The project intended to answer the following questions: –

1. How do business excellence custodians design business excellence frameworks/ models?
2. How do business excellence custodians promote the use of business excellence in their countries?
3. How do business excellence custodians facilitate the use of business excellence in their countries?
4. How do business excellence custodians award and recognize business excellence in their countries?
5. What are the support structures for business excellence in different countries?
6. How do the business excellence custodians measure the success of their business excellence frameworks/ models?

Once the responses from 29 BE custodians were compiled, the initial draft of the report was sent out to the GEM Council for approval. After approval, the draft was sent to the participants for internal validation. This version of the report was only for internal use by the project participants and not for public release.

From this version a second version was created for public release – the PUBLIC RELEASE VERSION, DOWNLOAD HERE, shows aggregated responses and excludes the names/ indications of the participants.

Future Research

Further to the EWB project, the participants that were interested in involving business excellence assessors were also provided with another survey specially designed for business excellence assessors. Preliminary results from that survey were shared with the participating countries. An additional survey for organisations that are on the business excellence journey is now underway – if you represent one of these organisations and would like to participate in this research please click here

For further information contact:

Saad Ghafoor
PhD Researcher for Excellence Without Borders
Centre for Organisational Excellence Research
Massey University, New Zealand
S.G.Ghafoor@massey.ac.nz

The Centre for Organisational Excellence Research (COER) has launched a global study to investigate Business Excellence. The project titled Excellence Without Borders (EWB) has 29 countries that are participating. We want to hear from organisations that have used business excellence frameworks – we want to hear how this has helped your organization and also learn what more could be done in your country to promote business excellence.

PARTICIPATE BY CLICKING THIS LINK

Reason to Participate: –

• Answering the questions will help you to reflect on how you are implementing business excellence within your own organization.
• As a participant you will be provided with a summary report of the survey results from the Client Survey. The findings from this will provide insights into how to improve your organisation’s business excellence approach.
• Your contribution will assist your country in benchmarking its business excellence services against other countries and develop future initiatives in business excellence to serve you better.
• The Client Survey is one component of the Excellence Without Borders study. Refer to https://www.excellencewithoutborders.org for full details on the research and https://www.excellencewithoutborders.org/resources/ to read some of the previous research reports published from similar research undertaken in 2005 and 2010.
• This research project with your support is expected to be the largest to date.
• The Global Excellence Model Council are sponsoring the research and will be reviewing the research findings as an input into its global business excellence strategy to deliver greater socio-economic benefits to nations.

This is your chance to contribute towards business excellence in your country. In order to fill in the survey online, please click here or scan the QR code below

You can choose to fill in the survey in more than one sitting. You are requested to complete the survey by the 1st of October 2019.

For further information contact:

Saad Ghafoor
PhD Researcher for Excellence Without Borders
Center for Organizational Excellence Research
Massey University, New Zealand
S.G.Ghafoor@massey.ac.nz

The project will investigate the design, deployment and impact of National/Regional/Sectoral Business Excellence (BE) programs. This research will help BE Custodians to learn from each other and strengthen national approaches to business excellence. As a result, it is envisaged that more organisations will become aware of and apply business excellence principles and practices leading to greater socio-economic benefits across the globe.

Currently the participant custodian organisations are reviewing the surveys and the methodology of the project so that they can provide the research team with useful feedback and comments. Following the incorporation of these comments, the custodian organisations will assist in distributing the surveys to clients and evaluators and also complete a survey on behalf of their own organisation. Learn more about the terms of reference of the project here.

21 BE custodian organisations have already signed up to the project since invitations were issued on 19th July with more registering each week. The Global Excellence Models (GEM) Council are providing in-principle support to the project. The project team will be giving a presentation on the project to the GEM Council Meeting in Sydney on 29 August. Following this the team will attend the Australian Evaluator Training, 30 August, and 2018 Excellence Conference and 30th Anniversary Celebration of the Australian Excellence Awards (to register for this conference click here).

The initial findings of the project will be shared at the Global Organisational Excellence Congress in Abu Dhabi from 10-12 December 2018.

