Army (ARDEC) – Recognized Sustained Excellence

REMARKS: Joseph A. Lannon, Director, ARDEC. 

It is a tremendous honor to stand here today and accept this prestigious award, the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, on behalf of my co-workers at the United States Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center, also known as ARDEC.

Our prescription for organizational success is very basic. Everything we do is bound by a commitment to the customer, our warfighters, whose lives depend on our work.

Four basic components—coupled with hard work, tenacity and vision—have shaped ARDEC into the organization it is today:

• Innovation in both product and process;
• Persistence in the pursuit of excellence;
• External evaluation and continuous learning to accelerate improvement; and
• A culture that thinks like a “for-profit” great business with a bottom line.

2007 was the first year for the nonprofit category.  The Award recognized SUSTAINED and PROVEN (auditable) excellence over several years.  

The Good or Great Page provides a notional comparison of Baldrige to the concepts of capability maturity, cost of poor quality, sigma, and knowledge of variation.