movements around the day of the announcement of the award for statistically significant abnormal behavior. Our analysis falsifies the critics’ claim that the financial and other resources spent by the companies toward winning the Baldrige Award are wasteful and reduce shareholder wealth.

A conversation with Curt W. Reimann on the background and future of the Baldrige award

A conversation with Curt W. Reimann on the background and future of the Baldrige award

A survey instrument for standardizing TQM modeling research

For over a decade, total quality management has been a principle focus of business managers and academic researchers alike. The myriad prescriptions and practices, all purporting to represent this management philosophy, have been implemented with varying degrees of success. Despite the significant failure rate of TQM programs, the successes, as indicated by Baldrige Award winners, support continued interest in TQM. The search for linkages between current descriptive models and proposed prescriptive models of TQM spawned our research, which, in turn, required creation of a survey instrument. This paper describes the initial sources and development of this instrument, the rigorous sequence of testing that it has been subjected to, and its application for current and future research. The successful achievement of key survey statistics suggests that this instrument can be used for TQM data collection with confidence by researchers elsewhere who will investigate other proposed models.

Estimating the Consistency of Third-Party Evaluator Scoring of Organizational Self-Assessments

Organizational self-assessments are an important tool for organizations attempting to improve performance. Little is known about the measurement properties of assessment processes, particularly the consistency of the evaluator scoring that provides the validation for self-assessments. Similarly, little is known about the magnitude of inconsistencies that must exist. A critical step toward improving the self-assessment process is understanding its properties and designing strategies for improvement based on this understanding.This article reports on research conducted to determine the level of consistency of third-party evaluator scoring of written organizational self-assessments using the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award as the assessment standard. Using practicing professionals, an experiment was conducted that measured consistency at several levels: among untrained evaluators; among trained evaluators; between trained and untrained evaluators; and between the various items and categories constituting the Baldrige Award criteria.The results indicate that consistency for the more quantitative categories was better than for qualitative categories. Frame of reference (FOR) training had an effect on evaluator consistency (for example, reduced leniency) and seemed to have greater effect on the categories with more quantitative content. No evidence was seen that FOR training reduced score variance among evaluators.

Total Quality Management‐A Cross Functional Perspective

Quality as a Strategy. What Is TQM? The Baldrige Award. Measures of Quality Product and Quality Process: The Traditional Approach. Measures of Quality Product and Quality Process: The Emerging Cost--of--Quality Model. Continuous Improvement: Basic Tools. Continuous Improvement: Statistical Process Control. Continuous Improvement: Some Advanced Tools. Customer Measurement I: Traditional Multi--Attribute Methods. Customer Measurement II: Quality Function Deployment. Initiating TQM: Managing Change. Employee Practices in Total Quality Management Organizations. TQM and the Product Development Process. Reengineering and TQM: The Role of Information Technology. Benchmarking. Landmarks on the TQM Road. Indexes.

The Baldrige quality competition in New Zealand: a critical assessment

Examines the Baldrige criteria and their use in New Zealand. Government development agencies and private industry groups have recently promoted models of best practice in business organization and strategy. Across these initiatives there is a remarkable unanimity in the version of best practice being advocated, reflecting the influence of the Baldrige Award criteria. Contrasts the types of workplace reorganization advocated in the Baldrige criteria with sociotechnical systems, German diversified quality production, flexible specialization. Argues that each of these systems offers a route to best practice in its related market and business environment. Discusses the limits of reducing workplace change to a single one of these options and managerial action alone. Presents evidence of the value of industry co‐ordinated change, including contrasting case studies from the meat and dairy processing sectors.

Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award

Focuses on some of the ethical concerns pertinent to the application process of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award programme and highlights some of the critical problems which the programme faces. Based on analysis of these issues, endeavours to distil an adequate opinion of the inherent value, merit and significance of Baldrige Award. Observes that, while the Baldrige Award programme does raise certain critical concerns ‐ specifically those related to unfairness, superficiality and publicity ‐ the inherent value of the continuously improving award programme far outweighs its limitations. As has been seen, the Baldrige paradigm is not limited exclusively to the world of business, and can be applied to reinforce quality and enhance productivity in virtually any kind of organization.

The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award

Initiated in the US Congress in 1987 as a rallying point for quality efforts in the face of (largely Japanese) competition, the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award is its country's most prestigious quality prize. It was named posthumously for the late US Secretary of Commerce. Applying for the Baldrige award is open to US‐based companies only. Winners demonstrate superior performance against seven criteria, each of which is allocated a points weighting within a maximum possible score of 1,000 points. The criteria are: leadership; information and analysis; strategic planning; human resource development and management; process management; business results; and customer focus and satisfaction (see figure 1). Following initial self‐assessed submissions a panel of peer‐recognized experts from industry, the professions and academia nominates a short‐list of companies for site visits. The judges can select two winners in each of the three award categories — manufacturing, services and small businesses — or none. Past recipients of the Baldrige award include Motorola, Milliken, Eastman Chemical, Xerox, The Ritz‐Carlton Hotel Company, Federal Express and three divisions of AT&T. It is used as the framework for the Swedish Quality Award and has also been the inspiration for several similar prizes elsewhere in the world, among them the European Quality Award.

