Users of the EFQM Excellence Model, report that they do so for the following purposes:

When used as a basis for an organisation's improvement culture, the business excellence 'criteria' within the models broadly channel and encourage the use of best practices into areas where their effect will be most beneficial to performance. When used simply for self-assessment the 'criteria' can clearly identify strong and weak areas of management practice so that tools such as benchmarking can be used to identify best-practice to enable the gaps to be closed. These critical links between business excellence models, best practice, and benchmarking are fundamental to the success of the models as tools of continuous improvement.

There are no rules on how an organisation may use the models,

• some use them continually to self-assess, as the driver of continuous improvement
• some use only the results sections as a basis for designing and managing a performance measurement system
• some use the resulting scores from an assessment against the model to benchmark against other like-minded organisations, allowing an easy method of identifying organisations that can potentially be learned from
• some base the whole culture of the organisation around the concepts