Frameworks to guide an organization towards achieving success exist in various forms across the world, commonly referred to as excellence models. By Penny Sutcliffe and John Buttling.
In an endeavour to chart the world’s progress towards business excellence a global fraternity, known as the ‘GEM council’, conduct a formalized approach for sharing their knowledge, experience and information in search of business excellence. The members of the GEM Council are the guardians of Excellence Models across the globe. SAI Global, a member of this group, believe it is an important way to benchmark both a Business Excellence model and Awards process with those of other countries such as the United States, Europe, Japan, India, Latin America and Singapore.
Members who partner with the GEM Council can gain invaluable assistance for future developments and can share their countries individual business excellence experiences within this global fraternity. For example in Europe, The EFQM Excellence Model was introduced at the beginning of 1992 as the framework for assessing organizations for the European Quality Award. In America, The Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence framework provides a systems perspective for understanding performance management.
The framework and associated criteria reflect validated, leading-edge management practices against which an organization can measure itself. In Australia, The Australian Business Excellence Framework was one of the first to be developed in the late 1980’s, in response to Commonwealth Government and industry calls to make Australian enterprises more effective, efficient and competitive. The Australian Business Excellence Awards involve extensive national assessment procedures that are benchmarked against similar top-level awards in several of the world’s leading economies – most of which are part of the GEM Consortium.
The Awards are open to businesses large and small – whether they have five employees or 5000, wherever they may be and whatever industry they may be in. Assessment is a rigorous procedure with some 100 volunteers who spend two to three days with applicants to assess their businesses. Entries then go before a panel of review. Key categories of assessment include: people; leadership; strategy and planning; customer and market focus; innovation; quality and improvement; success and
sustainability; knowledge and information.
Historically, most Award winners have learnt to walk before they run, having been able to enter Awards at progressive stages. High-level business achievers, like high-level sporting achievers, rarely win overnight. It normally requires years of planning, laying foundations and executing. The excellence programs award companies DORIC, a leading construction and development company who became the recipient of the high profile Australian Business Excellence Award, Bronze in 2006, and also scored a goal as Overall Winner of the Excellence in Construction Award for the Australian Master Builders Association 2006.
These programs on an individual level, set a global standard, as each business strives to reach a certain level of excellence – and it’s not something that just happens overnight. “We have excellent people backed up by excellent systems, which have taken many years of hard work to get where we are today. However, we never rest on our laurels. Every business area is constantly reviewed and improved so that we can reach tomorrow’s goals,“ explains Chairman and founder Harry Xydas of DORIC’s success.
The same formula applies to business. You might excel in one area and get the applause. But applause dies down. If you can score in every department of the business game, you could have a permanent reminder of achieving sustainable excellence and end up on the winners’ dais like DORIC managed to do this year in the Australian Business Excellence Awards. The case study that follows is a case in point of how benchmarks can be set, and companies drastically improved through such global business excellence frameworks that recognize business success.
> Doric success formula
DORIC’s original plan was hatched back in 1989 when Harry Xydas’s vision was, “A quality building company that provided truly excellent service to clients.” Wholly Western Australian owned, DORIC enjoys an outstanding record for completing projects on or ahead of time and on budget. These projects are major commercial and industrial buildings of a project value of $20m plus. Their client list reads like a Who’s Who of state and local Government, institutions, major corporations and developers; encompassing civil & engineering, commercial, education, health care, hospitality, industrial, public, residential and retail sectors.
Such success realizes Xydas’s original vision, but his plans and visions are regularly updated and brought into sharper focus as each stage of business development is reached. For example, “treble the size of our business by 2011” is part of the current
company vision. The building or doing phase required rock-solid foundations, a strong and synergistic structure, and an environment that fostered effectiveness, efficiency and innovation; all built around quality people and quality systems. That building phase is well advanced but ongoing, of course.
Every DORIC person is recruited, trained and becomes selfmotivated to align themselves with the company core values, and then put them into practice. The sum of all parts (in this case, the 90 management and staff personnel) = overall company success.
DORIC has built on its core values with guiding principles structured around eight KRAs (key result areas). These are: leadership; management; knowledge; people; management system; marketing; client services and results. The flow-on to DORIC’s procedures and processes creates the right structure for theory to be able to translate into practice.
Examples include well-defined strategic planning and reporting processes, excellent architecture of the information systems and data access/analysis, properly structured meeting structures to ensure sharing of knowledge and improvement ideas, disciplined client relationship processes; plus a management system that relates to all areas such as building construction, engineering construction, property development and corporate services; is aligned to DORIC’s business needs and is certified to ISO 9001.
The Environment (Internal & External) Components also play an important part. “Empowerment” is not just a word but is seen as a critical success factor for DORIC. This two-way trust is evident in the very high ratings by staff. For example 82 per cent satisfaction has been achieved through one-on-one meetings with a 90 per cent overall agreement that the executive team members were living the philosophies, walk the talk, and are committed to mentoring and coaching. A no-blame policy is considered crucial, as is regularly asking for feedback and improvement ideas, and generally listening to staff. DORIC has a genuine belief in its people.
“We spend a lot of time understanding the total environment in which we work. A major external differentiator for us is that we focus in on client relationships and stakeholder communications in a way that is not expected in the building and construction
industry. The building game traditionally has a ‘blokey’ culture that is more about doing rather than talking, let alone formally strategizing communication/PR to make sure all communication channels are open and working fine,” says Business Development
Manager, Keith Somers.
A strong internal recognition and reward culture is also in place, along with family-friendly work practices and excellent support mechanisms which all add up to a working environment that highly values staff, health, safety and wellbeing. And in the external environment, DORIC has established key customer requirements in terms of price, program and quality. It works.
> Putting theory into practice
The Edith Cowan University (ECU) Library is a prime example of how the DORIC’s theory is demonstrated in the work that they do. The design intent was to make the library (from the outside) look like a bookshelf. DORIC amongst four other leading construction companies put forward a tender that came up with building construction options and a recommendation. The $26m ECU project at Joondalup was due for completion late September 2006.
Realizing this importance of this project, DORIC had been tracking it for two years and proactively organized meetings with the architect, key consultants and ECU, which put DORIC in good stead from the beginning by having a thorough understanding
of the total project, and achieved good relationships being established before the tender. This together with DORIC’s reputation of accurately estimating costs and manpower resources resulted in them ultimately winning the tender.
“We like to be innovative and also add value,” says Somers. “The university is next door to a regional shopping centre. The owners were also DORIC clients, so we introduced them and now they are helping each other.” The DORIC approach to communication was “same team, same goal.” They believe that frank and open two-way communication can fix potential problems and keep everyone happy before they even become problems. ECU’s Ron Hewitt, Manager of Capital Projects was proud to
have this exciting project in safe hands “DORIC has shown ability to successfully manage not only the construction process, but also to communicate with the various stakeholders extremely well.”
Whether you are based in Australasia, Asia, America, Canada or Europe, DORIC’s example is a recognized formula showing how a company can take transferable intellectual capital from understanding and apply it to a business for overall success.
A website has been developed by the GEM Council members to communicate the links to each country's Excellence Model – http://www.excellencemodels.org