what is efqm certification?

While its origins lie in the private sector, public and voluntary sector organisations can also benefit from using the Excellence Model. It is non-prescriptive and does not involve strictly following a set of rules or standards, but provides a broad and coherent set of assumptions about what is required for a good organisation and its management. Each organisation can use it in its own way to manage and develop improvement, under the control of those who use the methods rather than an external evaluator.

The Model starts with the following premise:

Customer Results, People Results and Society results are achieved through Leadership driving Policy and Strategy, People, Partnerships and Resources leading ultimately to excellence in Key Performance Results.

Figure 1: The Excellence Model Framework

There are nine ‘big ideas’ or criteria in the Model that underpin this premise and attempt to cover all an organisation’s activities. These nine ideas are separated into Enablers and Results. The Enabler criteria are concerned with how the organisation conducts itself, how it manages its staff and resources, how it plans its strategy and how it reviews and monitors key processes. They are:

The organisation’s Results are what it achieves. These encompass the level of satisfaction among the organisation’s employees and customers, its impact on the wider community and key performance indicators. They are:

Each of the nine criteria is subdivided to describe in more detail the concept of ‘Excellence’ in that area and to examine how well an organisation is doing through a list of practical questions to ask itself. The starting point for most organisations is to gather evidence relevant to the nine criteria of the Model. This involves asking, for each of the criteria, ‘How good are we and how could we improve?’ Evidence may take a variety of forms depending upon the organisation.

The National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) suggests that each organisation will need to find a method for using the framework that suits them best.

They give examples of:

Once this self assessment exercise has been initiated, the organisation can take action to improve its performance with help from the guidance contained in the Model’s relevant publications or further training in the area that needs improvement.

The British Quality Foundation (BQF) has also developed a software tool called ‘BQFsnapshot’ that will run on most Windows-based computers. It is intended to provide a quick and simple way of finding out how your organisation measures up to the characteristics of Excellence.

Although most organisations concentrate on improving their performance using the Model, it is possible to ‘score’ performance against the criteria, providing an internal benchmark of improvement over a period of time.

The European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) owns the intellectual property of the Excellence Model. It is a not-for-profit membership foundation based in Brussels and was set up in 1989 by the CEOs of large European businesses.

EFQM (the European Foundation for Quality Management) is a non-profit membership foundation in Brussels, established in 1989 when the CEO/presidents of 67 European companies subscribed to the policy document and declared their commitments to EFQMs missions and values. EFQM works with over 50,000 organisations from across Europe and beyond, including organisations such as BMW, Robert Bosch, Aramco, Siemens and Huawei.

The Foundation was set up with members from many industries to develop the EFQM Excellence Model. The framework was intended to be used to support the assessment of organisations in the European Quality Award in 1992.

On the 15th September 1988, 14 European business leaders met with the 8th President of the European Commission (1985-1995) Jacques Delors, and signed a "Letter of intent" to form a European Foundation. The 14 CEOs were:

EFQM provides training services, award schemes by using their management framework, The EFQM Model.

The EFQM Model (known previously as the EFQM excellence Model) is a globally recognised management framework. The Model aims to support organisations in "managing change" and "improving performance."

A number of research studies have investigated the correlation between the adoption of holistic models such as The EFQM Model, and improved organizational results. The majority of such studies show a positive link. One tangentially related study was carried out by Vinod Singhal of the Georgia Institute of Technology and Kevin Hendricks of the College of William and Mary.

The EFQM Model, since 1989, aims to provide organisations from over 50,000 organisations with the skills to develop a culture of continuous improvement.

The model is used by about 50,000 organisations across the world. In recent years, more countries have started implementing the Model, especially across the Middle East and South America.

The EFQM Global Award is run annually by EFQM. It is designed to recognize organizations that have achieved an "outstanding level of continuous improvement", based on assessment against The EFQM Model.

Media related to EFQM at Wikimedia Commons

• I. European Excellence Award - EEA.
• II. Recognized for Excellence – R4E.
• III. Committed to Excellence – C2E.

The European scheme for recognising excellence was created to distinguish organisations that follow a strategy based on Excellence and which have met their established objectives.