A Life Cycle and Enabling Concepts for Green Business Process Management

Business Process Management (BPM) provides organisations with a systematic approach to model, execute, analyse, and continuously improve their business processes. Traditionally, BPM practices focus on the economic performance of business processes. With the advent of Green BPM, environmental sustainability emerged as an additional performance dimension, allowing it to support organisations in achieving their sustainability goals. However, most existing Green BPM initiatives focus on specific phases of the BPM life cycle or particular environmental performance indicators. As a result, organisations only have a limited understanding of the sustainability of their business processes and lack the means to control their environmental impact during process execution. This paper proposes a Green BPM life cycle that integrates environmental sustainability into every one of its phases without being restricted to specific indicators. An extension of BPMN, one of the standard notations for modelling business processes, is defined to allow process models to capture the environmental performance indicators that should be monitored during process execution, together with target values that can optionally be specified for each indicator to control the environmental impact of the process. An architecture is further presented for integrating these indicators into existing BPM systems by connecting calculator services to the process life cycle events. As a first step towards achieving full life cycle coverage, a prototype modelling tool for the BPMN extension and a prototype calculator service for carbon emissions have been developed.