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Edison wins
prestigious Baldrige Award
How can a company or organization compete in a global market?
What standards and practices are necessary to promote and ensure
quality at all levels of business?
In the mid-1980s, as globalization took hold as the new business model,
the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency of
the U.S. Department of Commerce, determined to set quality management
benchmarks to help businesses compete.
Then-Secretary of Commerce Malcolm Baldrige championed the
initiative. After his death in 1987, Congress enacted the Malcolm
Baldrige National Quality Improvement Act, a national award program to
advance quality management and competitiveness of American business,
health care, education, and government. The award identifies
seven key categories where businesses need to demonstrate
quality: leadership; strategic planning; customer focus;
measurement, analysis, and knowledge management; workforce; operations;
and results.
The award program’s stated goals are clear—“to identify and recognize
role-model businesses, establish criteria for evaluating improvement
efforts, disseminate and share best practices.”
This year, the Ohio Partnership for Excellence (OPE), the State of
Ohio's Baldrige-based award program, named Edison Community College in
Piqua one of its Silver Award winners.
The Ohio Partnership for Excellence named eight organizations as
recipients of the 2011 Ohio Award for Excellence. The award is
the state's highest honor for performance excellence. Edison’s
silver-level award celebrates their commitment to “innovation,
improvement and visionary leadership,” according to a recent press
release.
“The mission of OPE is to cultivate performance excellence and
continuous improvement among business, education, government,
healthcare and non-profit organizations based in Ohio. By
providing a framework for performance excellence through the Baldrige
Criteria, organizations have a greater focus on customers, process
management, work systems and organization-wide results. These
organizations typically see lower costs, improved productivity and
rises in both employee and customer satisfaction.”
Edison Community College will be honored at OPE’s Annual Quest for
Success Conference—“Harvesting Excellence”—to be held September 19-20
at Cherry Valley Lodge, Newark, Ohio. Award recipients will be
presented with their achievement awards Monday evening.
Edison and its fellow award-winners will share their best practices in
break-out presentations and informal, one-on-one discussions with
conference attendees. Also at the conference, four of the seven 2010
Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award recipients—MEDRAD, Advocate
Good Samaritan Hospital, Montgomery County Public Schools, and K&N
Management—will present information on their quality journeys.
Leading Edison’s continuous quality improvement and accreditation
initiatives is Dean of Institutional Planning and Effectiveness Mona
Walters.
“We’ve been a quality journey for 12 years,” Walters said. In
2000, Edison adopted the continuous quality improvement (CQI) model of
organizational performance, she said. “In 2001, we joined AQIP,
an academic quality improvement program, as our accreditation pathway
with the Higher Learning Commission, Edison’s accrediting body.”
Until now, Edison has partnered with its academic peers on this quality
journey. Today, with the Baldrige criteria, Edison competes in a
much larger quality arena, alongside members of the business,
government, healthcare and non-profit sectors, as well as education.
“It was time to showcase our efforts and see what happens,” Walters
said. “We entered into this, in part, for the constructive
feedback.”
As a result of their entry, Edison will hear from Baldrige-trained
examiners about areas they may wish to improve on. This will
enable Edison to further focus its quality efforts, Walters said. “The
constructive feedback identifying specific areas of improvement is one
of the main reasons we applied for the award. We also knew
that we were ready and that applying was the right thing to do.”
Edison Instructor Carolyn Jackson, a former Baldrige examiner and team
chairperson for the Ohio Partnership for Excellence quality award
program, praised Walters and her team.
“I can attest to the diligence, energy, and just plain hard work that
applicant organizations must exhibit to get to the point of even
thinking of preparing an application,” Jackson said. “Understanding the
criteria and applying it to your own organization is not easy at all.
To be able to express what is ‘day-to-day’ operation in your
organization in a way that examiners can understand is a challenge in
itself. Earning the Silver Level Award is a wonderful testament to the
sound processes and excellent people who put them in place at Edison.”
Also honored as Ohio Partnership for Excellence 2011 award recipients
are: Eaton North American Financial Services Center (Brook Park),
platinum level--Governor’s Award; Flower Hospital (Sylvania), gold
level; Summit County Developmental Disabilities Board
(Tallmadge), silver level; Fostoria Community Hospital (Fostoria),
silver level; The Christ Hospital (Cincinnati), silver level; Fairfield
Medical Center (Lancaster), silver level; The Nord Center (Lorain),
bronze level.
More information about the Baldrige program and its history is
available at http://www.nist.gov/baldrige/.
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