Our research project is now live. We appreciate the assistance of all Business Excellence Award Winners and Applicants to complete the survey by 31 January 2021.

Key benefits of your participation:

1. Answering the survey questions will help you to reflect on your existing BE approach and assess the effectiveness of your BE structure.
2. As a participating organisation, you will receive a report of the findings enabling you to learn from best practices on how to introduce and accelerate your BE journey.

It is important that the person who completes this survey can accurately reflect the views of your organisation. The survey will take approximately 30 minutes to complete and all data collected from this survey will remain confidential and anonymous. Published work will only show aggregated data across all organisations surveyed and not identify the names of the people or organisations completing the survey.

For further information refer to our previous article on the project Calling all Business Excellence Award Winners and Applicants – An Opportunity to Participate in Leading-Edge Research on Achieving & Sustaining Performance Excellence (bpir.com).

By Saad Ghafoor and Dr. Robin Mann, Centre for Organisational Excellence Research, January 2021.

The Centre for Organisational Excellence Research (COER) recently updated its research on the number of active Business Excellence (BE) awards in the world with inclusion of two BE awards in Russia.

Eligibility of an award to be considered as an active BE award

BE awards were considered as “active” if:

• they were based on a holistic BE framework and use similar assessment methods to internationally recognised frameworks such as the EFQM Excellence Model and the Baldrige Excellence Framework;
• the award was run/held in 2018 or 2019 or planned for 2020 or 2021.

Figure 1: The current EFQM Excellence Model

Figure 2: The current Baldrige Excellence Framework

To review the countries that have BE awards or initiatives click here. Please inform us if our information on your country’s award is incorrect or missing.

The graph below shows the most common BE models for BE awards. Whilst there are 57 countries with active awards there are 69 BE awards in total, some countries have more than one national award and there are also four international awards covering more than one country, these are Africa (Africa Excellence Award), Asia Pacific Quality Organisation (APQO), EFQM Excellence Award, and Iberoamerican Excellence Award (FUNDIBEC).

The graph shows that the EFQM Excellence Model is the most popular with 26 BE awards using it. Another 5 BE awards use unique BE models that resemble the EFQM Excellence Model. The Baldrige Excellence Framework is used by 10 BE awards with another 11 using BE frameworks that resemble the Baldrige Excellence Framework. The Government Excellence Model (GEM) was developed in the UAE and used at the Federal level for BE awards for Ministries and in Abu Dhabi and Dubai for awards to government entities, it is also used in Egypt. Thirteen BE awards use a unique BE model/ framework.

The latest update in the list of active BE awards is the inclusion of two BE awards from Russia. The Russian Government Quality Award is an annual award with up to 12 prizes. Up to three prizes are awarded to organisations with 250 or fewer employees, up to three prizes for organisations with 250 to 1000 employees, and up to six prizes for organisations with more than 1000 employees. The award recipients are recognised through non-monetary prizes and diplomas from the Government of the Russian Federation as the examples of the best business process management practices in the country. The second BE award in Russia is the EFQM Excellence Award which is governed by the All-Russian Quality Organisation, who is the national partner of the EFQM in Russia.

The research on BE awards is part of a research study titled Excellence Without Borders (EWB) which was launched by COER in July 2018 and is supported by the Global Excellence Model Council. This research is investigating the current state of and best practices in designing BE frameworks/ models and promoting, facilitating, awarding, supporting, and measuring BE on a national/ regional and sectoral level.

A total of 26 countries (and 29 BE custodian organisations) have participated in the project. BE custodians are organisations responsible for designing BEFs, and for promoting facilitating BE and BE awards in their countries. Some countries had more than one BE custodian organisation participating in the project such as the Dubai Government Excellence Program (DGEP), Sheikh Khalifa Excellence Award (SKEA), and the Dubai Economy Department (DED) in the United Arab Emirates.

Initial EWB research findings are available here. Further findings are being made available through a series of academic research papers. It is envisaged that the research findings will lead to an improved understanding of BE and help BE Custodians to raise the profile and use of BE worldwide.