For further information contact:

Saad Ghafoor
PhD Researcher for Excellence Without Borders
Center for Organizational Excellence Research
Massey University, New Zealand
S.G.Ghafoor@massey.ac.nz

Eligibility of an award to be considered as an active Business Excellence Award
Business excellence awards were considered as “active” if they were based on a holistic business excellence framework and used similar assessment methods to internationally recognised frameworks such as the EFQM Excellence Model and the Baldrige Excellence Framework. Also, to be included, an awards program must have been run in 2016, 2017 or planned for 2018.

In addition to the 55 countries, 18 countries did not have an awards program but were running initiatives to encourage organisations on a business excellence journey. Therefore in total 73 countries have a business excellence award or initiative.

List of Active Business Excellence Awards
We encourage readers of this blog to check the list and inform us if our information on your country’s award is incorrect or missing.

The following graph shows that the EFQM Excellence Model is the most commonly used, particularly in Europe and the Middle East. 30 countries use the EFQM Excellence Model or models similar to it. The Baldrige Excellence Framework is also popular with use in the United States and many countries in Asia. 19 countries use the Baldrige Excellence Framework or models similar to it. 15 awards programs use a unique model and one business excellence award in Sweden enables award applicants to choose between using the Baldrige Excellence Framework, EFQM Excellence Model or the Swedish Business Excellence Model.

This research was conducted by Saad Ghafoor, PhD student and Dr Robin Mann, Head of COER.

COER supports organisations and countries in business excellence in a number of ways:

• COER is undertaking research that is improving our understanding of National Business Excellence Awards and strategies. COER’s “Excellence Without Borders”. Project aims to assist the administrators and custodians of business excellence to effectively develop and manage regional and national business excellence strategies and awards.
• COER is working closely with a number of countries to help them develop national business excellence strategies and services. For example, refer to our recent work in Tonga and how we assist organisations on their improvement journey through Dubai We Learn.
• COER is currently organising with the Abu Dhabi Chamber of Commerce, APQO and GBN the Global Organisational Excellence Congress, 10-12 December 2018, Abu Dhabi, UAE. This event includes the International Best Practice Competition and GBN’s Global Benchmarking Awards.
• COER’s BPIR.com resource contains a wealth of best practice information including 1,000’s of best practices that are categorized by business excellence frameworks, and over 80 self-assessment tools.

For more information on COER’s work please contact Dr Robin Mann, r.s.mann@massey.ac.nz

Have you undertaken an improvement project and not got the breakthrough you were looking for? Or do you recognise the value of benchmarking but are finding it difficult to get your organisation to commit the time and resource to projects? If you have answered yes to either of these questions you should be considering rapid benchmarking.

This free report, download here, describes how the TRADE Best Practice Benchmarking Methodology has been used for rapid benchmarking by Fonterra, a multinational dairy co-operative and New Zealand’s largest company. TRADE is a benchmarking methodology consisting of 5 stages; Terms of Reference, Research current state, Acquire best practices, Deploy best practices and Evaluate. The methodology is prescriptive in its approach with 5 to 9 steps for each stage of TRADE. The methodology includes a project management system to guide users through a project.

TRADE best practice benchmarking methodology

Normally the TRADE Best Practice Benchmarking Methodology is used for projects that require a team approach with projects typically taking 2 to 5 months to identify best practices and develop an implementation plan. The term “rapid benchmarking” is used for Fonterra’s approach as Fonterra uses TRADE to identify best practices and develop an implementation plan within 5 days. The report describes how Fonterra organises the 5 days, provides three case studies showing how rapid benchmarking has been used and describes the success factors for rapid benchmarking.

Fonterra’s rapid benchmarking approach and its relationship with the stages of TRADE

For case studies on the standard approach to TRADE refer to how it has been applied within the Dubai government. Our free book can be accessed here – Achieving performance excellence through benchmarking and organisational learning – 13 case studies from the 1st cycle of Dubai We Learn’s Excellence Makers Program.