Kanji's Business Excellence Model Research Articles

A Review on Business Excellence Models

Business excellence models are widely used by the companies around the globe for business improvement. These models include Deming prize model, Malkolm Baldrige or American Model for Business Excellence, EFQM-model, and Australian Business Excellence Framework, The 4P model and Kanji's Business Excellence model. This paper presents an analysis of these existing models of Business excellence. Except Kanji's Business Excellence model all other models are National Quality Award winning models from different countries and it is not clear as to how to implement these models. It was found that Kanji's Business Excellence model has the clarity of measurement or implementation as compared to the other models.

BOOK REVIEW: IN A TRIBUTE TO PROFESSOR GOPAL K. KANJI: THE EDITED COLLECTION "QUALITY, EXCELLENCE AND MEASUREMENT"

BOOK REVIEW: IN A TRIBUTE TO PROFESSOR GOPAL K. KANJI: THE EDITED COLLECTION QUALITY, EXCELLENCE AND MEASUREMENTThe collection of research papers entitled Quality, Excellence and Measurement is a tribute paid to professor Gopal K. Kanji by 25 researchers inspired by the ideas of this renown scholar. The book was edited by Parvesh K. Chopra, the Kanji's collaborator and disciple.Professor Gopal Kishore Kanji (1938-2010) had started his academic career in 1960 at Sheffield University. Then, for over 35 years he had been an academic teacher in Sheffield Technical College, Sheffield Polytechnic and Sheffield Hallam University. After being retired from academia, he established Kanji Quality Culture Ltd. focusing his professional activities on consulting and training.In 1974, professor Kanji had founded Bulletin in Applied Statistics, transformed later into Journal of Applied Statistics. Kanji had been the editor of the journal for over 30 years. In 1990, Professor Kanji founded TQM Journal (TQM and Business Excellence Journal since 2003) in order to establish the platform for academic discussion and the exchange of ideas in the field of quality management issues. Moreover, professor Kanji is famous for the World Congress for Total Quality Management he initiated in the 1990s.The work collects individual writings of the researchers paying tribute to Professor Kanji. Therefore, it is organized around the research topics Kanji contributed to. The book consists of 16 chapters focused on the triad of issues enumerated in its title i.e.: quality, excellence and measurement.John Oakland studies excellence in leadership and quality policy deployments as determinants of TQM in the 21st century. Referring to them as the TQM backbone, Oakland identifies the requirement for top managers to establish a quality policy and he analyses the examples of quality policies. Then, the author examines the importance of culture, a vision framework and control for quality management and organizational effectiveness. Oakland enumerates and 71 characterizes the following requirements for effective leadership in the TQM context: developing the corporate vision; developing strategies and supporting plans; identifying critical success factors and critical processes; reviewing the management structure; and encouraging employee participation through empowerment focused on attitudes, abilities and participation. Applying his own TQM model Oakland provides the recommendations for delivering excellence in leadership through 4Ps (planning, performance, processes, people) and 4Cs (customers, commitment, culture, communication).Claiming that recently has been replacing quality as the main source of competitive advantage Kostas N. Dervitsiotis explores the issue of innovation for total performance excellence. First of all, he enumerates and discusses the types of innovations making distinction between technology-based innovations (such as: product, process and enabling technology innovations) and business model innovations (related to value proposition and supply chain) as well as between incremental and disruptive innovations. Secondly, he studies the approaches to improve the performance of the innovation process from the idea generation, through idea development and innovation commercialization. Thirdly, Dervitsiotis analyses innovation strategies. Finally, he explores the factors strengthening innovation capabilities, focusing attention on building and maintaining innovation culture.Viola Helge, Daniel Hovermann and Klaus J. Zink provide a comparative analysis of the EFQM Excellence Model and the Kanji Business Excellence Model (KBEM). At first, the authors discuss the development and structure of the EFQM Excellence Model including fundamental concepts of excellence, the criteria of the model (enablers and results) and the RADAR assessment framework. Then, they present Kanji's contribution to build up the business excellence measurement system consisting of the Kanji Business Excellence Model (KBEM) and the Kanji Balanced Scorecard (KBS) based on the Balanced Scorecard by Norton and Kaplan (1992). …

The ranking of higher education institutions: A deduction or delusion?

