(d) Excellence Through Information: In this present networking era, information has become a major resoure after physical, financial and human resources of the organisation. Proper management of information is the best way to get competitive advantage. Computer based information systems help the organisation to convert raw data into meaningful information, which helps the manager in taking effective decisions, which in turn improve business performance and ultimately lead to corporate excellence, Information systems like TPS (Transaction Processing System), MIS (Management Information System), DSS (Decision Support System), ESS (Executive Support System) Ef used intelligently help the organisation to reach the pinnacle in the competition.
Q.3. What is corporate excellence? What are its different models? Who uses corporate
excellence / models? (2011)
Ans. Corporate Excellence: Corporate Excellence, as described by the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM), refers to: “Outstanding practices in managing the organisation and achieving results, all based on a set of eight fundamental concepts”, these being, “result orientation; customer focus; leadership and constancy of purpose; management by processes and facts; people development and involvement; continuous learning, innovation and improvement; partnership development; and public responsibility”. This definition serves as a typical example of those put forward today.

In general, business excellence models have been developed by national bodies as a basis for award programmes. For most of these bodies, the awards themselves are secondary in importance to the wide-spread take up of the concepts of business excellence, which ultimately lead to improved national economic performance. By far the majority of organisations that use these models do so for self-assessment, by which they can identify improvement opportunities, areas of strength, and use the model as a framework for future organisational development. Users of the EFQM Excellence Model ,for instance, do so for the following purposes:
When used as a basis for an organisation’s improvement culture, the business excellence ‘criteria’ within the models broadly channel and encourage the use of best practices into areas where their effect will be most beneficial to performance. When used simply for self-assessment, the ‘criteria’ can clearly identify strong and weak areas of management practice so that tools such as benchmarking can be used to identify best-practices to enable the gaps to be closed. These critical links between business excellence models, best practices, and benchmarking are fundamental to the success of the models as tools of continuous improvement.
The most popular and influential model in the western world is the one launched by the US government called the Malcolm Baidrige Award Model (also commonly known as the Baidrige model, the Baidrige criteria, or The Criteria for Performance Excellence). More than 60 national and state/regional awards base their frameworks upon the Baidrige criteria.
User of Corporate Excellence/ Models: Organisations across the world are using these models as a basis for continuous performance improvement. In the US nearly two million copies of the Malcolm Baldrige Model have been distributed since the award’s launch in 1988, and this does not include copies that are available in books, state and local award programs, or those downloaded from the web. Of course there are no rules on how an organisation may use the models, some use them continually to self-assess, as the driver of continuous improvement, some use only the result sections as a basis for designing and managing a performance measurement system, some use the resulting scores from an assessment against the model to benchmark against other like-minded organisations, allowing an easy method of identifying orgaisations that can potentially be learned from some base the whole culture of the organisation around the concepts.