Business Excellence (BE) is about developing and strengthening the management systems and processes of an organization to improve performance and create value for stakeholders. BE is much more than having a quality system in place. BE is about achieving excellence in everything that an organization does (including leadership, strategy, customer focus, information management, people and processes) and most importantly achieving superior business results.

To be competitive in the 21st century, organizations need to improve continuously and perform to an excellent standard (Harrington, 1995). One of the ways to achieve excellence is by using Business Excellence Models (BEMs) (Dahlgaard-Park & Dahlgaard, 2007; Mohammad, Mann, Grigg & Wagner, 2009). There are numerous BEMs that can be found in the literature, such as Peter’s and Austin’s excellence model (1985), Kanji‟s BEM (2001), and Dahlgaard’s and Dahlgaard-Park‟s 4P excellence model (2004). According to Grigg & Mann (2008a, p. 1176), various researchers have “statistically tested and validated” the design, criteria and items of the major BEMs using techniques including simple correlation (Saunders & Mann, 2005); path analysis (Flynn & Saladin, 2001); and Covariance Based Structural Equation Modeling (Lee, Rho, & Lee, 2003; Wilson & Collier, 2000). In total, the authors‟ research identified that these BEMs are currently being adopted by 96 national Quality / Business Excellence Awards in 83 countries. These BEMs provide a systems perspective framework “based on business principles that have been proven to work” and can be utilized to guide organizations towards achieving sustainable world-class performance (Adebanjo & Mann, 2008a, p. 1).