Baldrige Assessment

Challenge 

Are your customers and competitors driving a need to change? Do you want to refocus your organization on common improvement goals?  Or, is your organization among the best and you want to make sure you stay that way?   

Responding effectively to change is a key to business survival. Unfortunately, most organizations find it difficult to determine where to focus their limited improvement resources to achieve maximum business gains. They simply don’t know how well their organization is performing, or at least how well their performance stacks up relative to key competitors or other relevant benchmarks.  

One way of determining comparative performance is to conduct benchmarking studies to search for best practices outside your organization.  These studies are helpful, but limited in scope and often resource intensive.  Or, a more effective way is to evaluate your processes against standards of performance excellence that reflect leading edge business practices. By far the best such standard is the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence. 

Solution 

Baldrige Assessments can provide an impetus for learning, a stimulus for growth, and a trigger for action. Our consultants are experts in helping organizations understand the Criteria and in facilitating all types of self-assessments.  These include “arm-chair” assessments with the leadership team, category team assessments enhanced by examiner training, and third party assessments performed by our consultants using a process of interviews, site visits and documentation reviews.  

Approach 

Our six step assessment process makes conducting an assessment relatively easy for our clients.  We do all the work in translating the Baldrige Criteria and making it relevant to the organization, helping with the scoring and quantification of performance, and providing step-by-step guidance throughout the assessment. Our clients need only bring their knowledge of the business and an open mind.  

Key to all our assessments is the final step of developing the Management Action Plan (MAP).  The MAP translates the assessment findings into prioritized improvement actions.  It also gives management a means for tracking progress and ensuring that the targeted gains are achieved.  

 

Results 

With our support, conducting a Baldrige Assessment will provide an analytical basis for your management decisions.  Knowing how each key process in the organization is performing relative to competitors and benchmarks gives your senior management much more control.  While they might not always like what they see, they now have the information and motivation to increase competitiveness by closing these performance gaps.  

Our structured assessment process ends with a Management Action Plan and significant improvement.  It’s not just a cost of doing business, but a true business result.  

On a broader scale, our self-assessment process will:  

p      Jump start change initiatives

p      Energize improvement efforts, and

p      Focus the organization on common improvement goals

We were extremely pleased with the quality of DeBaylo Associates’ work. In a very short time, they were   able to make very comprehensive, insightful recommendations which demonstrated the depth and breadth of  their experience. The project itself was a big success and we continue to implement the recommendations; they will serve us for a number of years.”                                               Wynne Van Thoen, Diversified Investment Advisors