Modeling BEST business excellence: The beginning

Abstract

BEST business excellence addresses the issue of excellence and sustainability from four perspectives: bio/physical, economic, social, and technological. The concept of BEST business excellence seeks to address the balance of objectives that many academics and practitioners alike believe are necessary, perhaps not sufficient, to secure the long‐term survival, prosperity, and thriving of humankind and its institutions. Somewhat allied with triple bottom line, this concept is in its infancy and little work has been completed in the formation of the concept intuitively or formally. This paper begins a discourse to develop an optimization model for the concept of BEST business excellence. The models presented herein are graphical and descriptive and offer a basis for further development. These models represent the transformation from maximizing economic outcomes as the organizational objective constrained by B‐sustainability (bio/physical) largely through regulation, S‐sustainability (social) largely through a sense of obligation or by consumer action, and T‐sustainability (technology) largely through the limitations of current technology available. The new model offers the different perspective of the objective function containing variables representing B‐, E‐, and S‐sustainability, wherein those objectives are jointly optimised using technology (T‐sustainability) where cost becomes the constraint. The resultant descriptive model shows how technology forms the centerpiece of optimization and provides direction for technological development resulting in simultaneous optimization of bio/physical, economic, and social objectives.

Citation

Hensler, D.A. and Edgeman, R.L. (2002), "Modeling BEST business excellence: The beginning", Measuring Business Excellence, Vol. 6 No. 2, pp. 49-54. https://doi.org/10.1108/13683040210431473