Baldrige Award Applicants Can Now Receive Recognition for Best Practices

From NIST Tech Beat: June 27, 2012
Contact: Michael E. Newman

For the first time in the 25-year history of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, high-performing organizations that are candidates for the award will be eligible for recognition of their best practices in six of the seven Baldrige Criteria categories, even if they are not selected as a winner.

The 39 applicants for the 2012 Baldrige Award are currently being evaluated rigorously by an independent board of 478 examiners in the seven categories of the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence: leadership; strategic planning; customer focus; measurement, analysis and knowledge management; workforce focus; operations focus; and results. Late this summer, organizations that distinguish themselves in the initial screening will be site visited by teams of examiners to verify information in the application and to clarify questions that come up during the review.
Based on the results of the site visits, the Baldrige Panel of Judges will recommend to the Secretary of Commerce which organizations should receive the 2012 Baldrige Award. From amongst the remaining site-visited applicants, the judges also may identify examples of best practices in the first six categories of the Baldrige Criteria for special recognition. A site-visited organization may be recognized for one or more category best practices. In each case, the organization will achieve the recognition based on its performance in that category and the results related to that performance.
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