Discover the Excellence Framework Europe

Your guide to excellent organizations

Holistic organizational development made easy

The Excellence Framework is your comprehensive guide to the (further) development of your organizational fitness and the holistic assessment of organization and management. It combines proven approaches, modern methods, and practice-oriented instruments for excellent organizations.

Simple. Effective. Convincing.

With the Excellence Framework, you receive a consolidated assessment logic that is easy to apply and highly effective at the same time. Regardless of the maturity level of your organization, you can easily:

  • Determine your current maturity level,

  • Identify strengths and potentials,

  • Derive targeted improvement measures.

Open. Up-to-date. Collaborative.

The Excellence Framework is open source and available to you free of charge. Annual updates are based on valuable input from our dedicated user community – ensuring that the framework remains up-to-date, practical, and future-oriented.

Help shape it!

We cordially invite you to contribute your own ideas and actively participate in the further development of the framework. Together, we will create the foundation for sustainable excellence in organizations.

The Excellence Framework Europe

The Excellence Framework Europe consists of three central parts:

  • Excellence Framework Europe – Principles
  • Excellence Framework Europe – Hexagon
  • Excellence Framework Europe – Maturity Model

Click on an area to get more information about subareas.

EFE Hexagon

A

Provide Orientation

A1

Creating meaning and defining futures

A1 – Creating meaning and defining futures
  • Developing and anchoring understanding of meaning and purpose
  • Enabling shared purpose
  • Anticipating, forethinking and shaping the future
  • Transforming visionary ideas into viable concepts

A2

Fostering culture and building identity

A2 – Fostering culture and building identity
  • Agreeing and embedding values
  • Making culture visible and shaping relational spaces
  • Living leadership and self-leadership as cultural drivers
  • Fostering identity and creating commitment

A3

Embracing diversity and understanding stakeholders

A3 – Embracing diversity and understanding stakeholders
  • Understanding the environment, involved parties and interest groups
  • Integrating social and environmental demands
  • Leveraging diversity and contradictions
  • Resolving obstacles and managing complexity

B

Develop a strategy

B1

Understanding the environment and organisational capabilities

B1 – Understanding the environment and organisational capabilities
  • Understanding the environment and market
  • Incorporating sustainability aspects
  • Understanding core competencies and opportunities
  • Aligning stakeholder requirements with one another
  • Gaining comprehensive insights

B2

Defining strategy

B2 – Defining strategy
  • Deriving information from analyses, designing scenarios and solutions
  • Defining and aligning strategic content
  • Developing and refining business model(s)
  • Setting strategic objectives
  • Deciding and implementing strategic initiatives

B3

Implementing and reviewing strategy

B3 – Implementing and reviewing strategy
  • Designing consistent communication of strategy
  • Cascading strategic goals
  • Anchoring implementation
  • Reviewing effectiveness
  • Initiating adaptation of systems

C

Shape collaboration

C1

Involving stakeholders

C1 – Involving stakeholders
  • Segmenting stakeholders
  • Attracting and engaging employees
  • Acquiring and retaining customers
  • Finding partners and suppliers and developing together
  • Providing feedback

C2

Designing products and services

C2 – Designing products and services
  • Defining value proposition
  • Designing and implementing innovation processes
  • Considering the life cycle
  • Assessing technologies
  • Managing the value proposition portfolio
  • Identifying and securing knowledge

C3

Designing structure and organisation

C3 – Designing structure and organisation
  • Defining and delimiting added value
  • Designing value creation processes
  • Enabling adaptable structures
  • Utilising trust and personal responsibility as design principles
  • Promoting learning ability and transferring knowledge
  • Balancing tensions

C4

Providing technology and resources

C4 – Providing technology and resources
  • Raising and providing capital
  • Preparing, approving and implementing investments
  • Managing and securing data, information and knowledge
  • Mastering technologies and reducing complexity
  • Improving and innovating simultaneously
  • Shaping digital transformation

D

Create Value

D1

Attracting and inspiring customers

D1 – Attracting and inspiring customers
  • Communicating customer benefits and winning customers
  • Obtaining and integrating customer feedback
  • Designing and improving customer experiences
  • Aligning the value chain with customer needs
  • Refining value proposition for specific markets and customer segments

D2

Empowering employees

D2 – Empowering employees
  • Embracing leadership as a service
  • Testing new ideas and driving things forward
  • Promoting lifelong learning
  • Promoting feedback and communication
  • Expanding room for manoeuvre and motivating employees

D3

Creating value with partners and suppliers

D3 – Creating value with partners and suppliers
  • Shaping partnerships strategically and ensuring sustainability
  • Selecting, developing and retaining partners and suppliers
  • Living partnership through dialogue
  • Creating alternatives and strengthening resilience
  • Utilising feedback and optimising collaboration

