Creating measures to determine whether companies are truly sustainable

Land use, water pollution, resource consumption and harmful emissions: existing approaches to the analysis of business process sustainability have given little or no consideration to these aspects. “Our objective with SOPA is to create transparency – in contrast to greenwashing and vague sustainability labels. Ultimately, CO₂ emissions and investments in sustainability can be decisive when customers choose whether or not to do business with a company. But I also believe that we will eventually see regulatory standards for measurement and evidence-based transparency in this regard,” says Luise Pufahl, who holds the Professorship of Information Systems at TUM Campus Heilbronn. SOPA is the outcome of work done by Luise Pufahl with her team.

A new benchmark for environmental assessment

In their framework they supplement the business process management life cycle, a widespread method for describing the various phases for managing a business process, with two further aspects. Life cycle assessment (LCA) looks at the environmental impact of a product or process over its entire life cycle – from raw material extraction to disposal. It is complemented by the principle of activity-based costing (ABC), which, rather than distributing costs based on fixed percentages, attributes them to the processes that cause them.

Testing costs and benefits in advance instead of costly trial-and-error approach

Another central element of SOPA is the ability to simulate sustainable process changes in advance. In contrast to the costly trial-and-error methods traditionally used by many companies when testing process changes, companies can apply SOPA to perform data-driven analysis and evaluation of various scenarios. “With our simulations, process experts can see exactly which measures have the biggest environmental impact and where savings make the most sense,” says Finn Klessascheck, a doctoral student at the Professorship of Information Systems and first author of the study. “This allows companies to develop targeted environmental alternatives without incurring high costs or risks.”

The researchers have tested SOPA using a case study on a hiring process at a German university. They simulated three scenarios, from a paper-based process to a fully digital hiring process and calculated the resulting environmental costs. The results showed that the increased use of digital communications can significantly reduce the environmental impact. SOPA is not only suitable for universities, however. It can also be applied to almost all processes in any company.