Simulating Environmental Impacts of Business Processes with SimuBridge and the SOPA Framework

Assessing the environmental impact of business processes is an important factor for organizations to contribute towards meaningfully facing climate change. However, existing contributions and frameworks are often rather conceptual, and no unified and user-friendly implementation exits. For this, we draw on previous studies and extend an existing tool, SimuBridge, which allows process analysts to create, manage, and execute business process simulation scenarios. We incorporate concepts of SOPA, a framework for sustainability-oriented process analysis that uses Life Cycle Assessments as holistic indicators of environmental impact. In doing so, we enable simulation-based analyses of business processes and allow analysts to develop process re-design scenarios and compare them regarding their environmental impact.