From Cargill to Caterpillar, from Motorola and Boeing to Ritz Carlton they all use the Baldrige Criteria to successfully drive performance excellence at a world class level. They are not alone, healthcare, education, non-profits and small business organizations also use the criteria all over the world. The National Housing Quality Award is based on the Baldrige criteria and our industry has also found the criteria a powerful way to drive improvement and increase profits. NHQA has been used by custom home builders and national production builders, from those building 20 homes a year to those building thousands. The NHQA is not just about applying for the award, writing a detailed breakdown of how your organization compares to the criteria and having the opportunity to get a detailed feedback report on how to improve. It can also be used internally as a self-assessment tool. This can mean creating the application document for you own use to discover where and how to improve. Or a simple scoring tool can be used to introduce the concepts and highlight where you have opportunities for improvement as a starting point.
At the below link is a simple Baldrige self-assessment table and a short paper describing how it can be used.
http://businessexcellenceconsulting.net/files/6%20QMFselfassessment.pdf