Measuring the carbon footprint of business processes

Abstract

While many corporations and individuals realize that environmental sustainability is an urgent problem to address, the academic community has been slow to acknowledge the problem and take action. We contribute to the emerging academic discussion by proposing a new approach for engaging in the analysis of environmentally sustainable business processes. Specifically, we propose an approach for measuring the carbon dioxide emissions produced during the execution of a business process, and apply this approach in a real-life case of a Direct Invoicing process at a Corporate Services provider. We show how this information can be leveraged in the re-design of "green" business processes. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.