Coping with New Business Challenges: Analysis of the Elements that Affect the Sustainability of Continuous Improvement Programs

International audience— Companies have evolved over time and this includes their efforts to overcome obstacles. In this article, we discuss sustainability as synonymous with success, and evaluate the sustainability of Continuous Improvement Programs (CIP) and the elements that affect it. The objective of this article is to highlight and analyse the results from a self-assessment investigation. We appraise the impact of a set of elements over sustainability and their maturity (absence or their degree of presence) while being deployed within the organization. This appraisal is done by assigning different weights and scores to the answers of the self-assessment investigation. We were able to observe that those elements with a higher impact score are heavily linked with management approaches. On the other hand, those same elements are not necessarily the more mature or appropriately displayed, and by the use of the maturity scoring system, we investigate the different stages of each element. This opens a pathway for further research into the behaviour of particular elements with the potential of enhancing or diminishing the sustainability of Continuous Improvement Programs