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.

鉴于不可持续的人类活动导致全球生态系统持续退化，企业评估其对环境的影响变得越来越重要。因此，评估业务流程对可持续性的影响正在成为业务流程管理 （BPM） 学科中的一个重要考虑因素。然而，现有的旨在对业务流程进行以可持续性为导向的分析的实用方法只能提供有限的视角来了解所造成的环境影响。此外，它们没有为可持续性驱动的过程分析和重新设计提供明确且实际适用的机制。遵循设计科学方法，我们在这里提出并研究 SOPA，这是一个以可持续性为导向的流程分析和重新设计的框架。SOPA 通过将生命周期评估 （LCA） 与基于活动的成本核算 （ABC） 结合使用进行可持续性分析，从而延长了 BPM 生命周期。我们通过案例研究评估 SOPA 及其有用性，通过实施来支持该方法，从而也说明了这项工作的实际适用性。