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COLLEGE PARK, Md. – The 2008 award recipients were announced at the 2009 MPEA Conference and Awards Ceremony by the University of Maryland and U.S. Senators Barbara Mikulski and Benjamin Cardin.
These awards honor role-model organizations that successfully implement systematic processes for continuous improvement and achieving outstanding results. Award recipients are evaluated rigorously by an independent board of examiners using the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence, which measure an organization in seven areas: leadership; strategic planning; customer and market focus; measurement, analysis and knowledge management; workforce focus; process management; and results.
Award recipients include:
· Maryland Quality Award—Gold: Headquartered in Harford County, Custom Direct is a market leader in direct-to-consumer personalized printed products, security and fraud protection, financial documents, fulfillment items, phone support and direct marketing services. With a vision to become a world class organization with $250 million in revenue with less than 50 percent from checks, the organization has adopted the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence and LEAN principles to create a culture of excellence for its 460+ associates, located in Maryland and Arkansas. Custom Direct was established in 1993 and is a wholly owned subsidiary of Edgestone Capital Fund III.
· Maryland Quality Award—Gold: Upper Chesapeake Health, a community-based, two-hospital, not-for-profit health system located in Harford County, has served more than three generations of patients with high quality health care since 1912. It owns and operates Upper Chesapeake Medical Center and Harford Memorial Hospital, both which are accredited by The Joint Commission (TJC). With its core values of excellence, compassion, integrity, respect, responsibility and trust, Upper Chesapeake operates in a Culture of Excellence model. Nearly 3000 staff and 800 volunteers work as a team to serve the healthcare needs of the residents of this northeastern Maryland community.
· Maryland Quality Award—Gold: The Veteran Affairs Capitol Health Care Network (VISN 5) serves over 200,000 enrolled veterans in Maryland, the District of Columbia and portions of Virginia, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. Its mission is “to honor America’s veterans as heroes by providing the highest quality health care.” With a team of 7025 employees and 2500 volunteers, the network facilities include hospitals, community living centers, rehabilitation centers, research centers and community based outpatient clinics. The network utilizes the most widely distributed, integrated computerized medical record system in the United States. With its values of trust, respect, excellence, compassion and commitment, the network monitors it progress through external peer review, clinical service champions, monthly clinical committee meetings, and quarterly medical center reviews.
· Maryland Quality Award—Silver: Since its founding in 1958, the College of Southern Maryland has evolved into a comprehensive community college dedicated to serving the residents of Calvert, Charles and St. Mary’s counties. It serves 21,000 students through a broad range of high-quality associate degree and certificate programs, as well as short-term training, workforce development, cultural enrichment and continuing education offerings. The college serves to improve the quality of life for residents in the community by providing a wealth of educational services and uses a Quality Improvement Process for continuous improvement throughout its three campuses.
· Maryland Quality Award—Bronze: The Internal Revenue Service Office of Procurement of one of six divisions in IRS Agency-Wide Shared Services and is headquartered in Oxon Hill, with area offices located in New York, Atlanta, Dallas and San Francisco. It provides lifecycle acquisition management services to its customers including IRS organizations and employees and the Departments of the Treasury and Homeland Security. With a workforce of nearly 500, the organization focuses its work on its core values of service, teamwork, ethics, quality of life, innovation and professionalism. Using a performance improvement system that includes the GAO Framework Assessment, Baldrige framework self-assessments, and a Balanced Scorecard, this public agency’s vision is to be the best acquisition organization in the federal government—best people, best practices, and best performance.
· MPEA Certificate of Recognition: A privately held company headquartered in Frederick, Integrated Communication Solutions provides IT services to the federal government with its core business areas of Information Security, Network Services and Managed Services. Founded in 1989 with a vision to be a leading small business with a national presence, the company has four sites across the country and 109 employees serving its customers. The organization follows the simple formula of listening to its customers, standing by its commitments and delivering effective solutions on time and on budget. ICS’s continuous improvement program centers around its FADE approach, a four-step variation of the PDCA model.
Since 1983, Maryland’s U.S. Senators and the University of Maryland have joined together to help Maryland organizations achieve excellence and world-class results using the Maryland Performance Excellence Awards process to inspire, coach and recognize role model organizations for their successful implementation of systematic processes and achievement of outstanding results. The awards program provides an opportunity for organizations to improve their performance through self-assessment, writing an application, receiving an external analysis, participating in workshops and conferences, benchmarking with other high-performing organizations and sharing best practices.
Nearly 200 professionals gathered at the University of Maryland on March 23, 2009 to celebrate performance excellence with a day of sharing of best practices by national and state award recipients, networking with other professionals with an interest in organizational excellence and presentation of the 2008 Maryland Performance Excellence Awards.
