Key excellence indicators for Results
Key excellence indicators are based on 12 years of Baldrige experience. They are the features exhibited by organisations which score highly in this criteria
  • Broad array of customer satisfaction measures, includes segmentation
  • Results for employees (the 'internal customer') emphasised
  • Broad base of improvement trends/excellent performance
    - products, services, internal operations, cycle time, productivity
  • Results benchmarked to industry or sector leaders
  • Results of financial and marketplace performance tied to improvement
  • Improvements in supplier performance
Source - NIST

7.1Customer Focused Results (115 points)
Summarize your organisation's customer focused results, including customer satisfaction and product and service performance results

Segment your results by customer groups and market segments, as appropriate.

Include appropriate comparative data.

As with all results requirements, the data you present here should map back to the relevant Approach and Deployment category – in this case to the processes you nominated in the Customers and Markets category

Check the assessment workshop material for generic indications of the sort of information you should be presenting for each requirement. All results requirements are broadly similar

Concentrate on performance data as viewed by the customer

Performance results as viewed by the organisation are reported in 7.5

7.1a Customer Focused Results

7.1a(1)What are your current levels and trends in key measures and/or indicators of customer satisfaction, dissatisfaction, and satisfaction relative to competitors?

Three sets of data (key measures and/or indicators) are asked for in this requirement:
- data on customer satisfaction
- data on customer dissatisfaction
- comparisons between your results and those of your competitors.

  • Customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction results reported here should relate to the processes described in Item 3.2
  • Data about customer satisfaction relative to competitors might include objective information and data from customers and independent (third-party) organisations
  • Satisfaction and dissatisfaction trends are influenced by a number of factors. If you have explanations for adverse trends or short-term reversals, include them as a short narrative or as extended captions for your graphs, and explain any steps taken to prevent recurrences
  • Keep segmentation in mind - how do you report data separately for different customer groups and market segments? If so, report it here.

7.1a(2) What are your current levels and trends in key measures and/or indicators of customer loyalty, positive referral, customer-perceived value, and/or customer relationship building?

  • Customer loyalty, customer inclinations (your customers and your competitors' customers) to recommend or refer your products or services, customer-perceived value and relationship building are high-level concepts that few organisations deal with systematically, and that few gather data on.

7.1a(3) What are your current levels and trends in key measures and/or indicators of product and service performance?

  • Comparative performance of products and services and measures of customer satisfaction should be included here
  • The combination of direct customer satisfaction data in 7.1a(1) and 7.1a(2), and the product and service performance data in 7.1a(3) provides an opportunity to explain cause and effect relationships between product and service attributes and evidence of customer satisfaction, loyalty, positive referral, and so on.

Relevant data and information include:
  • customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction
  • retention, gains, and losses of customers and customer accounts
  • positive customer referrals
  • customer complaints and warranty claims
  • customer-perceived value based on quality and price
  • competitive awards, ratings, and recognition from customers and independent organisations
Relevant data and information also include product and service performance measures, especially those that serve as predictors of customer satisfaction.

Product and service results that map to items 3.1 and 3.2 should show clear, positive correlation with customer and marketplace improvement indicators. Such correlations are critical management tools, defining and focusing on key quality and customer requirements and identifying product and service features that differentiate your products and services in the marketplace, perhaps revealing:
  • emerging or changing market segments
  • · the changing importance of customer or market requirements, or even
  • · the potential obsolescence of products and services.
Product or service performance characteristics that you might include here might be based on:
  • organisational measurements
  • field performance
  • data collected by the organisation or for the organisation
  • customer surveys on product and service performance.
Reported data might be from internal measurements and measurements of field performance, perhaps collected (by your organisation or a third party contractor) by in-depth follow-up questioning of customers for product or service features that cannot be accurately assessed through direct measurement (ease of use for example) or when variability in customer expectations makes the customer's perception the most meaningful indicator (courtesy for example). Blazey's (1998, p 147) linkage analyses may provide a useful overview of the functional relationships between customer satisfaction and items in the approach and deploy criteria.

