Organizations that apply for the Baldrige Award are judged by an independent board of examiners. Recipients are selected based on achievement and improvement in seven areas, known as the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence. This is graded on leadership, strategic planning, customer and market focus, measurement, analysis and knowledge management, human resource focus, process management and business organizational performance results.
The MBNQA is presented annually by the President of the United States to organizations who have demonstrated quality and performance excellence in each category. Functioning organizations are aware that demonstrating quality and performance excellence is no easy task, especially when doing so manually.
However, there is great value in choosing automation to help deliver quality management. In fact, Quality Management software can help organizations become Baldrige Award recipients through its ability to solidify quality within your business processes and help you achieve compliance.
Here’s how.
Document Control: A Document Control system lets you easily create document records, assign keywords to records, attach files of any size or type and create any number of workflows to route the document through the review and approval phases of the workflow. It also features a comprehensive change request workflow to ensure that changes and documents all follow proper change procedures. Document Control enables users to track all documented processes, jobs, specifications more. Automated Document Control provides a centralized repository for information where records are kept and controlled, administrators can track revisions and collaborate change more effectively, resulting in times saving and increased productivity.
Employee Training: Employees are the foundation for success. They help keep policies and procedures running smoothly which ultimately helps keep your customers happy. With that said, employee training from top to bottom is essential. An Employee Training module provides the ability for training to be organized by type. This means that training can be categorized by type or job specification, by individual, group or assignment type and more. This streamlines the ability to stay knowledgeable in quality and compliance initiatives and ensures that training is at an acceptable level at all times. Employee Training management software lets administrators manage and track employee training events, link documents to training requirements and enable employees to take training tests graded by a pass or fail score to prove excellence in job knowledge.
Risk Management: Risk Management software tools provide the framework for handling events in a systematic way. Risk is inherent in any organization and that is simply why Risk Management is a necessary tool for all. Managing risk manually is no easy task, therefore managing it is more easily and effectively done using automatic processes. Risk Management allows organizations to put a stop to threats and eliminate the harmful outcome it can have on your organization and its consumers. Some capabilities include adjustable risk templates, risk parameters and effectively filtering of all levels of risk within adverse events. This way you are in complete control and every event, whether it’s life threatening or simply the wrong equipment color, can be addressed in order of criticality in a timely manner.
Audit Management: An important task in any organization, regardless of industry is the measurement of performance results. Audit Management is an efficient method of managing and tracking results as part of continuous improvement. An Audit Management tool allows you to set up profiles for each specific audit, including integrated checklists and question data based on keywords with comparable scoring methods and a comprehensive audit report for results. Audit management is a necessary part of ensuring continuous improvement with any organization.
In addition to these automated processes, look for a QMS that is scalable and flexible in an easily implementable solution.