The European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) Excellence Model, is a self-assessment framework for measuring the strengths and areas for improvement of an organisation across all of its activities. The term ‘excellence’ is used because the Excellence Model focuses on what an organisation does, or could do, to provide an excellent service or product to its customers, service users or stakeholders...

The articles adds that there are potential limitations, such as:

* There is no formal mark or accreditation for the Model and it will not be overtly visible or recognisable to customers, service users, funders and other stakeholders. However EFQM does offer awards to organisations, showcasing winners through its website and networks.

* Though it has been used successfully by a number of medium and large voluntary organisations, it was initially developed for the commercial sector and some of the language of the Excellence Model may not translate easily to social enterprises or voluntary organisations. There are limited examples of use by third sector organisations.

http://www.proveandimprove.org/tools/efqm.php

My recommendation is a thorough review, especially revisit the KPIs.

i think what matter is the way your organization adopt the model and how it implemented form your organizational context. although all model  that is successful does not mean it will also successful to the rest of the world  there is what  we call it organizational culture and overall culture .similarly there are marketing instrument that measure success like six sigma for marketing  and sales 

Dear Mohammad,

Kindly note that your efforts have been stayed in a strategic level in which you should implement them asap. In this way you can use the following process to make your own organization revised. Please note that EFQM is not also applied in your organization but also it is not implemented at all. So I believe that you do not need any revolution or re-engineering, but the only thing what you need is the "Evolution". The steps as follows are very useful what have been used at least in 76 countries at the first issue:

1- Set your mission and vision:

Mission: a- Growth b- Productivity c- Development

Vision: a- Learning b- Process improvement c- Customer orientation d- Profiting

2- Make an operational translation and definition of the EFQM for all your staff again.

3- Make it favorable for all managers.

4- Make it continuous over the year.

5- Make it for everybody and everyday.

6- Make a gap analysis between your done mission and your objective vision.

It is obvious that after implementing the mentioned above process, you will have a good response from your situation.

As I know you are active in the Energy term, so I recommend you to read the attached article which is a pattern as a synergy between Strategic level and Operation level.

Rgds

Article Impact of "Energy Consumer's Behavior Management Process" on...

Very good approach Amir.

It's very kind of you Hussin.

Dear Mohammad, You may wish to dive a bit deeper into implementation. I have authored a publication (Organizational Excellence Framework, OEF)  that integrates leading excellence models (e.g. EFQM, Baldrige, Canadian, Australian) that were first published in the late 1980's and early 1990's and have evolved over time. The unique feature of the OEF publication is that it provides implementation guidelines used by seasoned management consulting professionals. The publication is intended to complement the good work of the excellence bodies and award programs and to provide additional assistance to the user. It can be downloaded at no charge in English and Spanish here  http://organizationalexcellencespecialists.ca/

Α few years ago the firma I worked for used this model

The biggest problem is the implementation and to ensure the aligment in all departments It needs consistency and to clear why do the model is important in the company

Good luck !!!

Thank you all for your informative comments however I believe beside implementation of the model there are some problems with model itself as follows:

1-Too much effort, time and resource needed to use the Model you have to mobilize all your organization staff level for few months to create a 100 pages self-assessment document it will be a major piece of work. You have to use massive resources to start using the EFQM Model. At the end what your organization get not real change, is not worth it.

2-   Many   organizations have not been   using the Excellence Model and they are on top such as  Top 100 fortunes companies in 2016  

3- All organizations implement their mission and vision by developing strategy that takes account of the market and sector. All process and activities of organization have to align to the strategy of organization however, the model consider only 8% of 1000 score to the strategy. This issue completely ignores how the Model has to be worked. 

Thank you Dawn for sharing the url. I already registered and following up on the framework.

I agree with my colleagues that the hottest zone for problems is the implementation, especially because it is the zone where people interact highly and where consistency is difficult to achieve.

Some additional comments on implementation:

Once the leader commits to the excellence journey, our work process includes four key steps. First, orient the employees on the excellence journey, Second, invite all employees to self-assess the organization against the model. Third, share the assessment results and an action oriented improvement plan (i.e. individual action plans to address low rated  management practices). Fourth, assist with implementation as required (e.g. assign action plans to employees, provide training and coaching, act as a temporary member of the team, conduct small projects).

We have two assessment tools. The free Teaser Assessment examines the culture of excellence in the organization and delivers a complementary report to the users inbox and the Full Assessment examines the culture of excellence and deployment of best management practices and delivers a  full report to the user at a very low cost http://www.qlbs.com/OrgEx/OrgExFramework.html (note - sample report at this link).  Another version of the full assessment may be viewed here  http://www.qlbs.com/QimonoVBA/Assessment/OrgExFramework . 

The magic formula when it comes to implementation includes: using guidelines that serve seasoned professionals well, engaging all employees in the excellence journey, finding creative ways to maintain the momentum,  and celebrating results along the way.

For those interested, I have a train-the-trainer program that shows professionals how to move through the process and use all the tools in the turnkey toolkit (i.e. publication, workshops, automated assessment and reporting tool). The toolkit is intended to add value to work with all excellence models and award programs.

Actually I believe that there's not any problem with the model in which I have done it many times. Each model decides to arrange the business process, so it is obvious that developing the strategies is not equivalent to implementation. Definitely, failure of implementation is caused by the managerial weakness.

Making the organization as strategy oriented is not implementation. Each part what I had explained before has its own program.

Thank you Dawn

Your contribution is an eye opener to many details beyond the thread's topic. 

My pleasure Hussin. 

