GOA-Solutions® success stories
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Success stories
Many researches and practical observations have proven the positive impact of the EFQM Excellence Model implementation in organisations both in private and public sector. A great success story from public administration sector is the Swiss Post – ESPRIX Award Winner in 2007, thus receiving the highest national level award in Switzerland among qualitative service providers.
Swiss Post, as a public service provider, holds a significant level of social responsibility, which generates a permanent necessity to verify and improve all their services. To ensure a continuous improvement Swiss Post has been carrying out internal self-assessments and assessments by external experts already since 2001. Results gathered from EFQM-based assessment have been used as a source for continuous improvement.
Over the years, Swiss Post met challenges caused by changes in customer behaviour and a decrease of direct sales. The Department of Post offices and Sales being responsible for Post office management has been focusing on customer needs and productivity improvement since 2001. In addition, the mentioned Department supports the internal self-assessment teams and experts during external assessments based on EFQM Excellence Model.
Swiss Post is proud of its management team that has agreed to accept the challenge of being a transparent and modern organisation. Most of the Post office and sales management department staff has received EFQM an Assessor training, thus ensuring the continuous improvement also during every-day processes.
The National Agency of Economics for Lichtenstein (Amt für Wirstschaft AVW) can be compared to a Ministry of Economics in other, bigger countries. Each Agency is committed to use the taxpayers’ money as efficient as possible, in the same time ensuring high quality service. AVW believes that those who pay taxes have a right to state-provided services for themselves; therefore, the authority is responsible to provide these services in high quality.
AVW as a public administration institution is not profit oriented. Considering, however, that the amount of tax-income currently decreases, the service quality may nevertheless not decline. This situation requires using a holistic management concept, like business excellence, which allows discovering potential ways of optimising costs and processes and therefore – to improve cost/benefit ratios of public services.
Christian Hausmann, Director of AVW, brought with him a good knowledge about the EFQM Excellence Model as well as its implementation and available software support from his former job at the University of Lichtenstein. Mr. Hausmann prepared the necessary steps for a successful EFQM Excellence Model implementation and adapted the self-assessment questions to public-service-specific language. In addition, his personal assistant had acquired European Excellence assessor training thus ensuring direct support for the team during the self-assessment.
WIFI Upper Austria has always tried to be the example for its members; therefore in all areas of the Entrepreneurs academy culture of excellence is being implemented.
‘Quality policy is part of our mission,’ said the Head of the WIFI Entrepreneurs academy department Mrs. Volfsteiner (Frau Dr. Wolfsteiner). ‘Quality is determined by our thoughts and actions, and from our partners and suppliers we expect high quality and aspire for a long-term cooperation. The EFQM Excellence model offers us, the service provider, a comprehensive and integrated excellence approach.’
The Gymnasium’s mission is to create preconditions for each learner’s personal growth, development of self-driven learning skills and achievement of high level of competitiveness. Dobele State Gymnasium is a regional methodical center, which has high learning achievements and for ten years has been in the second place of ‘Draudzīgā aicinājuma’ rating.
According to the mission of the gymnasium - to achieve high level of learner’s competitiveness, it is necessary to find the appropriate solutions that would help to ensure such level. Excellence is one of the main arguments and driving forces behind high results.
We try to ensure that learners reach high learning achievements not only to keep the status of a state gymnasium, but also to fulfil the educational-methodical function in our region and to promote the name of Dobele in society. Our long-term goal is to create an environment where high results and high level of competitiveness could be achieved. Excellence approach is a comprehensive quality assurance opportunity; therefore we chose it to reach our goals.
Since 2010 within the framework of the project we used the GOA-WorkBench® software provided by Eurofortis IT and came to the conclusion that it is a suitable solution for the implementation of gymnasium’s development needs. Information on the quality management tools indicated that this approach is recognised and used globally also in the area of education.
