The British Quality Foundation (BQF) is Europe's largest corporate membership organisation promoting performance improvement and excellence.

Please click here to download Reports and Accounts ( File Size: 139KB) for the year ended
31 December 2007, here to download our Memorandum & Articles of Association ( File Size: 135KB), here for the AGM Minutes 2008 ( File Size: 50KB) and here for the Annual Review 2007 ( File Size: 1.0MB)

Sponsor and Key Members of the Foundation help sponsor the UK Excellence Award, an annual award which, over the past ten years, has established itself as the UK's premier business prize.

The Foundation promotes business excellence through numerous activities, but at the core of all the programmes is the Excellence Model. Thousands of organisations in the UK now use this Model to plan their improvements and monitor progress through regular self assessment.

The nine elements of the Model have been identified as the key components of business excellence. These have been verified by extensive research and the Model has been validated by several hundred companies throughout Europe.

The Enablers are concerned with what is done to run the organisation and how it is operated.

The Results are concerned with what the organisation has achieved and is achieving as seen by the stakeholders i.e. customers, employees, the community and those who fund the organisation.

The Excellence Model, which is an overarching framework under which all improvement activities and initiatives fit, is based on the following premise:

Customer Results, People Results and Corporate Social Responsibility are achieved through Leadership driving Policy and Strategy, People, Partnerships and Resources leading ultimately to excellence in Key Performance Results.

A fuller description of the Model, the 32 sub-criteria and areas to address are available from the Foundation (See 'Products').

Performance against the Model is used to judge entries for the UK Business Excellence Award. However, the first step for most organisations is to undertake a self assessment against the Model to identify strengths and areas for improvement. The Foundation has developed a software tool called BQFsnapshot that will run on most windows based PC's. It provides a quick and simple way of finding out how your unit or organisation shapes up against the characteristics of Excellence.

The Foundation was established in 1993 - see History of the Foundation ( File Size: 701KB).

For further details about membership, the UK Business Excellence Award, workshops, publications and products please see our other web site pages or call the British Quality Foundation on 020 7654 5000.