Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Ceremony
April 23, 2008

Prepared remarks by
Joseph A. Lannon
Director
ARDEC

Secretary Gutierrez, Members of the Baldrige Foundation, Fellow Recipients, Distinguished Guests, My Fellow Colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen:

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.

While I personally have the privilege of standing in the spotlight, the men and women of ARDEC are the individuals who deserve your congratulations and applause. They have earned this distinction for our organization, the new high-technology Army and the Department of Defense by embracing the Baldrige criteria and other performance management tools that have made ARDEC what it is today.

This afternoon, I along with my fellow Baldrige recipients had their organizations honored by the President of the United States. I share this honor with all of my colleagues and pass on the President’s congratulations to each and every one of you.

Two years ago, it wasn’t even possible for a government organization to apply for this honor. Yet we and hundreds of other organizations like ARDEC at the federal, state and local level were operating according to the Baldrige criteria. In our case, we have been doing so since the early nineties.

Today, because of hard work and an unbelievably strong commitment to our customer—the U.S. warfighter—we are both the first DoD and federal organization to achieve this wonderful distinction.

We did so in order to become the best organization we can possibly be and provide the best products and support we can to the U.S. warfighter. I believe that we are doing that exceedingly well and this award helps to affirm that belief. But make no mistake about it. We can and will do even better as we travel the road of continuous improvement.

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.

We have integrated the voice of the customer, the Baldrige criteria as the management framework, and multiple best practices like Lean/Six Sigma, Capability Maturity Model Integration and ISO, and created an enterprise excellence performance model that has generated products and services of the highest possible quality that meet our customer’s performance requirements on schedule and within costs.

As I have already noted, our workforce is the cornerstone of our success.

Additionally, our partners, suppliers and collaborators in industry, academia and other Army laboratories and military services deserve recognition and credit for working with us in a spirit of cooperation and dedication to a common set of goals in support of the warfighter.

We never could have achieved this recognition were it not for our chain-of-command and the elected officials who have supported us and believed in the value of our work. They have been important enablers to us and allowed us to grow as an organization.

Thank you for bestowing this wonderful honor on our organization. We accept it humbly and appreciatively.

News release on the ceremony for the 2007 Baldrige winners

Posted: 04/23/08
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