ARMSTRONG'S STRETCH MARKS

Armstrong World Industries Building Products Operations has consistently used the Baldrige award model criteria competitively to gauge its performance and to set stretch targets. Along the way it has collected the coveted award itself.

Value-Driven Quality

The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA) criteria represent a fundamental set of key business processes that should form the management system for any quality-minded organization. The criteria are based on 11 core values and concepts that characterize the culture of total quality organizations: however, the relationships between these core values and the management processes embedded in the criteria are not well understood. Since it is management processes that reflect the culture of an organization, then—from the view of the Baldrige Award—understanding those processes (the outward view of an organization's culture) provides better insight to the values that drive behavior (the inward view of an organization's culture).In this article, the expertise of a sample of Baldrige Award examiners is drawn upon to gain insight on the relationship between the core values and key processes. The results are used to propose a quantitative approach for better understanding how strongly the core values are reflected in an organization's culture based on Baldrige Award assessment scores. Although the quantitative results are only preliminary, the process of mapping core values to management processes leads to better understanding of the criteria. The results raise some important issues for national, state, and local examiner training, and suggest several future research directions.

Critical Linkages in the Baldrige Award Criteria: Research Models and Educational Challenges

In this article, a causal model that describes the key linkages in the Baldrige Award criteria for performance excellence framework is proposed. This model provides significant research opportunities for further theoretical modeling and empirical testing, and a practical means by which practitioners and business educators can acquire in-depth understanding of the criteria. Three key linkages are explicitly addressed: the linkages among business results; linkages between management practices reflected in the award's areas to address and results; and linkages among the six approach/deployment categories. Finally, some issues and challenges facing modern management education in conveying the nature of integrated management systems to today's business students are addressed.

Developing a plan to win the Baldrige Award

Presents a strategy for companies to adopt when striving for eligiblity for the Baldrige Award. The Baldrige Award became the US standard of excellence due to the fundamental values that the guidelines provide by laying out the blueprint for quality. The word “quality” was used extensively in previous versions of the Baldrige criteria, and credit was given to organizations that had an impressive TQM progamme. However, that is not the case any more. In the 1995 Baldrige criteria, new standards now call for a balance between customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, and business results. Quality as a separate effort is no longer given the credit that it was given in previous years. Companies with even advanced TQM programmes will find that they do not fare very well against the new standards unless their TQM is fully integrated with the daily running of the business. Considering eligibility for the Baldrige Award, shows how to obtain the award by providing a strategy used by previously successful organizations. Uses this strategy to develop a plan that integrates a TQM plan and a Baldrige plan into one company’s overall plan. Then, the company’s overall plan is generated into three different plan levels, namely the strategic, functional, and annual plans, based on different time frames and details. Finally, deploys the plans to various work units throughout the organization to guide business day‐to‐day activities.

Benchmarking Maquiladora operations relative to those in the USA

Examines the total quality management (TQM) programmes of Maquiladora operations located on the Mexican border and benchmarks their quality practices vis‐à‐vis those in the USA. Six domains of TQM programmes (information and analysis, strategic quality planning, human resource development and management, management of process quality, customer focus and satisfaction, and quality and operational results) were investigated; these domains were based on the Baldrige Award criteria. The results identify areas of improvement for both Maquiladora and US operations. Maquiladora operations need to improve customer focus and satisfaction, and employee training, whereas US operations need to improve quality and operational results, information and analysis, management of process quality, human resource development and strategic quality planning. Overall, the results suggest that US companies relocating their operations to the Maquiladora zone can obtain a competitive advantage in terms of both lower costs and implementation of TQM programmes.

The Baldrige Education Pilot Criteria 1995: An Integrated Approach to Continuous Improvement in Education

Abstract The Baldrige Education Pilot Criteria were developed in response to strong interest by the education community and business leaders in having a set of criteria, similar to the very successful Baldrige Criteria, to guide the evergrowing quality efforts by educational institutions. The goals of the Education Criteria, which were pilot-tested in 1995 in parallel with the Baldrige Award for businesses, are (a) “delivery of ever-improving educational value to students, contributing to their overall development and well-being;” and (b) “Improvement of overall school effectiveness, use of resources, and capabilities.” This article describes the Education Pilot Criteria and proposes that they are highly compatible with the AACSB standards and provide a useful guideline for improving the quality of business schools.