Building Blocks for a Quality Company

An important aspect of any planning. exercise is to evaluate your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) to formulate a strategy for success. In order to conduct your SWOT effectively, you must use a good assessment model. There two major options in India: the IMC Ramakrishna Bajaj National Quality Award criteria, and the CII Exam Business Excellence criteria. They have been used by hundreds of organisations since 1995.

In 1995, the Bajaj criteria began as an attempt to identify organisations that were doing a good job with the new management technique called Total Quality Management, or TQM. The Bajaj criteria have changed significantly over the years, until they evolved into an overall model for assessing an organisations’ strengths and weaknesses. The criteria have been used by a variety of sectors: manufacturing - batch and continuous; services – IT, healthcare, education, and transportation; small businesses - manufacturing and trading.

Six of the seven Bajaj criteria address the approaches, processes, and systems the organisation employs to run its day-to-day business. The seventh looks at the organisation’s results over the last five to seven years, including financials, customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, community satisfaction, and operational results.

The most common approach to assessing your strengths and weaknesses against the Bajaj criteria is to Prepare  a 70-page application that summarises your systems, processes, and results. The application is then examined by a team of trained examiners (external or internal), who verify the information in the application through an on-site audit. The examiners prepare a feedback report summarising the strengths and weaknesses in each of the seven Bajaj criteria, along with scores on each item in the criteria. These feedback reports are then used as a part of the SWOT analysis for the planning process.

An alternative to writing a 70-page application that summarises your performance according to the Bajaj criteria is to evaluate your organisation during a meeting of senior executives. I urge you to assess your organisations’ strengths and weaknesses against the Bajaj criteria, annually.