Orange UK decided to apply for Recognised for Excellence (R4E), part of the EFQM Levels of Excellence programme. Anne-Catherine de Decker, Orange’s director of business excellence, explains the reasons why and the benefits obtained. "Since launching in 1994, we have always had a really clear belief in what we’re about and what makes us different. Orange's success has been built on this clarity. We created a vision, a mission and values to describe our people beliefs and ourselves.

"The market in which we operate today is very different. The technology has evolved at increasing speed, as have our customers' expectations that now extend well past our original 'voice' business. Today, we are a global company, owned by France Telecom, and operate in a very different, more advanced market. We therefore need to continually reiterate and reinforce our focus on providing something special for our customers, with ever-increasing efficiency.

"Since 1994, we have developed our management systems and are no strangers to the world of strategic plans, process management, balanced scorecards, KPIs and the discipline of continually reviewing and improving our performance against a range of quality models and standards. It is easy to be caught up in the excitement of delivering our objectives and we have discovered the value of periodically standing back and looking at the way we do business. Using internal and external experts, we "hold up a mirror," creating an opportunity to benchmark our results and capability against both competitors and other industries.

"In 2006 we decided to develop our use of the Excellence Model, starting our 'journey' with a successful application for 'Committed to Excellence'. To get the necessary buy-in at board level, we had to show clearly how this Model differed from those approaches we used. Perhaps the key factor influencing this decision was the tangible evidence of performance, provided by those leading companies who have been more fully engaged with the Model over a period of time. It is hard to argue against the fact that nine of the top fifteen European companies in the FT's World’s Most Respected Companies subscribe to the Excellence Model approach.

"Our 2007, bid to be Recognised for Excellence was a natural progression, allowing us to raise the bar and drive the business further forward. We wanted to find a way to progress our R4E application which fitted in with the way we do business - an approach which engaged and involved a lot of people but without it being an 'add on' to what we do. The materials based assessment, whilst needing a fair amount of co-ordination, generally focused on looking at evidence of how we do what we do.

"We started by identifying and engaging key stakeholders, ensuring they had an appropriate level of understanding of our overall objective, the benefits of achieving it, and the mechanics of how the Excellence Model and its RADAR assessment methodology (see box on page 6) work. Then we established a 'core team' which included senior people with experience in Project Management, Process Improvement, Quality, Risk Management and developing our Customer Experience. The core team developed a plan, with milestones, to measure and report our progress and we ran awareness workshops to brief 'criterion champions' on how to identify and present the evidence gathered against the criteria of the Model.

"Perhaps one of the biggest challenges was in asking people to stop and take some time to look backwards, at historic trends, rather than our embedded habit of driving change and pushing forwards against new challenges. The BQF assessment team started the assessment week with an opening meeting with various Vice Presidents and Senior Managers, a document review of the evidence gathered and then facilitated focus groups across the company. Over one hundred and twenty people met the assessors.

"We succeeded in gaining R4E recognition. The benefits of achieving R4E are perhaps more in the journey than the destination, albeit this recognition is undoubtedly a very significant milestone in our continued development, and will help provide a stable foundation on which we will build our future success. We have a concise view of where we are currently strong, where we can share our good practices better and where there are opportunities for improvement; we have a 'score' to act as a catalyst to develop added value initiatives that will make us more robust for the challenges that lie ahead; and we have new aspirations and targets on how to progress with increasing speed and efficiency.

"However, perhaps the most valuable benefit from our achievement is in finding yet another way in which to keep our people fully engaged in our original vision and current priority of continually striving to delight our customers."