The necessity to take into account the stakeholders' interests in higher education has resulted in the emergence of many performance measurement approaches that make use of performance indicators. The aim of this paper is to determine the benefits of using performance indicators for higher education and the problems associated with them. From a thorough examination of established models, it is concluded that the use of performance indicators for ranking purposes is unfounded. Performance indicators are known to bear many weaknesses such as, it is difficult to relate output to input; they only indirectly measure the achievement of objectives; and there is an ambiguity in their meanings. Their use should be restricted to highlight the areas of concerns in the higher education system. The ISO 9000 quality system was reported to have made very little progress in higher education. On a similar note, TQM, which has been widely practised in higher education institutions in the USA since the late 1980s, has not made much progress in other parts of the world. Tambi (2000) has proposed the application of Kanji's Business Excellence Model (KBEM) (Kanji, 1998a, 1998b) which can be used as a tool for quality review and enhancement of higher education institutions.

Reality check of Six Sigma for Business Excellence

Six Sigma is a useful problem-solving methodology and provides a valuable measurement approach. It has a statistical base and with proper utilisation of methodologies can help to improve the quality of both product and process. In addition to providing data-driven statistical methods for improving quality, Six Sigma also focuses on some vital dimension of business processes, reducing the variation around the mean value of the process. In general, it creates a link between the effective use of quality improvement and statistical tools to deal with customer focus, measurement and continuous improvement, which are also the partial requirements of the Business Excellence measurement system. Unlike Six Sigma the Business Excellence measurement system provides a comprehensive and holistic approach methodology for business improvement by integrating all the stakeholders' performances. The Business Excellence measurement system is a means of measuring customers', employers' and stakeholders' satisfaction simultaneously within an organisation in order to obtain a comprehensive evaluation of the organisational performance (Kanji, 2002). Here, the measurement system (that is, statistical methods) can be used to measure how well different areas of the organisation are performing. In reality, some Six-Sigma methodologies, such as statistical techniques, can be used for this purpose. In this paper, the author will discuss how well Six Sigma can be incorporated into the Kanji's Business Excellence Model (KBEM).

Poverty as a System: Human Contestability Approach to Poverty Measurement

Since Sen's (1976) paper on poverty measurement, a substantial literature, both theoretical and empirical, has emerged. There have been several recent efforts to drive poverty measures based on different approaches and axioms. These poverty indices are based on head count ratio, poverty gaps and distribution of income. These are very narrow in approach and suffer from several drawbacks. However, the purpose of the present paper is to introduce a new poverty measure based on a holistic and system modelling approach. Based on Chopra's human contestability (Chopra, 2003, 2007) approach to poverty, this new approach to measuring poverty has been developed using a structure equation model based on Kanji's business excellence model (Kanji, 2002) to create the proposed poverty model. We construct a latent variable structural equation model to measure the contestability excellence within certain boundaries of the societal system. It will provide us with a measurement of poverty in a society or community in terms of human contestability. A higher human contestability index will indicate the lower poverty within the society. Strengths and weakness as of various components will also indicate that a characteristic of the individual requires extra society or government support to remove poverty. However, there remains considerable disagreement on the best way to achieve this.

Quality award dimensions: a strategic instrument for measuring health service quality

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to describe research which compared quality awards and the selection of criteria for assessing health care processes quality status, in private sector health care institutions in India.Design/methodology/approachA comparison of quality awards was performed and criteria were selected for assessing health care processes quality status. The relationships in the model, as measured by the instrument, was the work's main objective. Using the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, European Foundation for Quality Management and Kanji Business Excellence Model, common factors were extracted to measure the quality perceptions of health care organizations and to measure the relationships among the quality dimensions. The sample selected for this study comprised healthcare stakeholders.FindingsAs a result of respondents' knowledge, data provide unique insights into the relationships among the dimensions that compose quality in healthcare organizations. Principal component analysis was used to identify relationships among service quality dimensions in the developed quality framework. Specifically, the relationship between leadership, resource measurement, people management, process management and customer satisfaction.Originality/valueThe research shows that developing a measurement instrument is an important step in assessing an organisation's actual or perception of quality and assessing customer's perception is one way to improve service quality.