The article below describes the Centre for Organisational Excellence Research (COER)’s research on “Organisational Excellence Architecture”– the ingredients required to help organisations on the journey to business excellence. We are inviting Business Excellence Award Winners and Applicants to participate in this exciting research project and benefit from the research findings. If you are interested, please send me an email, and I will send you further details.

Atif Baig, Research Associate, COER, Massey University a.baig@massey.ac.nz

Organisational Excellence Architecture (OEA) – The concept that each Business Excellence practising organisation should know to attain an accelerated BE journey.

This article introduces a novel concept of Organisational Excellence Architecture (OEA) requisite to implement Business Excellence (BE). OEA refers to the formal structure used to assist in the implementation of BE within an organisation. This support structure may consist of roles/responsibilities, resources, processes, assessment tools and rewards and recognition system that organisations put in place to implement and accelerate BE journey. To further investigate the components and importance of OEA in accelerating BE journey, a new PhD research project has been initiated by the Centre for Organisational Excellence Research (COER) and Massey University, New Zealand. The outcome of the study will guide BE practicing organisations on ‘how to’ implement and fast-track their BE journey in a cost and time-efficient way. Participating organisations will contribute to this research by completing an online survey, followed by an optional structured interview. All participants will get a detailed report of this study which will help them to reflect on their existing OEA and to learn from the best practices on the successful implementation of BE. This research has support and approval of the Global Excellence Models (GEM) Council and Global Benchmarking Network (GBN).

Background:
Agility, innovation, continuous improvement, and sustainable competitiveness are among the most used buzzwords of today’s corporate world. Organisations, irrespective of their size, nature of business, geographical location, eagerly wish to embed these superior traits in their organisation’s DNA. Additionally, due to severe competition in all aspects of business activity, organisations are compelled to continuously improve their processes, products, and services to survive and lead in markets where they operate. In other words, these deliberate leadership efforts to become the best in all organisational activities is business excellence (BE). Excellence is defined by the Global Excellence Model (GEM) Council as the ‘continuous improvement of outcomes to all stakeholders’.

BE practices provide organisations with structured guidance that enable them to assess their competitive strengths, derive and deploy their strategic plans and most importantly, identify opportunities to learn. Furthermore, as a management practice, BE helps organisations in developing and strengthening their overall management systems continually for sustainable performance and ultimately create value for stakeholders. BE models (BEMs) were introduced in the late 1980s and serves as a platform to define, develop, assess and achieve strategic objectives. BEMs such as the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA), European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM), Australian Business Excellence Framework (ABEF) and their corresponding national awards provides a robust leadership and management system. BEMs help organisations to pursue Excellence and provide a platform to quantify and measure Excellence maturity. BE maturity can be explained as a state of a BE journey where organisations successfully embed Excellence in the organisations’ culture. A BE journey starts with an organisation’s informed decision towards quality and making firm commitments for Excellence. At the moment, there are 67 national quality awards (NQAs) used in 56 countries across the world.

Business Excellence Models and their significance
In the last three decades, BEMs and awards have contributed significantly to organisational performance. Key benefits of adopting any BEM includes; reputation, good governance, sustainability and profitability. BEM’s success, however, depends on how organisations implement their BE ambitions and integrate ‘continuous improvement’ and agile thinking in their organisational systems. Additionally, implementation of BE is dependent on the strategic and logistical design of the organisation, and therefore, without holistically considering these factors, achieving the required objectives would be difficult. Some of these factors would involve internal structure settings such as: setting up BE improvement teams or steering committees; internal processes including communication process on BE related activities, undertaking BE assessments and conducting regular staff training. Consequently, these initiatives lead towards achieving BE maturity.

Current state of BE implementation research and potential limitations
A comprehensive literature review was conducted to comprehend existing research and practices to support successful BE implementation. This review revealed that there is a significant scholarly focus on BE philosophy, BEMs’ history and evolution, BE application within different sectors and BE’s impact on organisational performance. However, surprisingly, no research was found that specifically investigated ‘how’ organisations implement and achieve BE maturity. Similarly, a review of BE award winners’ applications revealed sparse information on how BE was implemented with most award applications silent on organisational support structures and allocated resources to facilitate BE activities. These award applications were ambiguous on critical processes such as self-assessments, internal communication and reward and recognition schemes to encourage sustainable BE.
In summary, there is a significant research gap concerning the optimum organisational excellence architecture to implement and embed a sustainable BE culture.

