Pathways to Greener Pastures: Research Opportunities to Integrate Life Cycle Assessment and Sustainable Business Process Management Based on a Systematic Tertiary Literature Review

Abstract

Sustainable Business Process Management (BPM) is a research field that aims to improve the sustainability performance of organizations’ operations. With its focus on business processes, it has the potential to bring sustainability considerations from external reporting to the core of organizations. We present a systematic tertiary literature study to provide a catalog of existing literature reviews and primary work and to give a consolidated overview of the state and research needs of the field. We find that Sustainable BPM research has focused on modeling approaches and most of the work so far is largely conceptual, with a limited sustainability perspective. Based on these findings, we propose an integration of BPM and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), an established and rigorous method for sustainability analysis. We present research opportunities to show how both disciplines can synergize and leverage methods and techniques for business process automation and innovation to effectively improve the sustainability performance of organizations.