An Excellence Model for Sustainability Management

This chapter designs a generic model for managing sustainability in companies. This can be adapted to the different concepts of sustainability, it is both scalable and flexibly usable. Working with models of excellence offers numerous advantages in practice, as they provide a framework that helps organizations improve their performance and competitiveness. The complexity of implementing sustainability can be depicted in such a model, thereby supporting its implementation. First, the individual components of the model are described, these are the elements considered, relationships, decision architectures, evaluations and effects, phases and finally general success factors in corresponding projects. The model for “sustainability excellence” thus provides a good overview of the individual components and their mutual interactions. It can therefore serve as a reference model for practical projects, in which it enables to follow the proposed structure and systematics for the conception and process of a sustainable corporate strategy. The model can be used both as a blueprint for project development and control, and also as a tool for measuring the maturity level of the individual components and thus as an important controlling instrument.