Case in Point: ARDEC Selected as First Federal and DoD Baldrige Award Winner

In late November 2007, the Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center (ARDEC) became the first federal and DoD organization selected to receive the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. ARDEC, headquartered at Picatinny Arsenal, New Jersey, provides nearly 90% of the Army's weapons systems and is internationally recognized for its innovative weapons technology and high-quality workforce. The Baldrige National Quality Award is presented each year to a small group of elite businesses and organizations deemed to have demonstrated world-class performance excellence through continuous quality improvement practices. This was the first year that DoD organizations were eligible for this award under the newly established nonprofit category.

ARDEC is the Army's principal center for the research, development, and sustainment of armaments solutions, both current and future - requiring proficiency in process management and business decision making. ARDEC's drive to provide the latest technology to our Warfighters, while supporting the Army's strategic force transformation, has required excellence in leadership, strategic planning/analysis, and customer/market focus. ARDEC works closely with its Army, Navy, Marine, and Air Force partners.

ARDEC achieved this recognition, in part, by leveraging one of its Lean Six Sigma (LSS) projects. Its leadership and workforce were united in their recognition of the value of using LSS for process design and innovation. In its Baldrige Award submission, ARDEC stated its goal is to ingrain and deploy LSS techniques in its everyday work, as well as in process design. More than one-third of ARDEC's workforce is trained in LSS. The way its employees learn and the way they perform is now impossible to separate from LSS techniques, according to its award submittal. It uses LSS as its improvement engine. According to its award submission, since FY01, ARDEC's LSS efforts have achieved cost benefits/avoidance in excess of $3 billion.

To continue its commitment to performance excellence and performance improvement, ARDEC's Director and Deputy Director personally developed its Enterprise Excellence system as their LSS Black Belt project. Enterprise Excellence (EE) integrates best practices and amplifies effectiveness to assure that ARDEC accomplishes its mission and strategic objectives. EE is a role model for the integration of a quality management system, the voice of the customer, and LSS, under the umbrella of the Baldrige Criteria. According to ARDEC's leaders, EE has enabled its transformation from a traditional, product center-based organization structure to an integrated, continuously measurable, process improvement capability and competency-based organization.

ARDEC EE is not a series of programs or special projects, which create islands of improvement. The intent is to institutionalize the Baldrige Framework throughout the center and equip every employee with the tools and methodologies to be used every workday. It is the way ARDEC thinks and does business.

For these and many other reasons, as one of five 2007 Baldrige Award recipients, ARDEC joins the elite ranks of 72 exemplary organizations that have been recognized since the program's inception in 1988. Both President Bush and Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez congratulated this year's Baldrige winners, recognizing them as organizations exercising superb "innovation, excellence and world-class performance... role models for organizations of all kinds striving to improve effectiveness and increase value to their customers."