APPLICATION OF BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT FOR CORPORATE SUSTAINABILITY

Abstract

In the light of the current debate on climate change and its ever-growing impact on the corporate world this thesis deals with the integration of sustainability into corporations. Its focus lies on the integration of sustainability through business process management (BPM). A comprehensive literature review on both corporate sustainability and BPM has been carried out. Research still fails to establish a link between sustainability and the strategic and operational management. Even though the integration of sustainability into business process management is explicitly recommended, no framework has yet realized this goal. In the light of the identified research gap one main research question evolved: How can Corporate Sustainability be integrated into Business Process Management? In addition to the theoretical data collection, this thesis is based on the experience of actual practitioners. This was achieved by a total of 21 interviews with employees responsible for sustainability. Coding the data produced a set of success factors and difficulties for the integration of sustainability, as well as requirements for a possible method for the integration of sustainability. This has never been described in literature to this extent before. So far literature does not provide a comprehensive set, as it is done within this thesis. From these results, a novel framework was developed to support companies with the sustainability integration using BPM. This initial framework was validated in a second round of interviews. The validation resulted in a refined Sustainability Integration Framework 2.0 which represents the main contribution to knowledge of this thesis. The framework shows the connection between the corporate strategy and the sustainability integration process. It further shows the relevant input factors that need to be considered when developing a sustainability strategy. It also demonstrates the most important steps that need to be undertaken when integrating sustainability into BPM. The framework is a novel approach that helps managers to structure and understand the process of integrating sustainability. It provides a clear guideline and a holistic approach for the integration of sustainability into business process management that has been requested by researchers and practitioners.