Unpacking OEA – An Overview of the Research Project
The Centre for Organisational Excellence Research (COER), Massey University, New Zealand, has recently initiated an exciting research project on successful BE implementation. This research introduces a novel concept of organisational excellence architecture. OEA can be defined as the formal support structure used to implement BE within an organisation. The research aim is to investigate an optimum organisational infrastructure such as resources, internal supporting structure, processes and level assessment tools required to facilitate and accelerate the excellence journey to achieve maturity and a sustainable BE culture within the organisation. This study is an extension of COER’s existing research called “Excellence Without Borders (EWB)” and aims to examine global BE practices from an implementation perspective.

The main objectives of the proposed research are:

1. To define organisational excellence architecture (OEA) required to achieve business excellence at different stages of excellence journey.
2. To identify components of OEA.
3. To establish if OEA is dependent on certain factors such as BE maturity, industry, size, sector, and urgency to implement BE.
4. To develop a ‘how-to’ guide on OEA for each stage of the excellence journey.

Research Design
The research design for this project involves an intensive literature review, analysis of BE award winners’ submission reports, online surveys and (optional) structured interviews to develop a conceptual model of OEA. The online survey and structured interviews will help to understand the importance and current state of OEA from the participating BE organisations. Considering the high practical relevance of this research project, the GEM Council (which consists of organisations that are recognised globally as the guardians of premier excellence models and award processes), Global Benchmarking Network and New Zealand Business Excellence Foundation (NZBEF) has already approved and supporting the proposed project.

Invitation to participate in the research:
Organisations that have reached a high level of maturity with regards to business excellence (award applicants and winners) are invited to participate through completing the survey with an optional opportunity to participate in follow-up structured interviews. The survey will introduce OEA to the participants and obtain feedback on their respective OEA to drive a BE agenda within their organisations. The study will be launched in November 2020 with an online survey.

Key benefits for participating organisations:

1. Answering the survey questions will help organisations to reflect on their existing BE approach and assess the effectiveness of their respective BE structure.
2. All participating organisations will receive a report of the survey findings enabling them to learn from best practices on how to introduce and accelerate their BE journey.

How to participate in this research?
If your organisation is following BE practices and at a high level of maturity (award applicants and winners), please join and participate in this research. Please email your interest and any questions to Atif Baig at a.baig@massey.ac.nz, we will contact you accordingly.

Atif Baig is a Research Associate at the Centre for Organisational Excellence Research (COER), Massey University, New Zealand. He is currently doing his PhD and investigating BE models from an implementation viewpoint. The research team includes Dr Robin Mann, Head – COER, Dr James Lockhart and Dr Wayne Macpherson, Massey University, New Zealand.

As part of this research a comprehensive literature of BE was undertaken. The findings including a full listing of peer reviewed BE journal papers are presented in this article.

BE journal papers were identified using the Scopus Elsevier database. Twenty-nine (29) keywords were searched for in paper titles and then the papers were thoroughly scrutinized to ensure that only genuinely peer reviewed BE focused journal papers were shortlisted. For the purpose of this research, the definition of BE used was as follows: “Business excellence is “excellence” in strategies, processes, and stakeholder related performance results that have been validated by assessments using proven business excellence models”. This definition was used to ensure there is alignment between this study’s definition and the understanding of business excellence as portrayed by the Global Excellence Model (GEM) Council.

With respect to this understanding and the tens of thousands of organisations that use these models, the major components of business excellence are: –

1. The core values and concepts of excellence (Baldrige) (NIST, 2019) or fundamental concepts of excellence (EFQM) (EFQM, 2019) which are considered as the building blocks of BE.
2. The BE criteria (displayed as a 9-criteria BE model by EFQM and 7-criteria model in Baldrige). Both models show the interrelationship between the criteria and its relationship to business enablers and business results (thus providing a holistic model of excellence). The core values and concepts of excellence are embedded in these criteria.
3. Assessment methodology whereby a scoring mechanism of 1000 points is provided and guides organisations on assessment against the model, from simple self-assessments to rigorous externally validated assessments for national business excellence awards. Both models also provide tools to assist in assessing business enablers and results using the RADAR (Results, Approach, Deployment and Assess and Refine) approach provided by EFQM and ADLI (Approach, Deployment, Learning, and Integration) in the Baldrige framework. In both types of models, assessment scores of 600+ are considered as highly mature in terms of business excellence and organisations scoring at this level have the opportunity to become recognised at a national award level.

