Background

Business Excellence (BE) involves enhancing an organisation's management systems and processes to boost performance and stakeholder value. It goes beyond a quality system, aiming for excellence in leadership, strategy, customer focus, information management, people and operations, to ultimately achieve Performance Excellence (PE) and deliver superior business results.

Purpose

Utilising a diagnostic framework based on Malcolm Baldridge’s Model and the EFQM Model to assess an organisation’s management systems and processes to identify strengths (to build upon) and opportunities for improvement (for action).

Objectives

• Assess the maturity of key processes and results, identifying Strengths and Opportunities for Improvement
• Identify good practices that can help deliver organisational goals
• Propose recommendations to increase efficiency & effectiveness and to drive improvement

Structure

The assessment is split into four phases, with stage-gates to be achieved between each phase:

Initiation

• Establish customer objectives & expectations of the assessment
• Confirm key inputs and outputs (from each phase)
• Agree high-level assessment plan

Understanding

• Provision of documents and data by the customer
• Desktop assessment of the inputs by assessors
• Introductory conversations to confirm business understanding

Assessment

• Agreement of key themes to investigate deeper
• On-site visit and interactions between cross-section of the organisation and assessors
• Detailed assessment of processes and results

Feedback

• Post site visit review and preparation of feedback report, (detailing “strengths” to celebrate success and “opportunities for improvement” for recommended action)
• Delivery of feedback report to key stakeholders
• Action planning discussion / workshop

Administration

1. The duration of the assessment is highly dependent on the scale of the organisation and customer expectations. From experience, assessment can vary in length from 4 weeks to 6 months. 
2. It is expected that the assessors have access to the entire organisation, without limits on who they can interact with directly or indirectly.
3. Conversations held during the assessment are confidential and individuals will not be named within the feedback.
4. During the Initiation phase, it will be agreed whether interactions with Suppliers and Customers are within scope.
5. Stage gate criteria must be achieved prior to commencement of subsequent assessment phases, unless specific concessions are agreed upfront.

Participant Feedback 

“It was a very different experience to that of a regular audit – there was no pass or fail, instead it was an open and positive experience.  The assessment covered the full scope of our operations, not just a focused area.”

“The assessment gave us a timely reminder of some of the things we do well. As a site we know that we can do better and are always looking for areas of improvement, but we shouldn’t ignore the steps we’ve already taken. As appropriate, the opportunities will be incorporated into our forthcoming annual plan.”

Assessors

The assessment is conducted by Gareth Symons and Keith Steel, who are experienced BE professionals, trained within the multi-national Tata Group. Both have conducted BE assessments for many Tata companies, internationally and across multiple industry sectors. They were also responsible for training hundreds of BE assessors and practitioners for Tata in Europe from 2015 through to 2023.

Furthermore, should additional resource or expertise be required during the assessment, Gareth and Keith can utilise their extensive network of subject matter experts, built up over 30+ years to support the process.