An Overview on Implicit Green Business Process Patterns

A key element of any approach to meeting the climate change challenge is the ability to improve operational eciency in a pervasive fashion. The notion of a business process is a particularly useful unit of analysis in this context. This article describes a subset of the Abnoba framework for green business process management and shows how an algebraic framework can be leveraged to enable an environmental as- sessment on multiple heterogeneous dimensions (of qualitative or quan- titative nature). Furthermore, a machinery for process improvement is outlined.

Since the decision-makers in enterprises will accept the goals of environmental management only if they are motivated enough, comprehensible and useful tools should be generated to support environmentally oriented business decision-making. For that reason, a general optimisation model of the multiphase business process is presented in this paper. This model includes the possibilities for an integrated approach to environmental protection so that it can be applied as a scenario by the business process simulation for the evaluation of environmentally oriented business decisions on business performance. Furthermore, development and application possibilities of the presented model are introduced. Some measures of resource efficiency are developed using the presented optimisation model.

2011

Sustainable practices are more than ever on the radar screen of organizations, triggered by a growing demand of the wider population towards approaches and practices that can be considered "green" or "sustainable". Our specific intent with this call for action is to immerse deeper into the role of business processes, and specifically the contributions that the management of these processes can play in leveraging the transformative power of information systems (IS) in order to create environmentally sustainable organizations. Our key premise is that business and information technology (IT) managers need to engage in a process-focused discussion to enable a common, comprehensive understanding of process, and the process-centered opportunities for making these processes, and ultimately the organization as a process-centric entity, "green". Based on a business process lifecycle model, we propose possible avenues for future research.

2015

Currently, Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emission calculations and reporting are mainly estimated at national, economic sector, and organisational levels. Broad brushed figures produced by high level calculations are not useful from organisational management's perspective. Further, present emission calculating initiatives have over looked Business Processes, which are important aspects within organizations. A business process is a collection of tasks and activities. Organizations function as a set of business processes. To manage GHGs efficiently, management needs to know how much GHGs were produced by each business process. Presently, GHG emissions calculated at various levels are not traced back to their origins in business processes. To date, GHGs at business process level are not investigated in great depth to support further analysis. This research proposes a tool that follows a bottom-up approach for calculating and collating GHGs according to the scopes defined by the GHG Protocol.

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 the 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.

Computing, 2012

Business Processes are a key aspect of modern organization. In recent years, business process management and optimization has been applied to different cross-cutting concerns such as security, compliance, or Green IT, for example. Based on the ecological characteristics of a business process, proper environmentally sustainable adaptation strategies can be chosen to improve the total environmental impact of the business process. We use ecological sustainable adaptation strategies that are described as Green Business Process Patterns. The application of such a Green Business Process Pattern, however, affects the business process layer, the application component and the infrastructure layer. This implies that changes in the application infrastructure also need to be considered. Hence, we use best practices of cloud application architectures which are described as Cloud Patterns. To guide developers through the adaptation process we propose a pattern-based approach in this work. We correlate Cloud Patterns relevant for sustainable business processes to Green Business Process Patterns and organize them within a classification. To provide concrete implementation support we further annotate these Cloud Patterns to application component models that are described with the Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA). Using these annotations, we describe a method that provides the means to optimize business processes based on Green Business Process Patterns through adapting the implementation of application components with concrete TOSCA implementation models.

2015

Anthropogenic Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emission from activities conducted within business organisations is a major contributor to climate change. A business process is a set of tasks and activities. At business process level, business objectives such as cost of production and time to market are managed and optimised by organisational middle level managers. At present, GHG emission related information is not available to facilitate decision making at process level to achieve GHG related objectives. For organisations to remain sustainable and decision making to be effective, managers need a holistic approach to manage and optimise GHG emissions together with other business objectives. Therefore, this research addresses the overarching knowledge gap in business process level GHG emission modelling, calculation, reporting, and optimising. The purpose of this thesis is to undertake a qualitative and quantitative examination of managing GHG emissions to achieve multi-dimensional business proc...

2005

In this paper we present a model that defines performances of a business process. The process is conceived as a service chain that delivers services to customers by a glow that links a set of organizations. This concept implies a wider view of performance. The model includes all the performances that increase overall competitiveness (i.e. classic cost and efficiency indicators are integrated by effectiveness indicators, that measure service level and quality). Second, the model considers the different stakeholders involved in a process: management, customers and operators. The model maps the performance indicators on these perspectives. This multiple perspective can be used in benchmarking and diagnosis to evaluate an existing process or to design a new process.

2016

This research aims to provide a complete solution to achieve true sustainability in business processes, evaluating all relevant aspects. This paper demonstrates a conceptual framework with a case study to simulate scenarios of potential applications, and discusses the simulation results of different aspects organisations struggle to succeed in the implementation.

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.