A paper was classified as a BE paper only if it satisfied all the following conditions:

• The paper was predominantly (at least 50%) focused on BE;
• The research was related to BEFs as advocated by the GEM Council. Therefore, researching their theory or use or proposing a development or variant of these established frameworks supported by research validating any proposed change

Papers have been identified and listed in sequence of their average citations per year to help researchers in BE in carrying out their literature review and to improve their understanding of BE. It is realized that the number of raw citations might not be the best measure for ranking the papers in terms of their impact because there may be a bias favouring the older published papers over the newer ones. In order to remove this bias these papers have been listed on the basis of their average citations per year.

The worksheet in the attached  Excel File list all the BE Papers: This worksheet contains the list of all 415 papers, their number of citations, and average citations per year by paper.

Contact:

Saad Ghafoor
PhD Researcher Excellence Without Borders
Massey University, New Zealand
Email: s.g.ghafoor@massey.ac.nz

Dr. Robin S. Mann
Founder and Head of the Centre for Organisational Excellence (COER) Ltd.
Chief Supervisor
Massey University, New Zealand
Email: r.s.mann@massey.ac.nz

By Saad Ghafoor and Dr. Robin Mann, Centre for Organisational Excellence Research, September 2020.

The Centre for Organisational Excellence Research (COER) recently updated its research on the number of active Business Excellence (BE) awards in the world.

Eligibility of an award to be considered as an active BE award

BE awards were considered as “active” if:

• they were based on a holistic BE framework and use similar assessment methods to internationally recognised frameworks such as the EFQM Excellence Model and the Baldrige Excellence Framework;
• the award was run/held in 2018 or 2019 or planned for 2020 or 2021.

Figure 1: The current EFQM Excellence Model

Figure 2: The current Baldrige Excellence Framework

To review the countries that have BE awards or initiatives click here. Please inform us if our information on your country’s award is incorrect or missing.

The graph below shows the most common BE models for BE awards. Whilst there are 56 countries with active awards, some countries have more than one national award and there are also four international awards covering more than one country, these are Africa (Africa Excellence Award), Asia Pacific Quality Organisation (APQO), EFQM Excellence Award, and Iberoamerican Excellence Award (FUNDIBEC). Therefore, the graph shows the BE models used across a total of 71 awards.

The EFQM Excellence Model is the most popular with 24 BE awards using it. Another 5 BE awards use unique BE models that resemble the EFQM Excellence Model. The Baldrige Excellence Framework is used by 11 BE awards with another 11 using BE frameworks that resemble the Baldrige Excellence Framework. Fourteen BE awards use a unique BE model/ framework. Two BECs (Sheikh Khalifa Government Excellence Program of the UAE and Egypt) use the Government Excellence Model (GEM) and two (Dubai Government Excellence Programme and Abu Dhabi Award for Government Excellence) use unique models resembling the GEM.

The research on BE awards is part of a larger research study titled Excellence Without Borders (EWB) which was launched by COER in July 2018 and is supported by the Global Excellence Model Council. This research is investigating the current state of and best practices in designing BE frameworks/ models and promoting, facilitating, awarding, supporting, and measuring BE on a national/ regional and sectoral level.

A total of 26 countries (and 29 BE custodian organisations) have participated in the project. BE custodians are organisations responsible for designing BEFs, and for promoting facilitating BE and BE awards in their countries. Some countries had more than one BE custodian organisation participating in the project such as the Dubai Government Excellence Program (DGEP), Sheikh Khalifa Excellence Award (SKEA), and the Dubai Economy Department (DED) in the United Arab Emirates.

Initial EWB research findings are available here. Further findings are being made available through a series of academic research papers. It is envisaged that the research findings will lead to an improved understanding of BE and help BE Custodians to raise the profile and use of BE worldwide.