What’s Business Excellence?

It’s not just getting a set of procedures you can follow religiously every time; or making sure you have an efficient supply chain; or sending out customer questionnaires periodically. Or any other one exercise in Quality Management.

Many companies have a range of quality initiatives on the go. This seems the right thing to do - things pop up which clearly need addressing: so deal with them. What’s wrong with that?

We answer with two further questions:

1. Why are you waiting for things to go wrong? The potential risks to your business are enormous.
2. Are you sure that the things which you see are wrong are actually the real issues for your company?

The Excellence Model from the EFQM gets you to look as a matter of course at all the things which make a company tick, including re-appraising why you are there at all. Only when you do that can you decide where you should be headed, what your priorities are (as a commercial business and as an organisation with many different interests), and what yopu should be concentrating on next.

The Model has 9 main Criteria to be examined:

1. Leadership
2. Policy & Strategy
3. People
4. Partnerships & Resources
5. Processes
6. Customer Results
7. People Results
8. Society Results
9. Key Performance Results

You can see that the first five get you to define what are termed ‘Enablers’ - those things which, if done well, will make your business efficient and effective in meeting its objectives. The last four are Results, obliging you to examine your actual results against the criteria defined in your Enablers.

As a consequence you are forced to look at your company as whole. Only then can you be sure you have all you need to deicde what to do next.

The Model process works equally well for an entire organisation as for a self-contained unit within it. The process is run by the people at the top of the organisation, not an individually nominated ‘Quality Manager’.

EFQM is a non-profit organisation, setting standards Europe-wide. Of course, the agencies like us which support you in the use of the Model are not non-profit. The Model is primarily a self-assessment regime. We provide training in understanding and use of the Model, the Workbooks and documents to use, and support in your self-assessment sessions.

The results of the assessments are the primary objective of the effort, and will tell you all you need to know about how to proceed. There is an optional scoring and Award programme.

To find out more contact us or go to the Useful Links and click on EFQM.