The Criteria for Performance Excellence have evolved significantly over time to help organizations address a dynamic environment, focus on strategy-driven performance, address concerns about governance and ethics, and, most recently, consider the key decisions driving both short-term success and long-term organizational sustainability. The Criteria have continually progressed toward a comprehensive, integrated systems perspective of overall organizational performance management.
The year-to-year changes to the Baldrige Criteria have been evolutionary; however, since the Criteria’s inception over 20 years ago, the changes have been revolutionary. They have evolved from having a specific focus on manufacturing quality to a comprehensive strategic focus on overall organizational competitiveness and sustainability. With each update the awards program must balance two important stakeholder considerations. On one hand, there is a need for Criteria that are at the leading edge of validated management practice to help users address the increasingly complex challenges they face; on the other hand, there is a desire for the Criteria to remain stable in order to provide users continuity in their performance assessments. In 2008, minimal revisions were made, in light of the major revisions made in 2007. Continuing its efforts to balance stakeholders’ needs for both currency and stability, beginning in 2009, the Criteria will be revised every two years, making these the 2009–2010 Criteria for Performance Excellence. The most significant revisions to the 2009–2010 Criteria address three areas of importance: (1) customer focus, (2) organizational core competencies, and (3) sustainability and societal responsibilities.
The concept of customer engagement has received increasing attention as organizations compete in a global marketplace and in competitive local markets. The Criteria questions probe your ability to identify and deliver relevant product offerings to your customers now and in the future. The questions ask about your organization’s customer culture and how it contributes to customer engagement. The questions probe how you listen to the voice of the customer and, more importantly, how you use the information gathered. Is your organization customer focused? While core competencies were introduced as an important concept in the 2007 Baldrige Criteria, their strategic significance was not fully exploited. The Criteria questions now probe the relationship of your core competencies to your organization’s mission, strategy, and sustainability. Is your organization competent in the areas that will deliver its sustainability? Leading organizations are paying increased attention to the sustainability of their environmental, social, and economic systems. The Criteria questions probe how you contribute to the well-being of these systems and what your specific contributions have been. Is your organization fulfilling its societal responsibilities?
COLLEGE PARK, Md.–The University of Maryland, U.S. Senators Barbara Mikulski and Benjamin Cardin announce today that Howard Community College is recipient of the prestigious U.S. Senate Productivity Award.
The award, part of the university’s Maryland Performance Excellence Awards Program, honors role model organizations for successfully implementing systematic processes for continuous improvement and achieving outstanding results. Award recipients are evaluated rigorously by an independent board of examiners using the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence, which measures an organization in seven areas: leadership; strategic planning; customer and market focus; measurement, analysis and knowledge management; workforce focus; process management; and results.
“Howard Community College is an incredible institution–but an institution is only bricks and building. What makes it great is determined students, powerhouse faculty and consistent leadership,” says U.S. Senator Barbara A. Mikulski. “Community colleges are the gateway to the future. Howard Community College is an example of everything we want for our higher education facilities in Maryland.”
Representatives from the college received the award today at the 2008 Maryland Performance Excellence Awards Annual Conference and Awards Ceremony, held at the University of Maryland.
“I am very impressed by Howard Community College’s commitment to offering its students the highest standards of quality, and by its continuous monitoring of student success and employee satisfaction,” says U.S. Senator Benjamin Cardin.
Howard Community College is a publicly funded two-year community college serving the educational needs of the citizens and employers in Howard County since 1970. The college is located mid-way between the metropolitan areas of Baltimore and Washington. With its slogan, “You Can Get There from Here,” the college has forged a variety of partnerships to offer career and transfer programs to 25,000 students annually at its main campus in Columbia, the Ecker Business Training Center, Laurel College Center, and the historic Belmont Conference Center.
“A commitment to outcomes and assessment reveals not only the mindset of an institution, but also its heart,” says Kathleen Hetherington, president of Howard Community College. “HCC has a passion to help students succeed and to ‘discover their greatness.’ That’s what motivates the college’s tireless pursuit of quality.”
Howard Community College employs a continuous flow of information to evaluate activities that serve students and help them succeed. A multi-step process is used to select, align, collect and integrate information—including evidence of student learning—to track daily operations and overall organizational performance. Every team and unit, as well as senior leaders, use a Plan-Do-Study-Act process called “FIRE It Up!” to innovate, design and improve work systems. Information is fed into the strategic planning process to clarify objectives and direct resources.
Howard Community College ranks above its peers in indicators such as registered nurse licensure, employer training, and satisfaction of students and employees. The college also ranks high among its peers with a 50.1 percent four-year transfer rate.
