National Quality Awards in India

It is interesting to learn that Malcolm Baldrige Performance Excellence Program is adopted globally across various countries.  Paul in his April blog topic wrote about Global Quality Programs where he refers to the Thailand Quality Award.  This award and the Singapore Quality Award are based on the Baldrige criteria for performance excellence.

Now come to India, you will see the prestigious Tata group, using TBEM (Tata Business Excellence Model) for performance excellence which is adopted from the Malcolm Baldrige Model.  I invite you to read my earlier blog post on the Tata success story and how TBEM is helping them deliver high quality products ranging from steel to salt.

Rajiv Gandhi National Quality Award was instituted by Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) to encourage Indian manufacturing and Service organizations to strive for excellence.  As you might have rightly guessed, it is modeled based on the Malcolm Baldrige Award and the Deming Prize in Japan.  This award is given to large, medium and small-scale industries.  The latest list of award winners is available at the BIS website.

To encourage total quality improvements in manufacturing and service sectors, Golden Peacock National Quality Award (GPNQ) is awarded to large, medium and smaller enterprises.  Award selection process is based on the Golden Peacock Awards framework which again is adopted from the Malcolm Baldrige and other European Quality models.

IMC Ramakrishna Bajaj National Quality award emphasize on the openness and transparency in governance and ethics, the need to create value to customers and business, and the challenges of rapid innovation and capitalizing on the knowledge assets.  This award was instituted in 1996 to recognize excellence in organizations.  The award guidelines again are quite similar to that of the Malcolm Baldrige model.

The power and robustness of Malcolm Baldrige model is immense and this is clear as we see that many Global Quality Programs were derived from this model. 

ASQ TV: For Effective Communication

A picture is worth a thousand words.  This popular adage tells the importance of how a still image can convey a complex idea or information.  When it comes it video, we know that, action speaks better than words.  I think ASQ understands this very well and hence the birth of ASQ TV.  

ASQ TV is a great initiative from ASQ, an adaptation of web 2.0, which will serve as an effective communication media for spreading the voice of quality across the world.  The third episode of ASQ TV was just awesome.  The video was crisp in sharing information and crystal clear with no buffering issues.    Way to go, ASQ!

It was a nice gesture from Paul to share information about ASQ TV to ensure that the influential voices and the ASQ members are aware of the same.  Thank you, Paul.

Service Quality - Impact of Mobility and Social Media

This month's discussion topic is around service quality.  Quite surprisingly, last year's ASQ customer service survey reported that companies don't consider customer service as a top priority.  In today's agile world, one year can change things drastically.

With the advent of modern smartphones (and mobile devices), both customers and companies are relying a lot on the social media to learn, share and gather useful information.   This information is available for free in the Internet that helps companies measure service quality more accurately than before.  Since the data in Internet is huge, modern techniques like Big Data Analytics help extract the right intelligence from the available data.

Let me site an example here.  Imagine I go to an Apple store to buy the new iPhone 5 that was recently released.  Whether my purchase experience was good or bad, I usually take a minute to go to my facebook page to post my service experience at the store.   For the Apple store manager, this feedback of mine in the social media is important and it helps measure the reputation of a particular store from a service perspective. 

Communication and feedback are two key aspects for accurately measuring service quality. While ASQ BOK for Service Quality covers communication, from social media, it can further be enhanced to take into effect the benefits of mobility and the social media in measuring service quality.