**Abstract**

The chapter presents an overview of management models starting with self-assessment (ISO 9004) and continuing with the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) Excellence Model. Stakeholders' analysis and their needs and expectations diagnostic are the baseline for building sustainable businesses. Sustainability and excellence are connected, and particular details of these approaches' implementation are presented. Partnership development appears a key principle in the EFQM model. Based on companies'strategies analysis, a simplified model may be proposed in order to support business survival in changing environments. Some guidelines to allow assessment of excellence fundamentals implementation are given. Based on experience and without seeing as exhaustive, a summary sheet of possible approaches and deployments is given. This may be used as a practical tool to connect actions implemented in organizations with the excellence model enablers, so as to facilitate assessment to explore the performance maturity level. The same sequence of Plan-Do-Check-Act relates approaches stated by ISO 26000 and sustainability initiatives. Embedding excellence and sustainability into business strategic objectives allows the management to define the framework for competitive continuous improvement.

**Keywords:** business models, excellence, sustainability, assessment, improvement, RADAR

## **1. Introduction**

Nowadays, the quality of products, including services, appears the mandatory criterion that must be taken into account by companies all over the world. In order to better organize their activities, the companies design, implement, and then review business management systems.

ISO standards offer a framework that covers different areas and give companies support regarding the design and implementation of the management systems.

To ensure a certain degree of quality in all the levels and areas, the company designs and sets in place the quality management system (QMS), in accordance with the fundamentals presented in ISO 9000 [1] and the requirements given by ISO 9001 [2].

In the last decade, to have a quality system implemented in the company appears not enough to identify all the problems and solve them or to face in a reliable way the changing environment. After some time, the systems need to be evaluated in order to identify their performance. For realizing the self-assessment of the QMS, the standard ISO 9004 [3] comes in handy.

To offer a broader alternative to ISO 9004, the excellence models have been developed and reviewed to facilitate benchmarking and maturity level assessment in terms of performance [4–8]. One of the most developed and used Excellence Model is the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) Excellence Model [4–6].

As the industry evolved taking into account the quality of products, processes, machines, and systems, another problem appeared that it is not covered in total by the tools used in order to analyze the performance (ISO 9004 [3] and Excellence Models [4–6]). The excellence models were the starting point of finding solutions for a sustainable development of companies.

In order to achieve sustainable development for a company, the three pillars, namely society (social responsibility), economic growth, and the environment protection, must be taken into account [9].

In 2010, ISO drafted and published the standard ISO 26000 [10] that offer companies' guidelines considering two of the three pillars (society and environment). Its purpose is to harmonize the social behavior of enterprises worldwide [10–12].

An important item in sustainability is the establishing of key performance indicators and the manner in which they have to report them. To have guidelines for reporting, the Stitching Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and ISO have developed a framework for companies presented in GRI1 Foundation [13]. The next three standards cover the part of general disclosures [14], materials [15], and economic performances [16]. The first four GRI standards are applied in all fields.

Nowadays, searching companies' websites, more and more companies exhibit their strategy in terms of customer focus and sustainability. Moreover, sustainability strategies are promoted to increase customer loyalty showing the approaches for sustainable development so as to harmonize stakeholders into more sensitive balance between environment – human – development – policies.

## **2. Fundamental concepts for sustained organizational survival**

One may analyze the structure of ISO standards concerning quality management, i.e., the fundamentals (ISO 9000 [1]), the requirements (ISO 9001 [2]), and the guidance for sustained success that may be considered an assessment framework and tool for the QMS maturity (ISO 9004 [3]). The QMS principles are accompanied by possible actions, these actions being translated into requirements in ISO 9001 [2]. This means that one may not focus unbalanced on one or another component of the system, the whole, as a system, appears relevant, and all aspects should be considered irrespective of the priority order selected by the organization to address the fundamental through approaches.

Once implemented, the organization may step into the next level of performance, applying the self-assessment regularly in order to define improvement plans and act accordingly. In this context, ISO 9004 offers a maturity assessment tool [3] finalized with a radar diagram for better evidence of the areas with more potential or emergency need for improvement. Such a radar, together with the detailed maturity assessment, may be used by the management team (top and middle) as a prioritizing tool for the decision-making process.

If organizations maintain into the improvement cycle according to ISO 9001 requirements, certainly certain benefits may be reported on long term, but, in order to proactive reply to the global changes, ISO standards appear too basic to release organizational adaptability and people real engagement. The management team has the option to support improvement projects, even beyond the ISO requirements, such as motivating people through different mechanisms to balance professional to private life or involvement in community responsibility projects. On short term, the tangible effect may be more satisfaction and engagement of people.

Based on the experience of different contexts, in function of the organizational capability, a significant step ahead may be embracing extended fundamentals of an excellence model, such as EFQM [3, 4] or other similar business models. **Table 1** presents in comparison the fundamentals showing the consistency in progression of these principles.

Once a sound management system set in place and a deep commitment of the management team for these fundamentals, the use of the excellence model framework is naturally adopted. Even more complex, more evidence-based, more refined, and indepth interconnected, the excellence model offers to the management team the framework for assessment on a broader and more discrete perspective in order to define action plans for improvement. Similarly, but more complex, all fundamentals should be considered, each of them having corresponding criteria and subcriteria, and the same maturing assessment is proceeded, revealing finally the areas for improvement.

The difference, but the added value of the excellence model, lies into the more refined evidence research for more organizational cells and layers, seen in the progression of PDCA (Approach – Deployment – Assessment & Refinement) of the assessment so as to identify, prioritize, and implement sustainable approaches.

Even if the model changed the role from an assessment tool [4, 5] to a framework for defining the direction so as to cocreate together with others a


**Table 1.** *Comparison of fundamentals.*