“Howard Community College has a long history of using outcome measures to improve performance in the classroom,” said Dr. Patrick Huddie, chair of the college’s Board of Trustees. “The culture of the college says, ‘the quest for excellence is never complete; you always try to improve.’ That is the hallmark of a great institution.”
Additional winners of Maryland Performance Excellence Awards this year include:
- Allen & Shariff Corporation received the Bronze Maryland Quality Award. Headquartered in Columbia, Md., Allen & Shariff is an engineering/construction services company with a mission “to be the best by delivering outstanding engineering solutions and construction services that are innovative, efficient, practical and on-time.” Founded in 1993, the company has 98 employees in four offices in Maryland and Pennsylvania and focuses its work on its core values of integrity, quality, team spirit, pride, growth and citizenship.
- Asbury~Solomons, Inc. received the Gold Maryland Quality Award. A not-for-profit 501(c)3 Continuing Care Retirement Community (CCRC) located on a 58-acre waterfront, resort-like setting on the Patuxent River in Calvert County, Asbury~Solomons’ mission is “to provide continuing care and services to the aging, in a dignified Christian environment in southern Maryland.” With 500 residents in Residential Living, Assisted Living and a Skilled Nursing Facility, Asbury~Solomons’ vision is “to be the first choice in senior living services and the employer of choice.”
- The College of Southern Maryland received the Silver Maryland Quality Ward. Celebrating 50 years of providing the residents of Calvert, Charles and St. Mary’s Counties with a broad range of high-quality associate degree and certificate programs, the College of Southern Maryland also offers short-term training, workforce development, cultural enrichment and continuing education offerings. In 2007, more than 21,000 students attended the college at any of its three campuses. The mission of the College of Southern Maryland is to prepare the students and community to meet the challenges of individual, social and global changes by offering a broad range of affordable, high-quality learning opportunities.
- The Information Services Division (ISD) of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) received the Silver Maryland Quality Award. Located in Gaithersburg, Md., ISD is responsible for creating, maintaining, organizing, and disseminating information and a NIST knowledge base to support the research and administrative needs required to fulfill the scientific and technical mission of NIST. Through the work of its Research Library and Information Group, Electronic Information and Publications Group, and Museum and History Program, ISD provides professional scientific and technical information assistance to NIST research staff through its research and publishing cycles.
- Naval Medical Logistics Command (NAVMEDLOGCOM)received a Certificate of Recognition. Located at Fort Detrick in Frederick County, NAVMEDLOGCOM is responsible for handling all medical logistics needs of the United States Navy, including procurement of healthcare professionals, operational and medical logistics, production and manufacturing, and external training. With 150 military, civilian and contract workers, NAVMEDLOGCOM provides medical logistics services, supplies, and equipment to 130 military treatment facilities and more than 300 Naval ships and U.S. Marine Corps units located throughout the world. The organization practices its guiding principles of honor, courage and commitment in all aspects of its services.
- Queen Anne’s County Public Schools won the Silver Maryland Quality Award. Located at the foot of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, Queen Anne’s County is the gateway to Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Within a rapidly growing rural community of 40,500 individuals, Queen Anne’s County Public Schools’ mission is “to educate, encourage and enable all students to become productive and contributing citizens in a diverse and changing world.” The school district subscribes to this premise by providing rigorous academic, career, and technology-based education to more than 7,900 students, starting at age four and continuing through adulthood.
- Savantage Financial Services, Inc. received the Bronze Maryland Quality Award. Savantage provides accounting, information technology, financial systems and e-business solutions, as well as a wide range of software products and consulting services, to government organizations. As a woman-owned, small business headquartered in Rockville, its number one priority is customer service, and its core values of dedication, hard work and a commitment to innovation are essential to making customers successful. With a highly educated and diverse staff, its corporate culture focuses on leadership, integrity, a passion for learning, mutual respect, and a drive for initiative.
Since 1983, Maryland’s U.S. Senators and the University of Maryland have joined together to help Maryland organizations achieve excellence and world-class results using the Maryland Performance Excellence Awards process to inspire, coach and recognize role model organizations for their successful implementation of systematic processes and achievement of outstanding results. The awards program provides an opportunity for organizations to improve their performance through self-assessment, writing an application, receiving an external analysis, participating in workshops and conferences, benchmarking with other high-performing organizations and sharing best practices.
About the Maryland Performance Excellence Awards (www.mpea.umd.edu)
The Maryland Performance Excellence Awards Program recognizes and honors high-performing organizations in Maryland. Given since 1983 by Maryland’s U.S. Senators and the University of Maryland, the awards foster process-based, measurable, continuous improvement that drives results, creating successful organizations that strengthen the Maryland economy.