Total Organisational Excellence (TOE) is a framework or blue-print for achieving world-class performance.  The overall framework starts with the vision, goals, strategies and mission which should be fully thought through, agreed and shared in the business.  What follows determines whether these are achieved.

The factors which are critical to success, the CSFs - the building blocks of the mission - are then to be identified.  The key performance indicators (KPIs), the measures associated with the CSFs, tell us whether we are moving towards or away from the mission, of just standing still.

Having identified the CSFs and KPIs, the organisation should know what are its core processes.  This is an area of potential bottleneck for many organisations because, if the core processes are not understood, the rest of the framework is difficult to implement.  If the processes are known, we can carry out process analysis, sometimes called mapping and flow charting, to fully understand our business and identify opportunities for improvement. 

We can then prioritise - identify those processes which are run pretty well and subject them to a continuous improvement regime.  For those processes which we identify as being poorly carried out, we may subject them to a complete re-visioning and re-design activity.  That is where Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) comes in.  What must happen to all processes, is performance measurement, the results of which feed back to our benchmarking and strategic planning activities.