Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award

Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award

The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award was established in 1987 (August 20,1987) by the U.S. Congress. The main purpose to create this award was to recognize U.S. organizations for their achievements in quality and business performance and to raise awareness about the importance of quality and performance excellence as a competitive advantage.

Its criteria and assessment tools are designed to help identify organizational strengths and areas for improvement. The data generated by the assessments are then used to establish continuous improvement opportunities leading to performance excellence.

The two primary goals of the Baldrige Award are customer satisfaction and improvement of the overall organizational performances. Therefore, for many organizations, using the criteria results in better employee relations, higher productivity, greater customer satisfaction, increased market share and improved profitability.

The award criteria reflect the following seven categories:

For a general overview of the content of each criteria, you may have a look at the link:

Updates of the Award

The criteria are updated yearly with major overhauls occurring every two years. The last revision is dated from 2001.

Actually the criteria continue to evolve, seeking to enhance coverage of strategy-driven performance, address the needs of all stakeholders, and accommodate important changes in business needs and practices.

In addition the Criteria emphasizes the roles of data, information, and information and knowledge management and their use in business.

The Organizational profile, the criteria items and the scoring guidelines have been aligned so that the assessment addresses both changing business needs/directions and ongoing evaluation/improvement of key processes. Both are important because prioritized process improvement ("doing things better") and addressing changing needs ("doing the right business things") are critical to success in an increasingly competitive environment.

In order to get more details about the main changes in each criteria, move cursor on the desired one on the following graph

The scoring guidelines have been modified to highlight the importance of addressing evaluation and improvement, as well as changing business needs

The percentage emphasis of Baldrige Award Criteria can be represented as follows:

Comparison with ISO 9000:2000 :

The similarities between TQM and the Baldrige criteria are no accident: both depend upon the thinking of Edwards Deming.

Both the Baldrige criteria and ISO9000:2000 are customer, process and continuous improvement oriented.

All interchangeably use, strongly support, encourage and potentially involve many of the common quality tools.

But of course, ISO 9001:2000 and the Baldrige criteria have their differences:

ISO 9001:2000 appears to be detail, document and technically oriented where, in contrast, the Baldrige criteria tend to sound as if they were written by management consultants.

There are main differences in the administration. Actually any organization can be registered to in the ISO 9000 standards as long as its various operating functions conform to the requirements of the standard. But this system does not work with Baldrige criteria. For example a company may lose its registration to ISO 9000 if it does not fit any more the requirements but it will never lose its award�

Although the Baldrige criteria have had and continue to have a profound respect on the ISO 9001:2000 revision, the weaknesses of the current revision are, in essence, the strengths of the Baldrige criteria:

There is no requirement or set of requirements to measure the impact of the ISO 9001:2000 system on organizational or business unit marketing or financial and profitability results

There is no requirement or set of requirements to measure the impact of the ISO 9000:2000 system on overall strategic planning or vice versa.