A New Business Excellence Model with Business Integrity from Ancient Confucian Thinking

In this fast-paced world, companies are always trying to find quick solutions, and will focus almost entirely on financial results. However, such undue emphasis on profits makes companies pursue profits with no regard for the means employed. Although this is not necessarily bad, an equally important ingredient to business excellence is seemingly taking the back seat – business integrity. Instilling Confucian thinking into a company can correct the problem because employees will know how to behave appropriately in every situation. A successful company is much like a marathon runner – quite different from a short-distance sprinter – in which integrity is valued. This study has demonstrated the importance of business integrity and turned to Confucius thinking for concrete steps. We also developed a conceptual Confucian business excellence (BE) model and compared it with Kanji's BE model. Confucian thinking is parallel to Kanji's BE model, yet still maintains its uniqueness. These findings can provide concrete principles for companies striving for business excellence.

Measuring performance in the healthcare field: A multiple stakeholders' perspective

This paper aims at measuring performance in a healthcare organization by utilizing Kanji's Business Excellence Model, which uses a multidisciplinary integrated systems approach. It also aims at identifying opportunities for improvement in the organizational performance, as a result of the study. The study is a quantitative cross-sectional survey, which measures non-financial performance of a 400-bed government hospital. Systematic stratified random samples of patients and staff constituting of 250 subjects each, were selected and interviewed. The instruments used in the surveys were structured questionnaires based on quality principles and Joint Commission International Standards. Clinical auditors performed a survey on a stratified random sample of 200 patient records using a structured questionnaire. A self-assessment survey to measure the performance adopting accreditation body approach was conducted by 60 hospital staff. The results showed that great opportunities for improvement are available. Hospital patients and families seemed very much satisfied with the hospital services. While the leadership seems to focus on its external customers, not enough efforts are exerted to satisfy the needs and expectations of its internal customers. Measurement findings based on accreditation bodies' approach showed that the hospital is lacking far behind the international standards. Findings of clinical auditors indicated better results mainly due to documentation practices.

Knowledge management and its relationship with TQM

With product life-cycles shortening and technologies becoming increasingly imitable, organization knowledge emerges as a major source of competitive advantage. Although Knowledge Management (KM) has promised to provide superb benefits, studies have showed that many are failing to exploit it. One of the main reasons is that people have no clear understanding of KM and knowledge. Accordingly, we have explored different KM perspectives – the object view and the process view, the tacit view and the explicit view – to clarify it. The object and process views explain how knowledge is generated through the cyclic interaction between knowledge stock and knowledge process flow. The tacit and the explicit views explain that there is no objective explicit knowledge independent of an individual's tacit knowledge. This points out the crucial role of human in KM. Moreover, we also propose that the full benefits of KM come from the third generation, which focuses on innovation. The first and second generation can only bring partial benefits that focus on gains from efficiencies and synergies. Based on Kanji's business excellence model, we compare the similarities and differences between KM and TQM. The similarities include: results orientation, people-based management, teamwork, leadership and delighting the customer. The differences consist of continuous improvement and management by fact, because KM focuses more on building a culture to support knowledge generation and sharing. We argue that both can complement one another if properly planned.

A new business excellence model from an old Indian philosophy

This paper shows how the 300 BC Indian Vedanta (the ancient Indian scripture) philosophy can be adopted for the improvement of modern business excellence activities. In doing so, the Vedanta Model for Business and its incorporation into the Kanji Business Excellence Model is discussed. The universal application of the model in every sector of business is also described. Various components of Vedanta are looked at and their applications in business excellence are discussed.

