Implementing sustainable operational excellence in organizations: an integrative viewpoint

Abstract

Many Organizations are implementing operational excellence initiatives to be competitive in the industry. The initial results are very encouraging but subsequently, it was difficult for many organizations to sustain the initial success. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how to implement a sustainable operational excellence initiative in the organization. The study builds a model for sustainability of operational excellence which considers the social, economic and environmental aspect of operational excellence. In addition, organizational culture and agility are found to contribute a major role in sustainable organizational excellence. This is the first study to propose an integrative model for implementing sustainable operational excellence in organizations. Organizations will be able to implement operational excellence initiatives in a sustainable manner if the model of sustainability is followed. Besides, there are research propositions and future research directions to academic researchers.

Keywords

• operational excellence
• business excellence
• sustainability
• lean
• six sigma
• total quality management