Corporate Sustainability and Business Excellence

This paper discusses the suitability for Business Excellence Models (BEMs) to include Corporate Sustainability on business model criteria. The conceptual paper brings discussion of what sort of measures are required to fit organizations´ needs in measuring performance in terms of economic, social, and environment bottom-lines. A literature review has been conducted for BEMs that includes the EFQM Excellence Model, Baldrige Model, ISO standards, GRI, and explores its integration with Corporate Sustainability. Then, an analysis is deployed in order to identify common frameworks and metrics used for assessing sustainability in the three dimensions of bottom-lines. Despite there are better frameworks to assess corporate sustainability, Business Excellence Models (BEMs) were found to be suitable performance measurement frameworks to integrate Corporate Sustainability; however, business criteria remain unclear and ambiguous, not addressing clearly how to measure Corporate Sustainability Performance. The research provides a general approach to explore suitability of BEMs to include corporate sustainability and it is limited in scope as some organizations´ have specific maturity levels in both: deploying BEMs and corporate sustainability. Further research include the suitability of current economic systems to reach corporate sustainability, and the use of lean-six sigma methods to support corporate sustainability at strategic and operational levels.