In this issue, I will share my experience acquired from the conglomerate and its operating companies.. For the purpose of this article, I will articulate the Customer Driven Excellence which is one of the eleven core values and concepts used in Malcolm Baldrige Criteria. As before, I will use case studies to show how some of the companies implement them.

To recap, below are the Eleven Core Values and Concepts of Baldrige Criteria:-

Visionary Leadership | Customer-Driven Excellence | Organizational and Personal Learning | Valuing Employees and Partners | Agility | Focus on the Future |Managing for Innovation | Management by Fact | Public Responsibility and Citizenship | Focus on Results and Creating Value | Systems Perspective

Articulated Customer-Driven Excellence Meeting customer requirement in quality of product and services is the key focus in this Values and Concepts. Organization must take the attempt to understand customer requirements such that there are understood and the same are well communicated to the employee of the organization to ensure its fulfillment along the customer-supply chain.

Customer-Driven Excellence means continuous improvement in the quality standards of the product and services by reduction of defects and errors beyond the specifications. An effective service recovery system must put in placed in order to retain and build customer relationship. Besides product and services, Customer Driven Excellence also strive for differentiation of other customer-supplier relationship offerings. It must a be strategic move to use Customer-Driven Excellence to satisfy customer for the purpose of long term customer retention and royalty. In order to upkeep the effort in Customer Driven Excellence, organization must keep current with the environmental. And business changes that effect customers buy habits.

Case Study on Customer-Driven Excellence Most of the operating companies claimed to attain Customer-Driven Excellence merely by focusing on meeting customer needs. By the articulated Customer-Driven Excellence, the effort must yield customer satisfaction and increase in market share. By that, it will mean fulfilling all if not most customer promises in product and services.

Key Performance Indicators are established to indicate the above, but meeting the target is far from reaching. Concerted effort to meet the target in Customer-Driven Excellence is apparent in most companies I worked with.

Issues with Customer-Driven Excellence Despite the effort to strive for Customer-Driven Excellence, it is dampen by eroding profit due to pricing erosion in the market. Since the profit margin reduced, effort to improve the Customer related KPI is put on hold or reduce it scale of implementation.. At time, priority for improvement changes due to capital investments..

Opportunity for Improvement Build Continuous Improvement of product and services as a culture across the company would yield big cumulative improvement over time. Although this way of improvement seems slow and small as compared to re-engineering type of improvement, it does not cause big investment in most case. Leaders of company should take the opportunity to understand the Continuous Improvement Methodology and drive this initiative personally until it becomes a culture. Without leaders involvement, sustaining this initiative will be questionable.

In summary, having understood the effect of Customer-Driven Excellence in Values and Concepts of Malcolm Baldrige, Leaders might benchmark their CEO of Baldrige Winners on their TQM successes in this value. My next article will articulate the next Core Values and Concepts in Organizational and Personal Learning

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Disclaimer All rights reserved. This article is written by the author based on his practical application experience. All definitions and interpretation of terminology are his point of view and has it has no intention to conflict with experts in similar topic. The author holds no responsibility for the use of this article in any way. Full Baldrige Criteria are available athttp://www.nist.gov/quality

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Resource Box: About the Author, LM Foong

The author holds a MBA major in TQM. He is an expert in Malcolm Baldrige Business Framework and Baldrige Assessment and TQM Implementations in manufacturing and service sector. He facilitates workshops and Cost Reduction and Productivity Improvement projects. He publishes TQM articles, ebooks, case studies, trainer manual and presentation slides available at More TQM Articles or Please Visit my Web Site

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