Combining sustainability with your business process development – why and how?

How to study and improve processes

Process management, development, and re-engineering are traditional ways to affect this chain of actions or tasks and improve the chain so that it can be performed more efficiently. Business process management (BPM) has been around for a long time and global companies, especially in manufacturing, have well-established processes that are being optimized and automated by constantly monitoring the results of process changes. Smaller companies don’t necessarily yet have clear processes in place, or at least those are not described or measured so extensively but with evolving demands to improve sustainability combined with technology and automation, recognized processes are today more important than ever for all types and sizes of organizations.

The following core elements have been mentioned as keys in BPM: strategic alignment, governance, methods, information technology, people, and culture. These all need to be recognized and aligned to gain results with BPM and sustainability needs to be incorporated into these elements. Traditionally, the goals of BPM initiatives have been mostly related to process efficiency in terms of time and cost. Green business process management (green BPM) in turn aims at reducing the negative environmental impact of organizations with business processes. This is an additional goal besides time and cost savings. 

How to achieve sustainable processes with the Plan-Do-Check-Act model

To begin with, there are numerous methodologies used to achieve traditional process improvement goals (time and cost) including Lean Management, Six Sigma, 5S, or Rummler-Brache. Some of these methodologies support the additional green
goal of reducing negative environmental impact better and some worse.

The good news is that regardless of where a company currently is with its process work, sustainability can be included in process management. If processes aren’t yet
identified and described, it’s easy to include sustainability from the very beginning. If processes are already well established, adding sustainability goals is possible as well.

In some formats, all development actions follow the simple Plan-Do-Check-Act model, which for a process developer looks something like this:

All these stages will continuously be repeated, or even partly automated, to improve the process. After having this basic framework, we can add sustainability into the picture. The idea in early research already has been that green BPM – meaning sustainability – needs to be incorporated into all elements and phases of business process management.

To stop green improvements from becoming a separate area and siloed expertise compared to other process improvements, it’s important to set the ambition level at a realistic level and make it very easy to incorporate sustainability ratios to other process improvements. To accomplish this, simple checklists can be created for all process developers to help them. Even if it cannot be scientifically calculated, regular notifications about sustainability effects will raise awareness and create a greener culture.

Accordingly, process development with a green aspect should look like this:

In the next blog post on this topic, we’ll look at an example of how this works in practice.