The maturity model for corporate environmental management

The optimization of corporate environmental management is an ongoing process of organizational improvement which is usually based on many small, iterative steps. This development will be analyzed in this paper on the basis of a framework which suggests that corporate management can progress through four stages of maturity: “basic”, “standardized”, “automated” and “continually improved”. These stages are generic in nature and can be applied to virtually any kind of corporation. In the current paper, however, the focus will be on multinational corporations (MNCs), which vary in terms of the degree of interaction, the time dependencies, the information flows, the size of the enterprise, the manufacturing model, the position within the supply chain, the financial and environmental regulatory regimes, the global manufacturing requirements and the degree of vertical integration. Knowing the level of corporate management maturity helps to achieve better understanding of the company-specific aspects of its management optimization and better predictability of corporate capacities to meet the optimization goals and to move to the next level. The strict hierarchy of management maturity levels and the deep interdependency between these elements make it impossible for a corporation, for example, to implement automated management if it has not yet established standardized management procedures. A corporation dedicated to “continual improvement” without the implementation of appropriate information and communication technologies, and without the modernization of production processes, is likely to fail due to a lack of common foundation and understanding of how processes are managed process. With every new maturity level, environmental management becomes increasingly integrated and at the latest stage even fully incorporated into “operations management” and “corporate management” respectively. Such amalgamation of environmental issues into general management at every level of corporate hierarchy enables a corporation to look for solutions which can make environmental protection economically profitable and, moreover, contribute to the minimization of external and internal environmentally-related risks.