SOPA: A Framework for Sustainability-Oriented Process Analysis and Re-design in Business Process Management

TL;DR

This paper introduces SOPA, a novel framework integrating Life Cycle Assessment and Activity-based Costing to enable sustainability-oriented analysis and re-design of business processes, addressing gaps in existing methods.

Contribution

The paper presents SOPA, a new framework that enhances BPM with sustainability analysis tools and demonstrates its practical application through a case study.

Findings

SOPA effectively integrates LCA and ABC for sustainability analysis.

The framework supports practical process re-design for environmental impact reduction.

Case study confirms SOPA's applicability in real-world scenarios.

Abstract

Given the continuous global degradation of the Earth's ecosystem due to unsustainable human activity, it is increasingly important for enterprises to evaluate the effects they have on the environment. Consequently, assessing the impact of business processes on sustainability is becoming an important consideration in the discipline of Business Process Management (BPM). However, existing practical approaches that aim at a sustainability-oriented analysis of business processes provide only a limited perspective on the environmental impact caused. Further, they provide no clear and practically applicable mechanism for sustainability-driven process analysis and re-design. Following a design science methodology, we here propose and study SOPA, a framework for sustainability-oriented process analysis and re-design. SOPA extends the BPM life cycle by use of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) for sustainability analysis in combination with Activity-based Costing (ABC). We evaluate SOPA and its usefulness with a case study, by means of an implementation to support the approach, thereby also illustrating the practical applicability of this work.