Areas of Business Excellence

Typically, we think about business excellence in the terms of superiority, but in practice, it is frequently translated into features of the business; its products and services, its profitability, its customer relationships, or even its employee relationships. The generally acknowledged definition of business excellence is the utilisation of quality management principles and tools in business management;  it is the systematic progress of business performance based on the principles of customer focus, stakeholder value, and process management.

Business excellence, as explained by the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM), refers to -outstanding practices in managing the organisation and achieving results, all based on a set of eight fundamental concepts, these being -results orientation, customer focus, leadership and fidelity of  purpose, management by processes and facts, people development and involvement,    continuous learning, innovation and improvement; partnership development, and public responsibility.

In general, Nationalised bodies have developed business excellence models as a foundation for award programs. For majority of the bodies, with respect to the widespread agreement of the concepts of business excellence, the awards are themselves of secondary in importance, which they believe is the one that ultimately leads to improved national economic performance. By far, Self assessment is being done by the greater part of organizations who model them, through which improved opportunities are identified, areas of strength and thoughts to develop professed weakness.

Business Excellence is traditionally defined by tools, not the result of being brilliant. The assumption is that the acceptance of tools  will yield  good economic results for companies and economies. This is not necessarily a valid assumption.

Business  excellence  is  best  defined  by  its  result,  not  its  process.  The Malcolm Baldrige award now weighs more the 50% of its award criteria on business results, not product quality. Hence, business excellence can be described as excelling in the important dimensions of the business: financial performance, customer relationships, product / service value, and employee relationships, over time.