Question

Imagine you are the manager of the City of Tucson, Arizona Public Health Lab, a lab very much like the one in Milwaukee. Imagine that you and the mayor had just watched this video together because you both are interested in making some laboratory cost and quality improvements. The mayor knows that the Southwest Alliance for Excellence conducts an awards program, based on the Baldrige Award format and that winning the award would bring the lab and the city recognition throughout the state but the mayor was also impressed by this video.

1. What are the pros and cons of using the Baldrige Award format instead of working with ASQ?

2. What are the pros and cons of just working with ASQ?

3. Would it make sense to try to do both? Would it make sense to try to do one then later do the other?

4. What would you do and how would you explain your choice to the mayor?

Answer 1

Q1. What are the pros and cons of using the Baldrige Award format instead of working with ASQ (American Society for Quality)?

Baldrige Award: It is a national award and its focus is that companies need to maximize customer satisfaction and engagement of employees by bringing holistic quality management in whatever they do. Its simple yet effective guidelines and principles show its merit: (pros)

• It transforms and sharpens the managerial thinking and conduct towards quality.
• It provides audit tools (in 32 areas of process control, quality managing, people best utilization with their involvement and customer delight) for company to gauge their targets of quality achievements
• Strongly proposes to run company by facts and not hunches. Promotes cooperation and mandates winners to share their knowledge as benchmark for others
• Its judging process is highly confidential. There are very few winners that make it appealing

But it has cons

There are following shortcomings reported by critics in it:

• It can be purchased like commodity by investing very highly in preparations of site and people when the inspection is done by officials of Baldrige.
• Its winning doesn’t prove that company produced unmatchable quality products for e.g. its winner, Cadillac didn’t make any high position in quality survey when was conducted for automobiles.
• The past winners (like Cadilla, Motorola etc fared poorly in sales, profit and competition. So its accuracy is questionable.

Whereas,

ASQ (American Society for Quality) is a one stop solution for bringing quality and in turn cost improvements in Arizona Public Health Lab. It works with organizations through its global quality expert network and provides them training and assistance in maintaining and upgrading quality in all their processes and people. Trainings are on site and off site. It is also customized according to needs of organization. Membership gives access to seminars and library resources of ASQ.

It also gives certification that need to renew, to organizations for their excellence in this area that are very well acknowledged and respected globally by many companies. This gives them more customers as is a point of differentiation in their product and services.

It has also recently come up with a workshop on “Lean Six Sigma” especially for Healthcare for improving its quality to keep patient safe and for improving clinical results. This could make the operations efficient by killing the waiting period of patient, quick delivery of medicines, lowering errors and reducing inventory.