Leadership for excellence in the Portuguese municipalities: Critical success factors, measurements and improvement strategies

There is a large consensus in the literature that leadership is the most critical aspect for successful implementation of TQM (Dale et al. , 1997; Deming, 1986; Oakland, 1999; Senge, 1990; Zairi, 1995, 1999) and, ultimately, to achieve organizational excellence. Therefore, leadership is the prime aspect of Kanji's Business Excellence Model (KBEM) (Kanji, 1998). Given the criticality of leadership, a new model for measuring leadership excellence was developed (Kanji & Sá, 2001), based on an extensive literature review. This model, which expands the concept of leadership embedded in KBEM, was empirically tested and validated in the Portuguese municipalities. A brief analysis of key leadership responsibilities in implementing TQM initiatives (Dale et al. , 1997; Darling, 1999; Dering, 1998; Prabhu & Robson, 2000a, 2000b; Senge, 1990; Zairi, 1999) points to the need to develop new leadership profiles in the public sector (Hartley & Allison, 2000; Korac-Kakabadse & Korac-Kakabadse, 1998; Morgan & Murgatroyd, 1994; Rago, 1996; Skelcher, 1992) and in the local government in particular (Gabris et al. , 2000; Gaster, 1996; Jones, 1999; West et al. , 1993). The leadership model developed incorporates the critical success factors thus identified. Based on these constructs, measurement scales were created and the resulting questionnaire administered to the Portuguese municipalities. Eighty-five municipalities participated in the study. The paper reports the main results of this application, which broadly confirm the structure of proposed model and demonstrate that the leadership roles and competencies identified have, in fact, a positive impact on leadership excellence. From the findings, possible improvement strategies are discussed.

Performance measurement system

This paper explains the importance of measuring performance and presents the Kanji Business Excellence Measurement System (KBEMS). An overview of performance measurement reveals that traditional systems have several drawbacks and do not fully support business excellence. KBEMS overcomes some of the limitations of current performance measurement systems and responds to the main requisites of a good performance system. Its criteria, which combine the fundamentals of Kanji's Business Excellence Model (KBEM) (see Kanji, 1998, 2002) and Kanji's Business Scorecard (KBS) see Kanji & Moura e S´a, 2002), will be presented in some detail and the methodology behind its development and application discussed. The performance measurement system proposed is the basis of a new certification scheme that aims to demonstrate that an organization is following the Critical Success Factors (CSFs) and developing adequate measurement methodologies to check progress and drive improvement. Kanji-certification is briefly discussed, which shows whether an organization has in place a comprehensive and reliable performance measurement system, based on the CSFs of organizational excellence. Moreover, it demonstrates whether the organization is measuring performance not only from an internal perspective, but also from the views of its stakeholders. Finally, an example is presented that shows how KBEMS can be used to measure performance.

Kanji's Business Scorecard

The Balanced Scorecard was first devised by Kaplan and Norton (1992, Harvard Business Review , January-February, pp. 71-79) as a measurement framework that was expected to overcome some of the deficiencies of traditional performance systems. It gives a holistic view of the organization by simultaneously looking at four important perspectives (financial, customer, internal processes, innovation and learning). Apart from being a measurement framework, the Balanced Scorecard achieved recognition as a strategic management system. The new approach to performance measurement suggested in the Balanced Scorecard is consistent with the initiatives under way in many companies: cross-functional integration, continuous improvement, customer-supplier partnerships and team rather than individual accountability. In this sense, it fits well into the quality management philosophy, embracing some of the business excellence principles of Kanji's Business Excellence Model. Nevertheless, the Balanced Scorecard, as presented by Kaplan and Norton, is not without limitations. The causality links suggested among the four perspectives are particularly problematic and ambiguous. Additionally, it fails to recognize explicitly the contributions of important stakeholders, such as employees and suppliers. Taking into account the potentialities and limitations of the traditional Balanced Scorecard, we propose the development of a new framework integrating the elements of Kanji's Business Excellence Model and taking advantage of the strengths of its sound methodological support. The Business Scorecard may be improved by integrating the total quality management principles and critical success factors that constitute Kanji's Business Excellence Model. The Kanji's Business Scorecard we present in this paper is not only a conceptual model, but also a measurement model. Furthermore, Kanji's approach has the potential to give a deeper understanding of how achievements in the different areas feed each other to form a cycle of continuous improvement. Finally, the implementation of Kanji's Business Scorecard can help organizations to develop, cascade and implement a strategy for business excellence.

