Page 24 - Jan-Feb 2020
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Baldrige Award from page 23 level. Alignment, efficiency and a focus hour) for application review, scoring, site-
on priorities are by-products of the City’s visit prep, on-site examination and final
about the work we do and our talented em- commitment to Baldrige. Reaching this report preparation - $100,000; Feedback
ployees who make Germantown excellent.” level of excellence enables the City to meet report development, editing and assess-
customer needs responsibly and ultimately ment (approximately 100 hours at $100
City Administrator Patrick Lawton results in being one step closer to achieving per hour including Baldrige team lead,
received the call from Secretary of Com- the mission of “Excellence, Every day.” NIST editors and judges panel) - $ 10,000
merce Wilbur Ross, who shared the thrill- Award Value
ing news: the City had achieved its 10-year The other common question has to do
goal and was being honored with a Bald- with the cost of the Baldrige application. In addition, professors from Dartmouth
rige Award. The administration erupted The City’s cost for the Baldrige Award was College and the University of North
in cheers when Lawton emerged from his generously supplemented in the amount Carolina at Greensboro surveyed the 273
office following the call. After a brief cel- of $43,100 by the Germantown Area Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award
ebration, the conversation turned to what Chamber of Commerce. “The Chamber applicants between 2006 and 2011 about
would come next: the feedback report. was glad to help fund the City’s Baldrige the value of the Baldrige criteria on three
application,” said Chamber President/ levels: cost savings, customer satisfaction
“This is a time to celebrate, but soon CEO Janie Day. “We’ve seen the great and financial gain. They estimated that the
enough it will be time to dig into the feed- work they do, and honestly, their commit- benefits of using Baldrige outweigh the
back report and decide how we’ll address ment to excellence helps the Chamber do overall cost of the Baldrige Performance
our new opportunities for improvement,” its job more effectively. We couldn’t be any Excellence Program by a ratio of 820:1. In
Lawton told the team. “This is only the happier for the City,” she added. their report documenting the study, the
beginning.” The City’s Costs professors explained that the figure may
Why Baldrige? be on the conservative side. “If the social
The City’s costs are as follows: Intent to costs were compared to the benefits for
It’s a common question posed to those apply and application fee - $10,100; Site the economy as a whole, the benefit-to-
who choose the framework to guide visit (eight examiners and one NIST rep- cost ratio would be considerably higher,”
improvement. The fact is that most mu- resentative on site for one week) - $33,000; they wrote.
nicipal governments don’t regularly use Consulting services - $12,900
reliable data to measure performance. In For more information about the Mal-
Germantown, the belief is “if you can’t The value of the outside expertise and colm Baldrige National Quality Award,
measure it, you can’t improve it.” feedback is estimated as follows: Approxi- visit asq.org/quality-resources/malcolm-
mately 1,000 hours of Independent Board baldrige-national-quality-award.
Baldrige provides a program and pro- of Examiners team services (at $100 per
cess for driving performance to a higher
24 TPW January/February 2020
