Business excellence is an integrated collection of proven management practices that define world-class organizations. It provides a framework to improve results and achieve a return on investment. Using business excellence models lets an organization objectively evaluate its current management systems and performance. The ‘criteria’ in these models also identify strong and weak areas of management practice to enable them to implement best practices to close the gaps.
Core Competencies
Core competencies are the unique strengths ingrained in your business that allow you to deliver value to customers. They are the defining characteristics that set you apart in a crowded marketplace and help create a sustainable competitive advantage. Core competencies can include everything from your industry experience, specialized skill sets, or training to your reputation as an expert in a particular field. Identifying your company’s core competencies requires deep introspection and evaluation of your current operations. Ultimately, they must improve your customer’s willingness to pay and be something your competitors can’t easily duplicate.
Ask critical employees and consumers for feedback to determine your company’s core competencies. They may provide insight into what you do exceptionally well and what keeps you above the competition. They can also highlight the areas in which you need to focus more energy and resources to achieve the excellence your customers expect from your company.
For example, a company’s core competency might be its ability to make the highest quality products. This could mean investing in stringent quality control procedures, highly skilled and specialized workers, or the best raw materials available. Alternatively, a company can produce goods and services at the lowest cost. This would mean investing in networked software systems, production processes, and streamlined supply chains.
Lastly, it might be a company’s capability to adapt quickly to commercial opportunities or challenges. This might mean having the quickest manufacturing processes, flexible production capabilities, or fast-tracked sales and marketing programs.
Once you’ve identified your core competencies, communicate them clearly to your employees and customers. This enhances your company’s identity, inspires employee excellence, and elevates customer service for market success. Effective communication of core competencies also builds a strong brand and boosts expansion success. For example, Southwest Airlines excels by emphasizing cost efficiency, top-notch customer service, and a vibrant workplace culture as its core strengths.
Core Values
A company’s core values establish the foundation upon which a business operates. They guide employees and help the company to achieve a competitive advantage. Core values are also essential to a healthy work environment and help ensure that the company acts ethically. In addition, a company’s core values can guide its relationships with clients and customers.
When a company establishes core values, it can define its beliefs clearly and concisely. These values represent something the company stands for and is passionate about. They should also be timeless, not influenced by market trends or changing leadership. Defining and incorporating core values into the company’s culture can be challenging, but it is well worth the effort.
Companies often take their core values very seriously and incorporate them into their work environments. They may even go as far as to publish their core values on their websites or offices. These core values include integrity, respect, communication, and excellence. However, it is possible to have too many core values and end up with a list that does not stand out from the competition or inspire employee behavior.
Ideally, a company’s core values will be constructive and promote a positive work environment. They should also be a catalyst for innovation and growth. A good example is Google’s ten core values: honesty, creativity, and innovation. The company’s founders have stated that the company is built on these guiding principles and is willing to do whatever it takes to stay true to them.
The value of “built-in quality” is a core SAFe value that aims to ensure high-quality results in all development, testing, and deployment aspects. This value helps to reduce the need for rework, saving both time and money for the organization. In addition, this value emphasizes the importance of building quality in all aspects of the development process, from the initial design phase to the coding phase to the test and deployment phases.
Core Knowledge
The Core Knowledge sequence is a specific, grade-by-grade body of knowledge that teachers must cover. It is based on the belief that students learn best when they are taught a wide range of content, from history and geography to science and social studies to mathematics and literature. This wide breadth of subject matter is essential for establishing cultural literacy and reading comprehension. It also ensures that students have access to essential shared knowledge and information necessary for academic excellence and equity in a democracy.
The Sequence is the result of a long process of research and consensus-building by the Core Knowledge Foundation. It offers language arts, history and geography guidelines, science, visual arts, music, and math. These guidelines complement the general skills and objectives in state and local curriculum standards.
While most schools and districts provide some guidance on what students should learn, they often need help identifying a particular knowledge set that children need in each grade. The Core Knowledge Sequence makes it possible to identify this body of knowledge and systematically build it year by year. This approach eliminates the repetition and gaps in instruction that can occur with vague curricular guidelines and allows teachers to focus on teaching critical skills.
The Sequence also includes a recommended list of high-quality literature that must be read at each grade level. This requirement is consistent with the mission of Great Hearts, which emphasizes the importance of reading and literature as a foundation for learning.
The Core Knowledge approach encourages memorization but also teaches students to analyze, evaluate, synthesize, and interpret the world around them. It teaches respect for diverse peoples and cultures and encourages students to apply their knowledge to real-world issues and problems. To do so, they must have a broad base of knowledge about past and current events and diverse civilizations. This knowledge enables students to connect across different subjects and time periods and develop more persuasive arguments. It is essential for developing strong reading comprehension and writing skills, which are the cornerstones of learning.
Read More: THE POWER OF BUSINESS SCHOOL EDUCATION
Core Skills
The terms process excellence, operational excellence, and business excellence often need clarification. They are three parts of a hierarchy, with Process Excellence and Operational Excellence subsets of Business Excellence. When businesses strive for all three, they achieve business excellence, the most comprehensive level of business process improvement.
To achieve operational excellence, companies must implement a culture that consistently meets customer demand and stays ahead of competitors. To do so, leaders must shift their focus from managing daily operations to continually improving processes and finding new ways to create value for customers. This will free up leaders’ time to focus on revenue-growing activities like marketing, continuous innovation, and new product development.
Achieving operational excellence requires breaking down departmental barriers and encouraging all employees to consider themselves part of one value stream. This is important because it encourages people to look for efficiency gains in every aspect of their job, including back-office functions. This type of thinking can help companies increase their overall productivity by reducing the time it takes to complete an activity from start to finish.
Unlike the related theories of Lean and Six Sigma, which emphasize eliminating waste in specific workflows, the concept of business excellence is more holistic. It focuses on creating efficient value streams that can produce tangible goods like cars or intangible ones like services. This approach helps companies stay competitive by building processes responsive to customer demand and providing high-quality products or services at the lowest possible cost.
Achieving operational excellence is a journey that will require ongoing commitment and support from management. Managers need tools to monitor progress alongside clear organizational goals. These tools encompass business process management apps, software for collecting customer feedback, and KPI-tracking dashboards. They aid in streamlining work processes and automation and provide task visibility to prevent oversights. HighGear’s workflow software platform is a solution that fosters business excellence by enhancing task clarity, responsibility, and work relationships for all company members.