Kanji's Business Scorecard

The balanced scorecard was first devised by Kaplan and Norton (1992, Harvard Business Review, Jan.–Feb., pp. 71-79) as a measurement framework that was expected to overcome some of the deficiencies of traditional performance systems. It gives a holistic view of the organization by simultaneously looking at four important perspectives (financial, customer, internal processes, innovation and learning). Apart from being a measurement framework, the balanced scorecard achieved recognition as a strategic management system. The new approach to performance measurement suggested in the balanced scorecard is consistent with the initiatives under way in many companies: cross-functional integration, continuos improvement, customer–supplier partnerships and team rather than individual accountability. In this sense, it fits well into the quality management philosophy, embracing some of the business excellence principles of Kanji's Business Excellence Model. Nevertheless, the balanced scorecard, as presented by Kaplan and Norton, is not without limitations. The causality links suggested among the four perspectives are particularly problematic and ambiguous. Additionally, it fails to recognize explicitly the contributions of important stakeholders, such as employees and suppliers. Taking into account the potentialities and limitations of the traditional balanced scorecard, we propose the development of a new framework integrating the elements of Kanji's Business Excellence Model (Kanji, 1998, Total Quality Management, 9, pp. 633-643) and taking advantage of the strengths of its sound methodological support. The business scorecard may be improved by integrating the total quality management principles and critical success factors that constitute Kanji's Business Excellence Model. The Kanji's Business Scorecard (KBS) we present in this paper is not only a conceptual model, but also a measurement model. Furthermore, Kanji's approach has the potential to give a deeper understanding of how achievements in the different areas feed each other to form a cycle of continuous improvement. Finally, the implementation of KBS can help organizations to develop, cascade and implement a strategy for business excellence.

Measuring leadership excellence

In Kanji's Business Excellence Model leadership plays the prime role for the creation of excellence in an organization. In this paper, we investigate why leadership is the prime and how leadership excellence converges from the core values of the organization. In order to do so, we start by discussing the concept of leadership and reviewing the main theories developed in its study. Then, we identify the fundamental competencies of leaders in a quality organization. Supported by an extensive literature review, we propose a structural equation model for leadership. To illustrate its application, we present a simplified example. Given the criticality of leadership, the emergence of a model that expands the understanding of the leadership construct and its measurement is of major importance for organizations to pursue business excellence. The purpose of this paper is to make a significant contribution in this regard and open the debate to further discussions and refinements.

Forces of excellence in Kanji’s Business Excellence Model

Forces of Excellence is transforming the way we work with low cost opportunities to quickly expand markets globally and deliver better, more personalized customer service. The challenge for Business Excellence today is to turn the organization's vision into reality. The task is to build a highly and well integrated Total Quality Management base in order to utilize the critical success factors of the organization. Organizations that have achieved a higher level of Business Excellence have demonstrated very high growth in their customer base, thus improving overall profitability and stakeholders values. Whatever the size of the organization, the time has come for them to make real sense of Business Excellence. Here, the Business Excellence approach will depend on its competitive landscape, strategy, objectives and resources. The Forces of Excellence will guide them in the right direction to achieve excellence. In this paper, the author discusses Kanji's Business Excellence Model as an index and provides the route to Business Excellence through Total Quality Management Framework.

Business Excellence model for supply chain management

Supply chain management (SCM) has been increasingly adopted by companies worldwide so as to utilize better their supply chain activities for competitive advantages. This paper reviews the relationships between total quality management (TQM) and SCM and concludes that existing SCM models have inadequacies which can be enriched by TQM principles and concepts. The authors selected Kanji's Business Excellence model, which uses TQM principles and concepts to help companies achieve business excellence, to fulfil the inadequacies of the existing SCM models and to create a new structured model for SCM. The model was tested with the data using the supply chain activities of 139 companies in Hong Kong. The results support that the structured model provides a good fit for the supply chain activities. Business excellence indices, which can be obtained for companies' SCM, can be further developed based on this new model.