Towards green business process management

There is a global consensus on the need to reduce our collective carbon footprint. While much research attention has focused on developing alternative energy sources, automotive technologies or waste disposal techniques, we often ignore the fact that the ability to optimize (existing) operations to reduce their emissions impact is fundamental to this exercise. We believe that by transforming the problem into the domain of Business Process Management (BPM) we can leverage the rich expertise in this field to address issues associated with identifying areas for improvement, understanding the implication and performing carbon footprint minimization. We will use the term “Green BPM” to describe a novel class of technologies that leverage and extend existing BPM technology to enable process design, analysis, execution and monitoring in a manner informed by the carbon footprint of process designs and instances. This article describes the first steps in the development of this class of technologies

Kick-starting Green Business Process Management – Suitable Modeling Languages and Key Processes for Green Perfomance Mesaurement

In this paper we examine an initial step towards Green Business Process Management. We give insights from a research project with the goal of monitoring and redesigning business processes in an environmentally sustainable manner. Using literature analysis and three case studies we derive suitable languages and software for business process modeling. In addition, we show business processes that can act as key examples for green process monitoring and redesign. The results show that enterprises can build up on process modeling and energy monitoring to become more environmentally sustainable

Sustainability performance measurement : a preliminary classification framework of models and indicators

In this position paper we focus on the diversity of sustainability measurements. Based on existing research on performance measurement, we propose a preliminary classification framework summarizing sustainability models and indicators. By describing illustrative examples, we claim that several models and indicators can be distinguished with their own peculiarities. Having such a framework is interesting for both academia and business to structure the range of models and indicators and to ultimately select the appropriate sustainability measurement approach. The proposed framework should be validated by further research

Business Process Management: Saving the Planet?

Organisational and government concerns about environmental sustainability (ES) are on the increase. While a significant amount of research from a wide range of domains has addressed various ES challenges, intuitively, Business Process Management (BPM), with its focus on process improvement and process performance measurement, has much to offer the ES field. In this paper we aim to understand the BPM research contribution to ES, including specific Environmental Performance Indicators (EPI), and the BPM concepts that have been utilized in the ES context. To this end we conduct a systematic literature review to capture prior research focused on BPM and ES, coding the articles according to their contribution to EPIs and other ES concepts, while also contrasting their focus with main challenges identified in industry reports. Our study identifies which EPIs have been addressed in prior BPM research and highlights areas of future contribution

Green Human Resource Management (GHRM) towards SME'S: A conceptual view

The main purpose of this paper is to deepen and to understand the concept of green management that is now getting the attention in the community. Currently, climate changes dramatically adverse impact on the population of the world.Events such as hurricanes, rising sea levels and global warming give an impact to human lives.Various parties are now demanding that each entity should play their role in the problems to overcome these phenomena.Thus, scholars in the field of management have begun to turn their attention to look forward to into sustainability.The rising of research and studies shown that these issues attracting researcher's mind.Green management is seen as one of the best methods to solve this problem.Large companies start to promote their actions to save the environment and implementing green management in their daily operation but most of Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) seen still in the low level of their involvement heading over towards sustainability.This paper will look some aspects of green management and highlighted the previous studies that have been conducted to see the issue debated in green management.In addition, this paper also checking out the issues inherent to SMEs in implementing green management to achieve sustainability in their business

ENVIRONMENTALLY SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT – DEVELOPING A GREEN BPM READINESS MODEL

During the last half decade, various theories, concepts, and models have been established to make organizations more environmentally sustainable. The IS community had their share with the Green IS/IT domain. As it turned out most of these concepts took a very functional approach, not making a good fit for business process oriented organizations. To fill this gap the research stream of Green Business Process Management (GBPM) arose. In this paper we develop and discuss various capabilities that organizations should have in order to actually take advantage of GBPM. We call these capabilities GBPM readiness

A Framework for Multi-dimensional Business Process Optimization for GHG Emission Mitigation

Anthropogenic climate change is shaping up to be a major global challenge in its potential impacts to humanity. A major contributor to this is Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions from various sources, including industrial or organizational sector. Some organizational managers realizing the inevitability of government legislations or taxes want to take proactive measures to manage their own GHG emissions. The current emission measuring tools and guidelines are not aimed at measuring emissions of organisational processes. Hence these guidelines and tools do not allow emissions to be handled in a pragmatic manner alongside other business objectives such as cost, turnaround time and quality of production. Therefore, we propose a framework for multi-dimensional business process optimisation that would facilitate modelling, measuring, analysing and reporting GHG emissions. This framework, derived from the GHG Protocol, enables organizational management to optimize their business processes for GHG emission mitigation, alongside other vital business objectives

Experimental Evaluation of a Process Benchmarking Tool in a Green Business Process Management Context

Using a combination of metamodels, ontologies, green performance indicators and metrics, we apply a novel approach in Semantic Business Process Benchmarking to the area of Green Business Process Management (Green BPM). Up to now, process benchmarking has mainly been a manual process; the approach described and empirically evaluated in this paper partially automates the time-consuming and costly process analyses while introducing more flexibility regarding varying terminology, level of abstraction and modeling notation. Also, overviews of literature relevant to the field of Green Semantic BPM and commonly applied metrics in a Green BPM context are given

Integrating sustainability into day-to-day business: a tacticalmanagement dashboard for O-LCA

In order to respond to the challenge of sustainable development, organizations need to manage the social, environmental and economic impacts of their activities. Existing approaches to manage organizational sustainability either are limited by a narrow perspective or lack concepts and tools to integrate sustainability considerations into day-to-day business. We address this issue by proposing a tactical management dashboard based on Organizational Life Cycle Assessment (O-LCA), an authoritative and comprehensive methodology for organizational sustainability analysis.We have developed a concept for a tactical sustainability management dashboard based on O-LCA guidelines and best-practices for dashboard design that allows managers (who may not be LCA experts) to explore, analyze and interpret O-LCA study results. The concept was implemented in an early software prototype and evaluated regarding its usability. Our concept and prototype show the viability and utility of a management tool based on O-LCA