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| The Story Behind Bama Foods Winning Baldrige Application
By Glenn Bodinson
Alan Vandenberg, Bama’s training manager, had positive hopes about the company’s application for the 2004 Baldrige Award. He believed 2004 might be the year that Bama made significant strides toward Baldrige recognition. In fact, by the time he and Vicki Adams, project manager and expert writer from Relations, Inc., attended the 2004 Quest for Excellence, they had already completed an original draft of the application. With just five weeks left before the application deadline, he thought they were in good shape.
Vandenberg’s optimism faded quickly at the Quest for Excellence conference as he and Adams realized the process was much more complex than they had thought. They turned to Stoner Solutions, a 2003 Baldrige recipient, for advice, and Stoner recommended that they immediately bring on a coach who was an expert in the application process.
Based on her research and the recommendations of the Stoner executives, Adams hired me as the Bama coach. Knowing that I had been an examiner for the Baldrige Award and the Shingo Prize and that I had worked with seven companies that received the Baldrige Award and with eleven State Award recipients, Adams decided to place her confidence in me.
The Bama senior leaders, Adams and I began working without delay, since the commitment had been made to submit an application and the deadline was looming. The first critical decision was about whether to work from the existing draft or to start fresh. The team decided that it would be easier and more effective to start the process from the beginning. It was clear to everyone that Bama was an excellent company with good possibilities for Award success. However, the original approach was not doing a good enough job of telling the Bama story.
Next, we had to focus on Bama’s strengths and what made it a role model company. After identifying the most important and best results, we carefully wrote the Organizational Profile to focus on what was key to Bama, its customers and its suppliers.
According to Brenda Rice, Senior Vice President, “Our strategy for focusing and aligning the application was linked to our Five Strategic Outcomes. Bama had already used these for our strategic planning and balanced scorecard, so it made sense to feature them in our application.”
Adams had already obtained buy-in from senior leaders, and it was time to get them more involved in the process. Each senior leader was assigned responsibilities for preparing responses to the Criteria.
The next weeks were a whirlwind as the team attempted to accomplish a task in weeks that normally takes several months. Key processes had to be identified and named, and pictorial representations were developed for each process. The team practiced ways to describe the deployment and cycles of refinement. Then, we identified a number of forums where key learning and best practices were shared.
Meanwhile, the team used templates developed by BaldrigeCoach.com to create tables and charts and to write captions for the charts. I was also training the Category writing teams on how to understand the Criteria and Scoring guidelines and how to write effective and efficient responses for the Criteria Process and Results Categories. Adams learned how to write to the 80 percent goal, and we calibrated her efforts to help avoid time consuming re-writes.
Adams took the input from the Category teams and skillfully wrote the first new draft of the application in an examiner-friendly format. This draft went through a rigorous review and improvement process to ensure clarity and optimize the scoring opportunity.
Even while the application was being written, the team began planning for site visit training. As soon as the application was submitted, site visit preparation began in earnest. If you wait until you are notified of a site visit to begin preparing, you have wasted a lot of valuable time.
Paula Marshall-Chapman, Bama’s CEO stated Bama’s policy very clearly, “As we identified key initiatives and aligned individual goals with corporate goals, we used the rule that we would not do anything just for Baldrige. We would only implement changes that were good for Bama.”
Vandenberg’s optimism that 2004 would be a good one for Bama was proven correct when the company was named a Baldrige recipient in November.
An insider’s assessment of Bama’s 2004 application process.
Mike Frihart, a Six Sigma Black Belt, had written Bama’s application in prior years. When asked what he thought made the difference in 2004, he replied:
1. “Getting the senior leaders personally involved in championing and preparing
a Category really improved buy-in and ownership;
2. Using graphics made our application clearer to the examiners and made the
writing easier and more effective;
3. We focused the application on our “wow” process and results story, and
Vicki used words that made it exciting and added sizzle;
4. Using a master Baldrige coach is like hiring a guide who knows where the big
fish are. Glenn helped us produce a higher scoring application and effectively
prepared us for the site visit. He saved us at least a year in our Quest for
the Baldrige Award.”
Acknowledgements: The author would like to thank Vicki Adams, Relations Inc. in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for being such a wonderful Performance Partner and for her extraordinary skill in telling the Bama story in its Baldrige application. The author would also like to thank each member of Team Bama who implemented the coaching with enthusiasm and excellence.
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