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Pursuing business excellence.

Article Excerpt
[check] This checklist refers to the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) European Business Excellence Model, popularly known as the Business Excellence Model. A model for excellence offers all organisations the opportunity to assess how far they have travelled down the path to excellence, and which gaps or weaknesses they need to address.

Definition

The EFQM Business Excellence Model is a non-prescriptive framework based on nine criteria. Five of these are "Enablers" and four are "Results". The "Enabler" criteria cover what an organisation does. The "Results" criteria cover what an organisation achieves. In April 1999 the Model was revised to take account of the growing importance of knowledge management, and additional measures to reflect the degree of innovation and learning within an organisation were introduced.

The Model states that excellent business performance results from the organisation's impact on its Customers, its People and on Society at large. These impacts are achieved through the organisation's Leadership driving its Policy and Strategy, and getting its People to make best use of Partnerships and Resources to operate and improve the organisation's key Processes. In graphic terms this is expressed in the following diagram:

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Advantages of the Business Excellence Model

The model provides a framework:

* which is easy to understand and assimilate across a wide...