Dear Dr. Amir& Dear Dawn

You two as consultants are expected to be expert in solving problems.  As a successful consultant today, you must know how to properly interpret, analyze, and think critically about the problems. The best way to analyze problems is to understand the bigger picture of model and realize that no model can be pertinent forever. You as good consultants have to know all diverse perspectives and experiences of the model, advantage, disadvantage, success factor and failure factor as well.  Not only closing your eyes and consisting on model that non of Top 100 fortunes companies in 2016 implemented.       

http://fortune.com/global500/list

http://www.efqm.org/what-we-do/assessment

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwj309DJmqXUAhWBWSwKHfG0ANkQFggmMAE&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.waprogramming.com%2Fdownload.php%3Fdownload%3D51c058e2da6cf7.64269415.pdf&usg=AFQjCNHQgIUxA73HSY3iZIplpRKKKXF_VQ

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwiMvOX-maXUAhVBApoKHTaNBA4QFgghMAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.agoraceg.org%2Fsystem%2Ffiles%2Flibro_efqm_25_anos.pdf&usg=AFQjCNGf2SlX8TJN6uL8sXEYmWRaQBW6yA

Quality models do not prevent flexibility as long as changes are justified within the philosophy of quality. Excellent input Amir.

Dear Amir

 As far as I know the total number of organizations that have been attempted to implement the module (EFQM)   in Iran is 507 so far. How come you participated for more than 750 executive projects!!!!!!  That means you have executed 68 project each year in average since the model appear in Iran!!!!! 

• By looking at the respective paragraph (4) it is obvious that:

• "This shows that they are not also expert in their own mission but also they like to work as "no plan" and this is the actual example of closing eyes against the implementation of strategies and employment of relevant model".
• "Definitely, failure of implementation is caused by the managerial weakness". It is better they go and have a running jump at themselves.
• Finally it is fully appreciated to discuss only on the question line and if someone could not have any toleration to hear our colleagues' comments, there's no reason to answer his own question.

Dear Mohammed

This is one of the are limitations of the EFQM (European Foundation for Quality Management). The result of improvement of you organisation shows that the EFQM is not a right choice for assessing the quality or the performance of your organisation.

Regards,

Zuhair

I may add,

Despite the fact that there were many good applications of TQM or EFQM excellence models in HEIs across America, Europe and Asia, and despite the benefits of TQM in general and the EFQM excellence model in particular in improving the quality in HEIs, the above authors have faced many serious problems in applying the EFQM excellence model in HEIs; some other authors have addressed numerous problems of an implementation type in its critical operating factors and in its structure and components, and have thus argued that the TQM and EFQM excellence models are not the optimal/best approaches for assessing the quality of HEIs.

Furthermore, according to the research based on the findings of TQM or EFQM excellence models and which was carried out by Dahlgaard-Park et al., (2013) it was shown that “not all the findings in the literature are positive” and “there are no significant differences in financial results that could be found”. Some limitations and serious practical problems of using TQM or EFQM models in many different organizations including HEIs were also discussed and identified by numerous papers and reports.

In order to clarify the issue addressed by the question, we ask, what are the critical limitations and challenges of TQM or EFQM models in HEIs? The discussions on this issue, which are very famous and available in a large quantity of literature some of it being included in three published papers, will be described and reviewed in this section for this purpose.

One of the important papers that discussed some problems relevant to the principles of the TQM model was published by Amaral and Rosa (2007). They confirmed that “the EFQM Excellence model is associated with business; this confirmation was resisted by academics and did not receive broad-based support inside HEIs” (Rosa et al., 2012).

The second important paper touching upon our interest is the paper of Becket and Brooks (2008) which has drawn numerous and significant limitations based on most papers published worldwide for the period from 1998 to 2006 concerning this model. Some of the pronounced limitations are in the existence of many “challenges related to managerial and leadership skills which have been identified with both EFQM and TQM models. Furthermore, the bureaucratic structures of HEIs are reported to undermine the application of the models”; “there is a continued debate on the role of the student as customer or co-producer in the HE system and the impact this has on the measurement and management of quality” and “there is an inherent difficulty in quantifying the outputs of higher education for self-assessment purposes”(Becket and Brooks, 2008, p. 44-45).

According to Arjomandi et al., 2009, EFQM models are not a right choice for assessing the quality or the performance of HEIs factories for many reasons. Some of them proposed to study the companies/factories but not to estimate the quality of HEIs, yet, the issues of quality and performance in HEIs are multidimensional and not unified.

For more details, see

1- Z. A. Al-Hemyari, S. Al Bulushi and A. Al-Humairi (2017). Quality Teaching of Private HEIs: Comparative Study based on Students’ Perceptions and Expectations. Accepted in Int. J. of Quality and Innovation (Inderscience).

2- Z. A. Al-Hemyari and A. M. Al-Sarmi (2017). HEIs Quality Improvement Through Students and Academic Staff’s Perception: Data Analysis and Robustness of the Results. International Journal for Quality Research, Vol.11, No.2, pp.261-278(Serbia and Indexed in Elsevier).

3- Z. A. Al-Hemyari and A. M. Al-Sarmi (2017). Al-Farahidi Performative model to assess HEIs. 4th OQNHE Conference 2017, Muscat, pp.1-15.

4- Z. A. Al-Hemyari and A. M. Al-Sarmi (2016). A Framework for Fostering the Quality of HEIs: Data Collection, Evaluation, Indication and Validation. Int. J. of Quality and Innovation, Vol.3, No.1, pp.42-66 (Inderscience).

Regards,

Zuhair