Business Excellence and Quality Management Practices
Business Excellence
Business excellence refers to a set of effective practices associated with organizational management for achieving key objectives and based on a framework of several fundamental concepts. These concepts include the orientation on results, the focus on customers, management by using facts and processes, continuous learning, constancy, and leadership of purpose, improvement and innovation, public responsibility, and the development of partnerships.
In general, business excellence models and measurements have been developed by organizations to create a basis for different business award programs. However, such award programs are considered secondary since the take up of business excellence concepts can significantly improve economic performance. The most popular and influential model for business excellence is the Malcolm Baldridge Award Model.
By using business excellence models, companies perform self-assessments of their strengths and weaknesses and potential opportunities for future organizational development. For instance, by conducting a business excellence overview, a company can formulate a strategy and vision or evaluate supplier and project management effectiveness. Self-assessment is considered the most widespread purpose for which the business excellence model is used.
As a result of business excellence evaluations, organizations are expected to improve their operations by integrating best practices into areas that need to be reinforced. When companies use business excellence for self-assessment, the identified criteria can contribute to the differentiation between the weak and strong areas of practice so that such tools as benchmarking can be implemented for closing any gaps in performance. Thus, to implement continuous improvement, companies should understand the value of creating connections between business excellence, benchmarking, and best practices.
Quality Management
When it comes to quality management, the models and systems involved in the process promote a standards-based approach toward business for implementing integrated systems. Thus, quality management is targeted at ensuring that a product or service that a company offers to its clients is consistent. For this reason, continuous improvements in this sphere are necessary not only for keeping clients satisfied but also for ensuring that businesses are headed in the direction that aligns with their strategic vision.
Business excellence is relevant to quality management because of the increasing competition in the market characterized by globalization, and higher customer exigencies push companies to increase the quality of outputs. Today, when suppliers provide inadequate quality products, businesses fail to offer customers more than they will usually expect, thus unable to preserve a good reputation and retain clients.
According to Dinu’s article, in the current business environment, “it is highly acknowledged that each business process contributes to accomplishing organizational objectives and influences its ability to ensure a high level of customer and stakeholder satisfaction” (7). Thus, quality management is necessary for helping organizations reach their objectives and foster customer satisfaction by implementing processes inherent to business excellence.
Overall, business excellence and quality management processes allow organizations to strengthen their position in the market by ensuring compliance with appropriate standards. Business excellence goes hand-in-hand with quality management because of the need for implementing best practices for strengthening weak areas of performance. Such quality management methods as ISO, Six Sigma, the Toyota Production System, Total Quality Management, and multiple others allow businesses to understand their priorities and implement appropriate procedures for making customers satisfied and loyal to them.
Work Cited
Dinu, Vasile. “Quality Management and Business Excellence.” Amfiteatru Economic, vol. 19, no. 44, 2017, pp. 5-7.