The application and review process for the Award is the best, most cost effective, and comprehensive organization health audit you can get. The results were sometimes uncomfortable because both our internal evaluations and objective feedback reports from the outside were not always flattering. They did, however, provide valuable information to help us identify and implement improvements that lead to substantial performance improvements. In fact, many of our competitors now benchmark their operations against ours. The process helped us become a better company.
Internal assessments play a valuable role.
However, at some point in the journey, you need the outside perspective that only an application can secure. That energy resulted from the team motivation that occurs when pursuing a common goal. That trend has continued. We have reduced the number of process defects to only one-tenth what they were at the time we won the Baldrige. We now take one week on production processes that several years ago took four weeks.