FACED with an increasingly turbulent and chaotic business environment in recent years, a new approach called ‘business excellence’ emerged in the business world as more and more companies, faced with declining profits, implemented business excellence strategies and made ‘quality’ a key element of their business philosophy.
In this respect, measurement frameworks were created and developed by national or international bodies such as the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA), (USA), the Australian Business Excellence Framework (ABEF) and the European Foundation for Quality Management Excellence Model (EFQMEM).
These well-known business excellence models, among others, provide guidelines and criteria for business evaluation and are used by companies across the globe as groundwork for continuous improvement in their businesses.
Initially, the American MBNQA model constituted a landmark for other business excellence models around the world.
Its appearance gave an impetus to other countries to design and implement their own business excellence models.
As such, the ABEF and EFQMEM were greatly inspired by this American model.
As quality leads to improved business performance, the design, formulation, implementation and evaluation of strategies required rethinking of the way businesses are organised and managed (for continuous improvement). In this respect, the growing adoption of various methods and techniques, such as business process reengineering (BPR), balanced scorecard, enterprise resource planning (ERP), lean management or Six Sigma, showed the need to implement an integrated approach to business excellence at the organisational level.
According to proceedings at the 12th International Conference on Business Excellence held in 2018: “… a better understanding of business excellence models help managers to design and implement business excellence strategies that provide a holistic approach to continuous improvement for any type of organisation… These models, based on sound values, concepts and principles, have proven their viability in time. Consequently, they gave birth to frameworks that allow organisations to benchmark their performances and demonstrate best practices in their field of activity.”
New business models and tools were designed and implemented to make adaptation to this continuous change easier and to provide pertinent performance measurements (PPPMs), for any company.
On the other hand, modern measurement frameworks were created and developed by national or international bodies such as the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the Singapore Business Excellence Framework, the Australian Business Excellence Framework or the European Foundation for Quality Management Excellence Model.
Moreover, the last years have witnessed the emergence of several initiatives to design a specific approach of business excellence for small and medium enterprises (SMEs).
As performance measurement has constituted a topic of interest in business in the last decades; business excellence has become a major concern for any company.
The last two decades or so have witnessed the increasing application of business excellence models as more companies have learned how to use them and to obtain superior performances.
However, implementing business excellence at the organisational level is easier in the case of companies that have already built simple and informal organisational structures.
Business excellence can be seen not only as the next step after total quality management (TQM), or a new quality understanding, but also as an umbrella term that takes into consideration a wider spectrum of issues such as the social responsibility and environmental outcomes of a company.
The application on business excellence models should be of interest for Zimbabwe, where cutting costs is the accepted business criteria and the philosophy of ‘tongo kiya- kiya’ reigns supreme.
Sadly and ironically, this is contrary to the Munhumutapas of Great Zimbabwe known for creating products of high standards of excellence, with judicious quality management and effective organisation as core values.
Since the end of the Second World War (1939-1945), several business excellence models have been created and developed.
For example, the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) launched the first globally known model of excellence prize after JUSE invited W. E. Deming, one of US’ quality experts, in1950, to conduct quality control seminars for Japanese engineers and top management.
He taught the basics of statistic quality control and provided the basis for the development of quality control in Japan where his lectures made a deep impression on a Japanese participant, K. Koyanagi, the managing director of JUSE, who decided to fund a prize in his honour – the ‘Deming Prize’; the first of which was awarded, in 1951.
In 1984, the Canada Awards for Excellence (CAE) was introduced, followed by the establishment of MBNQA in the US, in 1987; the Australian Quality Award in 1988 by SAI Global; the National Quality and Excellence Prize in Israel, in 1989, by the Standards Institution of Israel; the National Quality Award in Mexico, in 1989, by Qualtop Mexico; and the European Quality Award, in 1992, by the European Foundation for Quality Management.
Other countries, especially from Asia, instituted their own awards, in the 1990s, such as the Rajiv Gandhi National Quality Award in India, in 1991, by the Bureau of Indian Standards; the National Quality Award in Brazil, in 1992, by the National Quality Foundation; the UK Excellence Award, in 1994, by the British Quality Foundation; the Singapore Quality Award in 1995 by SPRING Singapore, or the Philippine Quality Award(PQA), in 1997.
Established by the US Congress to raise awareness of quality management, the MBNQA is awarded annually to organisations that prove passion for quality and obtain performance excellence.
The Baldrige Framework aims to help organisations achieve excellence, based on several core values and concepts, also encapsulated in other frameworks, and provides the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence that comprises seven critical areas that proved to constitute a ‘powerful set of guidelines for running an effective organisation’.
As the global business environment is changing at an unprecedented pace, scientific research has tried to provide a new understanding to companies around the world of how to better perform in the 21st Century.
For any type of organisation, business excellence models provide a holistic approach to continuous improvement.
These models are based on sound values, concepts and principles and have proved their viability in the course of time.
Consequently, frameworks that allow organisations to bench-mark their performances and demonstrate best practices in their field of activity were developed and in time adapted and improved to face the new realities of the 21st Century society, in general, and of the business environment, in particular.
They provide the key elements that constitute the bedrock of a successful organisation.
Despite the Deming Prize being the first globally recognised quality management model, the Baldrige framework constituted the starting point for the design and development of business excellence models all over the world.
However, the MBNQA has remained the oldest and most popular business excellence model worldwide. What about for Zimbabwe?
The time is now, especially the SMEs, to emulate the examples set by President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s work ethos and introduce our own National Quality Award for deserving business excellence.
Dr Michelina Andreucci is a Zimbabwean-Italian researcher, industrial design consultant and is a published author in her field.
For views and comments, email: linamanucci@gmail.com