7.2 Financial and Market Results (115 points)
Summarize your organisation's key financial and marketplace performance results, segmented by market segments, as appropriate. Include appropriate comparative data.

As with all results requirements, the data you present here should map back to the processes nominated in the relevant address and deploy categories.

Check the Assessment exhibit for generic indications of the sort of information you should be presenting for each requirement. All results requirements are broadly similar.

7.2a Financial and market results

7.2a(1) What are your current levels and trends in key measures and/or indicators of financial performance, including aggregate measures of financial return and/or economic value, as appropriate?

  • Measures reported here will frequently be those key financial and market measures tracked systematically by senior leaders to gauge overall performance, perhaps also used to determine incentive compensation for senior leaders.

  • Include aggregate measures such as return on investment (ROI), return on equity, asset utilization, operating margins, profitability, profitability by market/customer segment, pre-tax profit margin, liquidity, debt to equity ratio, value added per employee, and financial activity measures, earnings per share, profit forecast reliability, and other liquidity and financial activity measures

7.2a(2) What are your current levels and trends in key measures and/or indicators of marketplace performance, including market share/position, business growth, and new markets entered, as appropriate?

  • Marketplace performance could include market share measures of business growth, new product and geographic markets entered, and percent new product sales, as appropriate. Comparative data for these measures might include industry best, best competitor, industry average, and appropriate benchmarks from outside your industry.

7.3 Human Resource Results (80 points)
Summarize your organisation's human resource results, including employee well-being, satisfaction, development, and work system performance. Segment your results by types and categories of employees, as appropriate. Include appropriate comparative data.

  • This Item addresses the organisation's human resource results – those relating to employee well-being, satisfaction, development, motivation, work system performance, and effectiveness
  • As with all results requirements, the data you present here should map back to the processes you nominated in the appropriate approach and deploy categories
  • Results reported here relate to activities described in category 5. The results should be responsive to key process needs described in category 6, and the company action plans and related human resource plans described in item 2.2
  • The results you report here may be generic and/or organisation-specific. Generic factors include safety, absenteeism, turnover, and satisfaction. Organisation-specific factors include results commonly used in the industry or created by the organisation for purposes of tracking progress. Results reported might include input data, such as extent of training, but the main emphasis should be placed on measures of effectiveness
  • The Item calls for comparative information so that results can be evaluated meaningfully against competitors or other relevant external measures of performance. For some measures, such as absenteeism and turnover, local or regional comparisons also are appropriate. All graphs or data-sets should include comparative data

7.3a Financial and market results

7.3a(1) What are your current levels and trends in key measures and/or indicators of employee well-being, satisfaction and dissatisfaction, and development?

  • For appropriate measures of employee well-being and satisfaction, see the notes to item 5.3 in the Full Baldrige pages
  • Measures and/or indicators of employee development might include:
    - innovation and suggestion rates
    - courses completed
    - learning
    - on-the-job performance improvements
    - cross-training.

7.3a(2) What are your current levels and trends in key measures and/or indicators of work system performance and effectiveness?

  • Appropriate measures and/or indicators of work system performance and effectiveness might include:
    - job and job classification simplification
    - job rotation
    - work layout
    - changing supervisory ratios
    - changes in local decision making.

    Item 7 should also include safety data, including your occupational safety and health results (OSHA in the USA). Many workplaces record accident-free days, but you may also aggregate safety audit data, near misses (however recorded) and other preventative measures, along with worker compensation costs, number of lost-time accidents, days of work lost due to accidents (maybe segmented by workplace, employee category, time of day or week, and so on.

    Workplace morale data should be included, if there are any, and any other indicators of workplace climate, culture or sociology.

    Organisations which don't systematically collect HR data will nevertheless have information which can be presented here - staff turnover, requests for transfers, complaints, grievances, stress-related illnesses, average hours worked and overtime and absenteeism (Brown, 1998, p250) are all data-sets that should be present in and extractable from organisational records.

    Without comparisons, the value and relevance of organisational or workplace-specific data may be difficult to assess. Examiners will look for clear evidence of context (if you're the only employer in town, staff turnover might be a problematic measure, however low).

