3M Dental Products Division
Established in 1964 and competing in a $4b global market, this 700-employee division of 3M manufactures and markets more than 1,300 dental products, including restorative materials, crown and bridge materials, dental adhesives, and infection control products.

Most of its 700 employees are based at the St Paul, MN, headquarters of the 3M Corporation. Its manufacturing and distribution facility is at Irvine, CA. In the US, where it has a leading share of the market, Dental Products competes with more than 100 manufacturers of dental products. Sales and distribution to US dentists are carried out through a network of independent distributors. In foreign markets, which account for 65% of sales, the division uses 3M subsidiaries for support.

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3M Dental Products Division

Boeing Airlift and Tanker Programs
(1998 winner)
The Boeing Company Airlift and Tanker Program (A&TP) designs, manufactures, and supports the C-17 Globemaster III, a USAF aircraft that transports people and oversized cargo throughout the world.

Headquartered in Long Beach, California, A&TP has approximately 9,000 employees; 91% located in California, 7% in Macon, Georgia, and 1% at Charleston Air Force Base in South Carolina; the remaining 1% are co-located at various customer sites.

The C-17 has been described by President Bill Clinton as “the world's best moving van.”

The C-17 development program began in 1982. On the leading edge of technology, the program experienced significant technical problems, along with late deliveries and cost overruns. In the early 1990s the Department of Defence threatened to cancel the program unless immediate improvements were made.

The program was turned around by investing in people, by being process-focused and customer-driven, and by partnering with customers, unions, and suppliers.

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Boeing Airlift and Tanker Programs

Granite Rock Company
Granite Rock has been headquartered in Watsonville, California, since its founding in 1900. The company's employees work in branch locations in South San Francisco, Redwood City, San Jose, Gilroy, Salinas, Monterey, Watsonville, Felton and Santa Cruz.

The company operates as a general engineering contractor and supplies construction materials including ready-mix concrete, hot mix asphalt, building materials, landscaping supplies, rock, sand and gravel.

Graniterock won the 1992 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award and the 1994 Governor's Golden State Quality Award. The company has twice been named one of the best 100 places to work in America by FORTUNE magazine.

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Granite Rock

IBM Rochester
IBM Rochester won its Baldrige award in 1990, at a time when the parent corporation was in some trouble.

Early critics of the Baldrige award frequently (and of course, prematurely) cited this apparently bizarre outcome as yet another nail in the award's coffin. IBM today is not the organisation that it was in the late 80s. But in many important respects, IBM Rochester still is.

IBM Rochester's story is interesting in the context of the Baldrigeplus case study collection because of the eight, it represents one of the oldest awards, and ten years have passed since a 17-person IBM team put together the 1990 winning application.

The IBM site in Rochester, MN is a 1 mile long facility consisting of 32 interconnected buildings covering 32 acres, with 7,000 employees. It's the manufacturing location, 'the home of' IBM's AS/400 machines, produced in versions which span the range from desktop PCs to mainframes, and the RS/6000. There is also some disk substrate manufacturing on this site. Most of the Rochester site staff are engineers, programmers and professionals. At the time of writing (early 1999) one AS/400 was shipped every 12 minutes, and the AS/400 business was worth about 15% of IBM's total revenue

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IBM Rochester

Raytheon
Strictly speaking, Raytheon is not a Baldrige winner. It was Texas Instruments' (TI) defence business which won a Baldrige award in 1992, the first defence contractor to do so.

Raytheon Systems Company is an amalgam of Raytheon Electronic Systems, Raytheon E-Systems, and Hughes and Texas Instruments' defence operations (taking the company from 'a second-tier $12b firm to a top-tier contractor on the scale of Lockheed Martin and Boeing').

It's the TI 'legacy' company (now more or less the Sensors and Electronic Systems operation) that's the 'Baldrige' champion within RSC.

TI's post-Baldrige approach to performance excellence, variously packaged and labelled (TI-BEST, ACLAS, Six Sigma), maps closely to the Baldrige system.

Raytheon comprises about 100,000 people world-wide, with about $20b of aggregate revenues. SES has about 16,000 people, and about a $3-5b of business, with 4 facilities in Southern California, about 25 facilities altogether across the US.

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Raytheon

Solar Turbines (1998 winner)
Solar Turbines, a wholly owned subsidiary of Caterpillar Inc., is headquartered in San Diego, CA.

Solar's “rugged, reliable industrial gas turbines” are used for oil and gas production and transmission, industrial power generation, and marine propulsion applications, using a wide variety of fuels including natural gas, distillates, NGL, LNG, landfill and sewage gases, coal-seam methane, hydrogen and others.

Solar is one of the 50 largest exporters in the United States, with about 75% of revenues, nearly $1.3 billion in 1997, from exports.

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Solar Turbines

Solar Turbines' 1998 Baldrige application summary is publicly available on the Caterpillar website (start at www.cat.com). For a slightly edited Acrobat PDF version:

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Solar's application summary

Solectron
Founded in 1977, Solectron Corporation provides integrated solutions that span the entire product cycle — from pre-production planning and design, to manufacturing, distribution and end-of-life product service and support — for the world's leading electronics original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).

It offers its customers competitive outsourcing advantages, such as access to advanced manufacturing technologies, shortened product time-to-market, reduced cost of production and more effective asset utilization.

The company is well known for its printed circuit board assembly (PCBA) business but also delivers a full-range of systems manufacturing solutions for its customers in a variety of industries.

Solectron has received 200 quality and service awards from its customers in addition to the 1997 and 1991 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Awards, and it's the only company to win the Baldrige award twice.

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Solectron

Solectron's 1997 application summary is publicly available on the company's web site.

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Solectron's application summary

Texas Nameplate Company (1998 winner)
Texas Nameplate Company, the smallest organisation ever to win a Baldrige award, manufactures the identification labels commonly seen on all types of products - from refrigerators to high-pressure valves to computer equipment.

TNC's nameplates are used for identification and to inform users of electronic and computer equipment, oilfield equipment, valves, pressure vessels, and vehicles. The techniques used to manufacture nameplates include screen printing, photo engraving, and chemical etching.

Seventy-five percent of TNC's products are chemically etched, and can withstand adverse conditions such as long-term exposure to outdoor elements or use in a saltwater environment for offshore applications.

“Using the Baldrige criteria, we became conscious of the impact of our work on the environment. We currently exceed EPA requirements for wastewater by over 12 times. And, I am happy to announce today that we are on the brink of eliminating hazardous waste altogether, not just reducing it,” said CEO Crownover in his Baldrige acceptance speech in front of US President Bill Clinton.

“Using the Baldrige criteria, we have achieved a fair profit while at the same time controlling our growth. We have learned that simply growing bigger is not necessarily growing better.

“And, finally, using the Baldrige criteria, we have learned how to optimise our internal processes. We happily share the benefit of these processes with the neighbourhood school we have adopted. This has been especially rewarding for our employees because, with the exception of two of us, our employees are not college-trained."

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Texas Nameplate Company