Tata Steel won the coveted award for "Sustained Excellence" in the Tata Business Excellence Model (TBEM) assessment for the year 2003. The award was given for sustaining 600 plus score out of 1000 for three consecutive years. Mr. B. Muthuraman, MD Tata Steel received the award from Mr. Ratan Tata, Chairman, Tata Group of Companies at a glittering function in Mumbai. Earlier, the company had won the prestigious JRD QV Award in the year 2000. The award is conferred upon the company scoring at least 600 out of a maximum score of 1000. So far, Tata Steel is the only company to win this award. Two other profit centres of Tata Steel? The Tubes Division and The Ferro Alloys & Minerals Division scored over 500 points. FAMD was awarded the trophy for "Active Promotion" of TBEM for crossing the 500 point mark for the first time.

The award was instituted nine years ago in memory of the illustrious JRD Tata. It is based on The Tata Business Excellence Model adapted from the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, USA. The JRD QV Award is meant for Tata Group companies only and is aimed to propel theTata companies to measure themselves against a set of criteria, which are the hallmarks of a world-class organisation. While the JRD QV continues to challenge and inspire the companies to reach the levels worthy of an award, the TBEM engages all participant companies in a continual journey of improvement leading to business excellence.

As part of the assessment exercise the applicant companies are assessed by trained assessors on seven dimensions e.g., leadership, strategic planning,customer and market focus, information and analysis, human resource focus, process management and business results. Under the TBEM assessment, the companies seek to measure the abilities of their processes to deliver the business results. This in turn helps them to prune and churn the way they conduct their business. In this process, the companies are assisted by a large pool of assessors and mentors who tirelessly and incisively assess to draw the focus to critical drivers of success. For their assessment, they are armed with the TBEM framework and their own business acumen and experience.

This year, Tata Steel scored 675 points indicating that the company has reached the position of being the industry leader. A senior Baldrige assessor from USA, Mr Bob Osterhoff carried out the assessment of Tata Steel with other trained assessors from the Tata Group. Bob has done a number of assessments for the Baldrige Award in the US. He commented that Tata Steel was among the best companies he had visited in terms of the willingness to learn, change and be among world industrial leaders. There are many great practices that the Tata Steel people can all be prou. Some of the striking strengths he observed were the quality of senior leadership and its commitment to excellence, community involvement activities, production processes driven by process automation, deployment of Balanced Score Card and Knowledge Management interpretation and deployment.

The process of assessment culminates on 29th July every year. The birthday of the legendary JRD Tata. The JRD QV seeks to commemorate his memory and spur Tata organisations into higher levels of performance.

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