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Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award

The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award is an annual award that recognizes U.S. organizations in the business, health care, education, and nonprofit sectors for performance excellence. The Baldrige Award is the only formal recognition of the performance excellence of U.S. organizations given by the President of the United States. It is administered by the Baldrige National Quality Program, which is based at and managed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce.

The Baldrige National Quality Program and the associated Award were established by the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Improvement Act of 1987 (Public Law 100-107). The Program and Award were named for Malcolm Baldrige, who served as United States Secretary of Commerce during the Reagan administration, from 1981 until Baldrige's 1987 death in a rodeo accident.

The Award promotes awareness of performance excellence as an increasingly important element in competitiveness and information sharing of successful performance strategies and the benefits derived from using these strategies. To receive a Baldrige Award, an organization must have a role-model organizational management system that ensures continuous improvement in the delivery of products and/or services, demonstrates efficient and effective operations, and provides a way of engaging and responding to customers and other stakeholders. The Award is not given for specific products or services. Up to 18 Awards may be given annually across six eligibility categories--manufacturing, service, small business, education, health care, and nonprofit. As of 2009, 84 organizations had received the Award.

Riding on the experience of the past twenty years, these awards went up in stature and are widely acclaimed as the best-managed ones in the world. The criteria for selection and the management are annually reviewed to make them contemporary and meeting to current business challenges. Though during the initial years, the awards focus was on manufacturing and service organizations, the awards were later made applicable also to educational and health care units.

Criteria for Performance Excellence

Baldrige criteria for Performance Excellence provide the basis for organizational self-assessments, i.e. within organizations themselves, for getting assessments made by external assessment teams on the award applications, and for giving feedback to applicants.

The criteria are designed to help provide organizations with an integrated approach to organizational performance management. When applied, they help in delivery of ever-improving value to customers, improvement of overall organizational effectiveness and enhanced capabilities in organizational and personal learning.

The seven categories of the Criteria are:

Leadership

Strategic panning

Customer Focus

Measurement, Analysis and Knowledge Management

Workforce Focus

Process management

Results

The Baldrige criteria are built upon a set of core values and concepts. These core values are embedded in seven Baldrige categories, and each of these criteria has maximum weightage, called value points (as shown below in the table), totaling to 1000 points.