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The Criteria for Performance Excellence provide organizations with an integrated, results-oriented framework for implementing and assessing processes for managing all operations. These Criteria are also the basis for making Awards and providing feedback to applicants. The Criteria consist of a broadly-defined organizational profile and specific areas to address in seven Categories. Examiners trained in these same Criteria produce a comprehensive feedback report detailing an organization's most critical good practices ("strengths") and the areas most urgently needing to be addressed ("opportunities for improvement") for all Criteria Items:
P: Organizational Profile (0 points)
A snapshot of your organization, including a description of its main products and services, organizational culture, workforce, regulatory environment, stakeholder groups, suppliers, partnerships, collaborations, competitors, performance improvement system, and other essential characteristics about the organization and the forces that drive and influence it. Although the Organizational Profile is worth no points, information supplied in this section of the application provides a critical context in which responses to Criteria requirements in all other areas to address can be evaluated.
Category 1: Leadership (120 points)
The company's leadership system, values, expectations, and public responsibilities. This section asks (among other things) who senior leaders are and how they set and communicate organizational vision and values, promote an ethcial and learning-friendly environment, ensure organizatioal ethical behavior and sustainability, engage the workforce, create a focus on action to address organizational objectives and challenges, demonstrate accountability, address adverse impacts of products and services, and support key communities.
Category 2: Strategic Planning (85 points)
The effectiveness of strategic and business planning and deployment of plans, with a strong focus on customer and operational performance requirements. Among the requirements of this Category is an explanation as to how strategic objectives are linked to opportunities for innovation in products, services, operations, and the business model. Other areas to address call for alignment and synthesis across the organization in strategic objectives, strategic challenges, strategic plans, action plans, resources, and human resource plans.
Category 3: Customer and Market Focus (85 points)
How the company determines customer and market requirements and expectations, enhances relationships with customers, and determines their satisfaction. The Criteria require the identification and differentiation of specific customer segments, and the voice of the customer, including measures of satisfaction and dissatisfaction drives improvement to customer-related processes.
Category 4: Measurement, Analysis and Knowledge Management (90 points)
The effectiveness of information collection and analysis to support customer-driven performance excellence and marketplace success. It's not enough to collect data—does your organiuzation actually use that information to evaluate and improve performance and the design of key processes, including strategic planning? The Criteria also require organizations to ensure the quality of software and hardware according to several specific attributes.
Category 5: Workforce Focus (85 points)
The success of efforts to realize the full potential of the workforce to create a high performance organization. This Category reflects a strategic veiw of workforce management, going beyond motivation and career development to focus on workforce engagement, capability, and capacity. High-performing organizations extend their thinking in new and creative ways to optimize their return on workforce investment.
Category 6: Process Management (85 points)
The effectiveness of systems and processes for ensuring the quality of products and services. The Criteria ask you specifically how you determine your core competencies and how these are reflected in the design of your work systems. There's also an important emphasis on innovation in the core design and management of work processes.
Category 7: Results (450 points)
Performance results, trends, and comparison to competitors or benchmarks in key business areas: leadership, products and services, customer satisfaction, financial and market performance, workforce, suppliers and partners, and operations. Results are evaluated according to their direct relevance to key processes described in Categories 1–6 in terms of levels, trends, comparisons to relevant competitors or benchmarks, and integration.
More information about the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence can be found on the National Baldrige Quality Program's website. Copies of the Criteria are also available from the WFA office. Call us at (608) 663-5300 or e-mail us for details.
Every odd-numbered year, the Baldrige National Quality Program performs significant revision to the Criteria in order to reflect current best practices and high performance models. WFA Judge and instructor Jane Rada developed this cross-walk highlighting changes to the Health Care Criteria from 2006 to 2007; very simiar changes apply as well to the Business/Nonprofit and Education Criteria.
About Malcolm Baldrige and the Baldrige National Quality Award
Malcolm Baldrige was President Reagan’s commerce secretary from 1981 to 1987. During his tenure, Baldrige played a major role in developing the administration’s trade and antitrust policy and was a proponent of quality management as a key to the country’s economic prosperity. An accomplished rodeo team roper and inductee in the National Cowboy Hall of Fame, Baldrige died July 25, 1987 in a rodeo accident in California. He was one of the longest-serving commerce secretaries in history.
To honor his memory, Congress in 1987 created the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. Baldrige had long taken a personal interest in the quality improvement act that was eventually named after him and helped draft one of its early versions. Principal support for the program comes from the Foundation for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, established in 1988.
The award is meant to recognize U.S. organizations for their achievements in quality and performance and to raise awareness about the importance of quality and performance excellence as a competitive edge. Today, the Baldrige award is considered the most prestigious quality management awards in US business and industry.
The Wisconsin Forward program is honored to model its annual review and award process after the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award program and strives to uphold the ideals and rigor of the Baldrige process.
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