Book excerpt: Assessing Business Excellence presents a strategic framework for business excellence and total quality management and shows how you can be actively involved in continuous improvement by systematically reviewing your business activities and results against holistic business excellence frameworks. For all practitioners who seek to use total quality management to improve their organization's effectiveness, efficiency and responsiveness, this title is the essential route map to business excellence. From two leading expert authors comes a book where the most recognized quality award criteria are used to explore the concepts of business excellence and self-assessment. This book: * Introduces the major business excellence and total quality frameworks including The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award and the European Quality Award and ISO9000:2000 * Compares the frameworks and identifies their strengths and limitations * Introduces the self-assessment process * Explores the main approaches to self-assessment * Illustrates the practical benefits of self-assessment through case examples