Analysis Of The Malcomb Baldrige National Quality Award

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In the mid 1980s, and into the 1990s, business leaders realized that a renewed focus on quality was required to continue to compete in an expanding global market. (NIST, 2010) Consequently, several strategic frameworks were developed for managing, and measuring organizational performance. Among them were the Malcomb Baldrige National Quality Award, which was created by and act of congress and signed into law by the President in 1987, and The Balanced Scorecard, which is a performance management tool that was born out of research conducted in the late 1980s and early 1990s by Robert S. Kaplan, and David P. Norton published in 1996 (Kaplan, 1996). Initially the renewed emphasis on quality management systems was a reaction to the LEAN approach
Two of these limitations are that there are no basic guidelines for selecting performance measures, and that feedback from the financial perspective to the customer and process perspectives is unnecessarily complex (Dror, 2008).
The Malcolm Baldridge Performance Excellence process
The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award is recognized as an extraordinary means for for-profit, not-for-profit, educational, and healthcare organizations to improve organizational performance and competitiveness. The Baldrige criteria provide a structured approach to achieve performance excellence and an ideal set of performance and quality criteria toward which an organization should continuously strive. The criteria are used to help organizations assess their improvement efforts and to diagnose their overall performance management system (Byrne, 2003).
The Baldrige criteria address seven major categories, each with sub-criteria and allocated points. In the Business Criteria for Performance Excellence, these categories are:
1. Leadership: How upper management leads the organization toward best
Process management: How the organization designs and improves key processes.
7. Organizational performance results: How the organization performs in all key business areas, including customer satisfaction, financial performance, human resources, partner performance, operational performance, governance and social responsibility. (ASQ, n.d.)
The criteria are designed to work in an integrated way to achieve a system of performance excellence. For example: Leadership; Strategic Planning; and Customer and Market Focus, link together to emphasize the importance of leaderships ' focus on strategy and customer satisfaction (Shields, 2013). The criteria are written as a series of questions that can help an organization to gain knowledge of itself.
Critics of the Baldrige process say that criteria are too focused on business results and not focused enough on quality. As it stands, the customer and market focus category counts for 450 of the criteria’s possible 1,000 points. (Schonberger, 2001) Richard Schonberger, president of Schonberger and Associates, a performance management consulting firm, argues that “the category of business results shouldn’t be in the criteria at all” (Schonberger, 2001).
Conclusion – Apples and

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