ABSTRACT
The more deeply leaders, managers, and associates understand the principles of operational excellence and the more perfectly systems are aligned to reinforce ideal behavior, the greater the probability of creating a sustainable culture of excellence where achieving ideal results is the norm rather than the aspiration. There is a lot to learn from an external assessment and the best ones will be principle-focused rather than tool-focused. The Shingo Prize has become the world’s highest standard for enterprise excellence. As an effective way to benchmark progress toward enterprise excellence, organizations throughout the world may apply and challenge for this Prize. Most organizations do not wait until they believe they might qualify for the Shingo Prize to challenge. They challenge for the Prize so they can have a team of enterprise excellence experts visit their company and evaluate their performance.