7.4 Supplier and Partner Results (25 points)
Summarize your organisation's key supplier and partner results. Include appropriate comparative data.

The data you present here should map back to the material you presented item 6.3

This Item addresses current levels and trends in your nominated measures and indicators of supplier and partner performance

Suppliers and partners provide “upstream” and/or “downstream” materials and services - see the IBM and 3M Dental case studies for discussions of channel partner performance, for example

The focus should be on the most critical requirements from the point of view of your organisation - the user or consumer of the products and services.

7.4a Supplier and partner results

7.4a(1) What are your current levels and trends in key measures and/or indicators of supplier and partner performance? Include your performance and/or cost improvements resulting from supplier and partner performance and performance management.

  • Data reported should reflect results by whatever means they occur – through improved performance by suppliers and partners or by selection of better performing suppliers and partners, for example
  • Measures and indicators of performance should relate to supplier and partner activities and inputs that are important to your organisation, and where you have large numbers of suppliers and partners, you may want to consider partitioning them to reflect their relative importance
  • Data reported also should reflect how suppliers and partners have contributed to your organisation's performance goals. Results reported could include cost savings; reductions in scrap, waste, or rework; and cycle time or productivity enhancements. This sort of information is particularly relevant for key relationships like those with channel partners (whose success directly affects your own)
  • And as always, the Item calls for comparative information so that results reported can be meaningfully evaluated against competitors or other relevant external measures of performance. Consider:
    - how do you select competitors for comparison?
    - how do you select supplier benchmarks?

7.5 Organisational Effectiveness Results (115 points)
Summarize your organisation's key operational performance results that contribute to the achievement of organisational effectiveness. Include appropriate comparative data.

Results here should map to areas of importance nominated in your business overview, and to 1.1, 2.2, 6.1, and 6.2, and any not in 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, and 7.4

Results reported in 7.5 should provide key information for analysis (4.2) and review (1.1) of organisational operational performance and should provide the operational basis for customer results (7.1) and financial and market results (7.2)

This Item addresses key performance results not covered in Items 7.1 through 7.4 that contribute significantly to the organisation's goals - customer satisfaction, product and service quality, operational effectiveness, and financial/ marketplace performance. The item encourages the use of any unique measures the organisation has developed to track performance in important areas. For example, a nuclear facility would present a great deal of regulatory, compliance and safety data in this area

Results should reflect key process performance measures, including those that influence customer satisfaction. Measures of productivity and operational effectiveness in all key areas - product/service delivery areas and support areas - are appropriate for inclusion. Results of compliance with regulatory/legal requirements should be reported.

7.5a Organisational Effectiveness Results

7.5a(1) What are your current levels and trends in key measures and/or indicators of key design, production, delivery, and support process performance? Include productivity, cycle time, and other appropriate measures of effectiveness and efficiency.

  • Measures and/or indicators of operational effectiveness could include:
    - environmental improvements reflected in emissions levels, waste stream reductions, by-product use, and recycling
    - responsiveness indicators such as cycle time, lead times, and set-up times
    - process assessment results such as customer assessment or third-party assessment (such as ISO 9000)
    - business-specific indicators such as innovation rates, innovation effectiveness, cost reductions through innovation, time to market, product/process yield, complete and accurate shipments, and measures of strategic goal achievement.

7.5a(2) What are your results for key measures and/or indicators of regulatory/legal compliance and citizenship? What are your results for key measures and/or indicators of accomplishment of organisational strategy?

  • Regulatory, legal and compliance results reported in 7.5 should refer to requirements from 1.2
  • The Item calls for comparative information so that results reported can be evaluated against competitors or other relevant external measures of performance. These comparative data might include industry best, best competitor, industry average, and appropriate benchmarks from outside your industry. Such data might be derived from independent surveys, studies, laboratory testing, or other sources.
  • Brown (1998, p256) suggests that what's important here (or what was important in the differently-phrased but similarly-intentioned 1998 criteria) is to select and present data for those measures that reflect overall company performance