What is Business Excellence?

Whether you are a Chief Executive, Senior Leader, Business Owner or Business Advisor, using a world-class proven management framework in your business will help you gain a better understanding of your organisation’s strengths — and opportunities for improvement. In turn this guides your planning and delivery efforts for business success, ensuring alignment throughout your organisation.

We call this approach ‘Business Excellence’ as it:

• Guides your organisation towards a desired future;
• Improves your abilities and that of your team to think and act strategically;
• Improves alignment between strategy, processes and resources;
• Engages your workforce and customers;
• Improves key business results, and;
• Provides a real return on investment.

Using a Business Excellence approach has assisted thousands of organisations around the world for more than 20 years. Taking a Business Excellence approach is not something extra, it’s designed to be integrated into what you already do or should do. It gives you a roadmap for your activities, helps you set your priorities and ensures your efforts are taking your organisation forward.

How do you apply it?

By adopting a business improvement framework!

There are a range of these throughout the world including; EFQM in Europe, and ABEF in Australia. The New Zealand Business Excellence Foundation utilises the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence (CPE) from the USA as it is an internationally calibrated, proven framework which is reviewed by business leaders every two years.

The Baldrige framework reflects all the characteristics of leading international organisations. The fact that it’s generic, holistic and non-prescriptive allows other business improvement tools to work in harmony with the Criteria, acting as an overarching guide for business improvement.

The Criteria for Performance Excellence don’t tell you which process to use, but allows you to identify where you may need a process.

We are able to provide real New Zealand examples of success in applying the CPE using tools such as ISO, Lean, Six Sigma and the Balanced Scorecard, as well as sector audit tools, to address specific and near sighted business needs. A key strength of the CPE is the alignment between the various benefits of an organisation and getting results. This is an area that many organisations struggle to address effectively, potentially compromising their continuous improvement efforts. The framework is reflective of key business functions found in any organisation. All the functions interact and align with one another in cause and effect relationships — which is the key to gaining total business excellence.

What are the criteria for Business Excellence?

The purpose of the Criteria is simply to help your organisation — no matter its size, sector or industry — answer three questions:

• Is your organisation doing as well as it could?
• How do you know?
• What and how should your organisation improve or change?

By challenging yourself with the questions that make up the Criteria you explore how you are accomplishing what is important to your organisation. The questions (divided into six interrelated process categories and a results category) represent seven critical aspects of managing and performing as an organisation:

1. Leadership. How do your senior leaders lead the organisation, and how do you govern your organisation and fulfill your societal responsibilities
2. Strategy and planning. How do you develop and implement your strategy?
3. Customers. How do you obtain information from your customers and how do you engage customers by serving their needs and building relationships?
4. Measurement, analysis and knowledge management. How do you measure, analyse and then improve organisational performance, and how do you manage your organisational knowledge assets, information and information technology infrastructure?
5. Workforce. How do you build an effective and supportive workforce environment, and how do you engage your workforce to achieve a high performance work environment?
6. Operations. How do you design, manage and improve your key products and work processes, and how do you ensure effective management of your operations?
7. Results. What are the results for each of the categories above in other words, how do you know what you say you are doing is working?

Criteria for Performance Excellence framework

The Criteria looks at the linkages between the various elements of your business as shown in the following diagram.

Some examples of these linkages are: the connections between your processes and the results you achieve; the need for data in the strategic planning process and for improving operations; the connection between workforce planning and strategic planning; the need for customer and market knowledge in establishing your strategy and action plans; and the connection between your action plans and any changes needed in your operations.

Ian Ris
General Manager, NZBEF