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Edison wins prestigious Baldrige Award

How can a company or organization compete in a global market?  What standards and practices are necessary to promote and ensure quality at all levels of business? 

In the mid-1980s, as globalization took hold as the new business model, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, determined to set quality management benchmarks to help businesses compete.

Then-Secretary of Commerce Malcolm Baldrige championed the initiative.  After his death in 1987, Congress enacted the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Improvement Act, a national award program to advance quality management and competitiveness of American business, health care, education, and government.  The award identifies seven key categories where businesses need to demonstrate quality:  leadership; strategic planning; customer focus; measurement, analysis, and knowledge management; workforce; operations; and results. 

The award program’s stated goals are clear—“to identify and recognize role-model businesses, establish criteria for evaluating improvement efforts, disseminate and share best practices.”

This year, the Ohio Partnership for Excellence (OPE), the State of Ohio's Baldrige-based award program, named Edison Community College in Piqua one of its Silver Award winners. 

The Ohio Partnership for Excellence named eight organizations as recipients of the 2011 Ohio Award for Excellence.  The award is the state's highest honor for performance excellence.  Edison’s silver-level award celebrates their commitment to “innovation, improvement and visionary leadership,” according to a recent press release. 

 “The mission of OPE is to cultivate performance excellence and continuous improvement among business, education, government, healthcare and non-profit organizations based in Ohio.  By providing a framework for performance excellence through the Baldrige Criteria, organizations have a greater focus on customers, process management, work systems and organization-wide results.  These organizations typically see lower costs, improved productivity and rises in both employee and customer satisfaction.”

Edison Community College will be honored at OPE’s Annual Quest for Success Conference—“Harvesting Excellence”—to be held September 19-20 at Cherry Valley Lodge, Newark, Ohio.  Award recipients will be presented with their achievement awards Monday evening.  

Edison and its fellow award-winners will share their best practices in break-out presentations and informal, one-on-one discussions with conference attendees. Also at the conference, four of the seven 2010 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award recipients—MEDRAD, Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital, Montgomery County Public Schools, and K&N Management—will present information on their quality journeys.

Leading Edison’s continuous quality improvement and accreditation initiatives is Dean of Institutional Planning and Effectiveness Mona Walters.

“We’ve been a quality journey for 12 years,” Walters said.  In 2000, Edison adopted the continuous quality improvement (CQI) model of organizational performance, she said.  “In 2001, we joined AQIP, an academic quality improvement program, as our accreditation pathway with the Higher Learning Commission, Edison’s accrediting body.”

Until now, Edison has partnered with its academic peers on this quality journey.  Today, with the Baldrige criteria, Edison competes in a much larger quality arena, alongside members of the business, government, healthcare and non-profit sectors, as well as education.

“It was time to showcase our efforts and see what happens,” Walters said.  “We entered into this, in part, for the constructive feedback.”

As a result of their entry, Edison will hear from Baldrige-trained examiners about areas they may wish to improve on.  This will enable Edison to further focus its quality efforts, Walters said. “The constructive feedback identifying specific areas of improvement is one of the main reasons we applied for the award.   We also knew that we were ready and that applying was the right thing to do.”

Edison Instructor Carolyn Jackson, a former Baldrige examiner and team chairperson for the Ohio Partnership for Excellence quality award program, praised Walters and her team.

“I can attest to the diligence, energy, and just plain hard work that applicant organizations must exhibit to get to the point of even thinking of preparing an application,” Jackson said. “Understanding the criteria and applying it to your own organization is not easy at all. To be able to express what is ‘day-to-day’ operation in your organization in a way that examiners can understand is a challenge in itself. Earning the Silver Level Award is a wonderful testament to the sound processes and excellent people who put them in place at Edison.”

Also honored as Ohio Partnership for Excellence 2011 award recipients are:  Eaton North American Financial Services Center (Brook Park), platinum level--Governor’s Award; Flower Hospital (Sylvania), gold level; Summit County Developmental Disabilities  Board (Tallmadge), silver level; Fostoria Community Hospital (Fostoria), silver level; The Christ Hospital (Cincinnati), silver level; Fairfield Medical Center (Lancaster), silver level; The Nord Center (Lorain), bronze level.

More information about the Baldrige program and its history is available at http://www.nist.gov/baldrige/.


 
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