Sustainable Excellence

How the world's most influential companies are building business strategies that tackle the biggest global challenges. Today's business landscape is changing in fundamental ways: Natural resources are growing ever more scarce and expensive. Technology and changing consumer expectations are making transparency a fact of life. The rise of emerging economies creates vast market opportunities for companies--and better living standards for hundreds of millions. In Sustainable Excellence, Aron Cramer and Zachary Karabell tell the stories of the companies who are transforming themselves by responding to these paradigm shifts and in the process shaping the future. From their work with these Global 1000 companies, Cramer and Karabell know firsthand how business can successfully grapple with big-picture issues like resource scarcity, supply chain complexities, and the diverse expectations of government and the public. In Sustainable Excellence, they tell the story of how Coca-Cola and Greenpeace collaborated on a refrigerator that fights climate change. They show how companies like Best Buy and Nike are transforming the very products they sell to deliver more value to consumers with less waste. They recount how GE and Google created an innovative partnership that is developing "smart grids" that radically reduce energy use. And they show how business leaders like Starbucks' founder and CEO Howard Schultz put sustainable excellence at the center of his company's business strategy. Through these and other fascinating stories, Sustainable Excellence makes the case for a different way of doing business--one that will define both business success and economic vitality in the 21st century.

Provides the foundation and tools that are essential for an enterprise to bring Operational Excellence into their organizational culture; gain maximum results, benefits and value Strategies for and implementing details for enterprises at all levels of maturity from those with programs in place to those looking to improve safety, health, environment performance as well as the efficiency and effectiveness of their operations Includes topics from concept to sustainability satisfying knowledge requirements of all levels in the organization Defines program objectives; develops improvement strategies; identifies and prioritizes improvement opportunities; implements improvement plans; monitors, continuously improves and sustains results Applicable to a broad variety of operating enterprises, academic institutions and third party implementing organizations

This book is a collection of the up-to-date experience and knowledge about the implementation of sustainable business excellence in a particular context of SMEs. The book uses empirical and practical approach to tackle this issue, which is underdeveloped in the literature. Hence, it could constitute a relevant reference for SMEs managers seeking to manage their operations sustainably, efficiently and resiliently. The book also integrates the smart component to the sustainable business excellence and proves for those who are still skeptical that SMEs could benefit from smart and digital technology in the favor of sustainability and business excellence. Overall, we build on successful initiatives we experienced in real life to guide SMEs in order to be sustainable smart and resilient in the post COVID context which is highly demanding in terms of business excellence and efficiency.

All businesses strive for excellence in today’s technology-based environment in which customers want solutions at the touch of a button. This highly regarded textbook provides in-depth coverage of the principles of operations and supply chain management and explains how to design, implement, and maintain processes for sustainable competitive advantage. This text offers a unique combination of theory and practice with a strategic, results-driven approach. Now in its fourth edition, Operations Management for Business Excellence has been updated to reflect major advances and future trends in supply chain management. A new chapter on advanced supply chain concepts covers novel logistics technology, information systems, customer proximity, sustainability, and the use of multiple sales channels. As a platform for discussion, the exploration of future trends includes self-driving vehicles, automation and robotics, and omnichannel retailing. Features include: A host of international case studies and examples to demonstrate how theory translates to practice, including Airbus, Hewlett Packard, Puma, and Toyota. A consistent structure to aid learning and retention: Each chapter begins with a detailed set of learning objectives and finishes with a chapter summary, a set of discussion questions and a list of key terms. Fully comprehensive with an emphasis on the practical, this textbook should be core reading for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of operations management and supply chain management. It would also appeal to executives who desire an understanding of how to achieve and maintain ‘excellence’ in business. Online resources include lecture slides, a glossary, test questions, downloadable figures, and a bonus chapter on project management.

This book offers a unique view of how innovation and competitiveness improve when organizations establish alliances with partners who have strong capabilities and broad social capital, allowing them to create value and growth as well as technological knowledge and legitimacy through new knowledge resources. Organizational intelligence integrates the technology variable into production and business systems, establishing a basis to advance decision-making processes. When strategically integrated, these factors have the power to promote enterprise resilience, robustness, and sustainability. This book provides a unique perspective on how knowledge, information, and data analytics create opportunities and challenges for sustainable enterprise excellence. It also shows how the value of digital technology at both personal and industrial levels leads to new opportunities for creating experiences, processes, and organizational forms that fundamentally reshape organizations.

This book combines over 25 years of experience with research that resulted in two award-winning, peer-reviewed frameworks. The Leadership and Design Frameworks are integrated into a 14-step Blueprint for leading the journey to sustainable excellence.

"This book presents contemporary case studies on selected Italian food and wine products, to explore how traditional production and consumption models address and adapt to the sustainability challenges in the Italian high excellence agri-food sector. Sustainability in High-Excellence Italian Food and Wine adopts a transaction cost economics approach, which is applied to five case study chapters, each focusing on a key Italian agri-food product: Parmigiano Reggiano, Mozzarella di Bufala Campana, Amarone wine, Prosecco wine and Prosciutto di San Daniele. The production and organization of these products face many challenges as they seek to balance competing priorities around economic viability, maintenance of high-quality standards and environmental and social impacts. The book argues that the development of sustainable and quality models requires changes to the structure and organization of the supply chain while also acknowledging that consumers are increasingly demanding authentic, high excellence products that require reliable labeling systems and designations of origin mechanism. Recommending that hybrid structures, such as cooperatives and consortia, are the most cost-minimizing governance structures for the production, the book highlights that in the case of Italian excellency food, environmental sustainability and economic efficiency are not actually traded off but are reciprocally valorized through the regulation of high-quality standards. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of food and wine excellence products, food systems and supply chains, agricultural production and economics and sustainable consumption"--

Sustainability has become a topic of global relevance: Corporations and other economically acting organizations increasingly need to realize economic, environmental and social objectives in order to survive. Supplementary to "classical" environmental management, realizing corporate sustainability requires comprehensive approaches which allow the integration of social and economic aspects. Such concepts can be found e.g. in international excellence models mainly based on a TQM thinking but also in the field of human factors in organizational design and management. Understood as systems approaches, they include the interests of all relevant stakeholders with a mid- or long-term time perspective and are thus highly linked with the principles of sustainable development. In this book internationally leading scientists discuss the issue of sustainability from their perspective, resulting in an innovative view on different management approaches under the umbrella of corporate sustainability.