D4

Managing value creation, technology and resources

D4 – Managing value creation, technology and resources
  • Keeping specifications compact and increasing flexibility
  • Optimising and digitising core processes
  • Utilising data and accelerating decision-making
  • Connecting and strengthening supply chains
  • Applying technologies and driving innovation

E

Demonstrate impact

E1

Demonstrating impact on social interests

E1 – Demonstrating impact on social interests
  • Demonstrating and evaluating the impact on social interests
  • Demonstrating the impact of suppliers and partners on social interests
  • Presenting future viability based on the impact on social interests
  • Ensuring communication and transparency on social impacts
  • Reporting on laws and sustainability standards

E2

Demonstrating impact on environmental interests

E2 – Demonstrating impact on environmental interests
  • Demonstrating and evaluating impact on environmental interests
  • Demonstrating the impact of suppliers and partners on environmental interests
  • Presenting future viability based on the impact on environmental interests
  • Ensuring communication and transparency on ecological impacts
  • Reporting on laws and sustainability standards

E3

Demonstrating impact on economic interests

E3 – Demonstrating impact on economic interests
  • Identifying and evaluating the impact on economic interests
  • Demonstrating the impact of suppliers and partners on economic interests
  • Presenting future viability from an economic perspective
  • Presenting future viability based on the impact on economic interests
  • Ensuring communication and transparency on economic impact
  • Reporting on laws and sustainability standards

F

Master change

F1

Winning people for change

F1 – Winning people for change
  • Promoting a willingness to change and developing a positive mindset
  • Telling the story of change and building the ability to change
  • Living exemplary leadership and providing psychological safety
  • Obtaining continuous feedback and making adjustments

F2

Empowering the organisation for change

F2 – Empowering the organisation for change
  • Planning and balancing change at an organisational level
  • Defining and leading change processes
  • Measuring and optimising the effectiveness of change (from the organisation's perspective)
  • Reflecting and strengthening the capability for change in corporate culture

F3

Changing the organisation in context

F3 – Changing the organisation in context
  • Designing and strengthening relationships in an organisational context
  • Ensuring and adapting communication within the organisational context
  • Identifying and using synergies in an organisational context
  • Driving change in the value creation network

Your Benefit

Why you should use the Excellence Framework Europe

The Excellence Framework Europe offers you clear added value: It is practical, open, and easy to use – regardless of industry, size, or existing management system.

Your advantages at a glance

Model-open and universally applicable
Applicable to any organization – regardless of the management approach used. The only requirement: the desire to be better than average.

Holistic and integrated
The framework combines proven and current management logics in a consistent, holistic framework that considers all relevant dimensions of excellence.

User-friendly and clearly structured
Thanks to understandable language and a practice-oriented structure, you can apply the framework without any effort – ideal for beginners and experienced users alike.

Free of charge and open source
The open-source approach enables you to download and use it for free – for your own development, evaluation, and further work.

Community-driven and continuously improved
Regular updates and further developments are created by the active user community. Get involved and help shape the framework – together we drive excellence forward.

Developed close to practice
The framework was developed by the leading German-speaking Excellence Award organizations together with the Excellence Community – for maximum relevance and applicability in practice.

Download the framework for free

Download the framework for free

Where does the Excellence Framework Europe come from?

The Excellence Framework Europe is based on a consolidation matrix that integrates all relevant management and excellence approaches – including:

ISO 9001, ISO 9004, EFQM, CAF, UnternehmerEnergie, St. Galler Management-Modell (SGMM), MBNQA, Gemeinwohl-Ökonomie, ESG, CSR, GRI and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).

The common basis of successful organizations

All well-founded management models share comparable principles, levers of success, and ways of thinking. Success research confirms that excellent organizations distinguish themselves through the consistent implementation of proven principles.

A framework for sustainable success

The Excellence Framework bundles the common essence of these approaches into a modern, practical orientation system.
It offers clear structure, inspiration, and orientation for the sustainable development of your organization – regardless of where you stand today.

Statement of the founders

Excellence as a management approach should continue to contribute to the competitiveness of as many European organizations as possible. That is why we have been working with a large group of experts on the Excellence Framework Europe for more than a year.

Since September 2024, it has been used intensively and successfully in numerous assessments. Many existing users and experts of the excellence approach are convinced of its practicality and benefits. Fortunately, new users are constantly joining us and confirming that the clarity and openness of the framework and the easily applicable and meaningful maturity level assessment demonstrably support their organizations in their further development.

This is exactly what we want to achieve permanently. We maintain the topicality and practicality of the Excellence Framework Europe with annual reviews and invite you to actively participate in the European Excellence Community. The free availability of the current framework is a matter of course for us.

Felix Horner for the ESPRIX Excellence Suisse Foundation (ESPRIX)
André Moll for the Ludwig-Erhard-Preis e.V. Initiative (ILEP)
Franz Peter Walder for the Austrian Foundation for Quality Management (AFQM)
Founders Excellence Framework Europe