Quality Time.

• Author: HROMADKA, ERIK
• Position: Awards for businesses. - Brief Article

Recognizing those who are doing it better

As Indiana business leaders embrace a new year of opportunity, there's one resolution they can all agree on: improving the quality of their operations. That's why the state of Indiana established the annual Quality Improvement Award program that encourages and recognizes the achievements made by companies setting out to improve their operations.

"Quality is everyone's business," begins the award application. "Every citizen of Indiana and beyond stands to benefit when a company or organization in the state makes a commitment to quality." And that belief is central to the success of any effort to improve standards, explains Joe Phillips, manager of quality services at the Indiana Business Modernization and Technology Corp. (BMT), which reviews nominated companies and hosts the award programs in South Bend, Indianapolis and Evansville.

Phillips says the 202 award winners for 1999 have all demonstrated improvements in measuring and maintaining quality since last year. Recognizing year-to-year improvement allows all sorts of companies to vie for recognition, explains Phillips, noting that winners vary in size from three to 6,700 employees and include 155 manufacturing companies, 28 service companies, three distributors, three educational institutions and other companies that range from retail stores to utilities. "When we put the program together back in 1995, we decided to recognize improvements that companies are making rather than having them compete against each other," he says.

That means the companies recognized have set and achieved individual goals in the areas of certification by third-party quality organizations such as the International Standards Organization (ISO 9000, ISO 14000, etc.), demonstrated dramatic improvement in a single area such as customer satisfaction or product quality, or shown progress in quality systems such as environmental compliance, safety and health, and strategic planning.

One Indiana company that understands how the process works is Ferro Corp. in Evansville, which has won the award four consecutive years. As a result, the 250-employee manufacturer of polypropylene compounds has experienced 3.5 million man hours without a lost-time accident.

"If you care about your employees, you give them a good, safe environment," says general manager Steve Edge, who notes the company has maintained its stellar safety record in an industry where the potential for accidents is much...