Building an Infrastructure

The IMC Ramkrishna Bajaj National Quality Award criteria have gradually matured over the past seven years. Starting as a simple quality management system framework the criteria have evolved to a catalyst for ‘making quality happen’-World-class.

In my opinion, organisations that wish to attain world-class stature, using the Bajaj criteria, can start by building a robust infrastructure using Six Sigma, Balanced Score Card (BSC) and the International Quality Maturity Model (IQMM).

Six Sigma serves as a brilliant methodology for addressing customer focus and delivering customer satisfaction. It emphasises a boundaryless organisation that efficiently manages its business processes to be effective in the marketplace. (As a philosophy, effectiveness should precede efficiency.)

Further, the roles of the apex council, champions, process owners, black belts, green belts, and team members are clearly articulated to reinforce horizontal crossfunctional process management. Articulated also, is the need to adopt a strict manage-by-fact culture.

To accomplish radical change, the Six Sigma methodology is equally applicable to manufacturing and service industries. Finally, business results have been significant when organisations have focused on core processes that deliver to paying customers.

The BSC approach is vital for business performance measurement. Organisations must link select metrics to their mission, values, vision and key success factors. This approach enables the senior leadership to:

• Choose proper metrics to measure performance
• Understand the difference between strategic and operational metrics
• Communicate the metrics throughout the organisation
• Master the process of collecting data
• Evaluate the organisation’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats

All the above are key inputs for building an infrastructure appropriate for the Bajaj criteria. The BSC, in combination with Six Sigma, delivers significant synergistic advantage in terms of business results.

In order to manage with the Six Sigma and BSC approaches, organisations need an efficient quality management system infrastructure. The IQMM is an excellent enabler for the same. On a scale of 1 to 10, the IQMM guides organisations to grow their infrastructure from an ISO 9001 (Level 3) to one that supports the Bajaj criteria (Level 8). The significant dimensions of the IQMM are management controls, core process management, and feedforward as well as feed-back information.

In conclusion, winning the IMC Ramkrishna Bajaj National Quality Award should not be the only objective of aspiring world-class organisations. Implementing the criteria and getting customers to vote for you with their rupees, yens, euros and dollars should be the real driver.