Sustainability and Business Process Management in Times of Global Disruption: Practices and Challenges

Dear colleagues,

The outbreak of the novel coronavirus disease Covid-19 has already raised many issues in our society, pertaining to health, education, economy, and human behavior. According to the declaration of Covid-19 as a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO), society was suggested to take urgent and aggressive action including total restrictions on movement (people and goods), limitations on the private sector (commercial and production of non-essential goods and services), and the suggestion to be more flexible in terms of public activities (i.e., working from home). Despite all these efforts, many business sectors are still facing a crisis in how to adapt to the current situation and to define a new business model for the sustainability of their business.

The current challenges for business organizations involve identifying threats and opportunities emerging from this situation and finding their potential role in the future in terms of viability and competitiveness. The trends toward sustainability in business process management include various factors, such as cost, technological issues, environmental issues, human behavior, and economic policy. In this context, the quality of the environment is not instantly affected by technology but by human behavior, which means that technology can facilitate and support human behavior. On the other hand, it also should be hand in hand with the thoughtful design of the chained activities or business performed by humans and machines. Thereby, business process management (BPM) could be a powerful tool to help stakeholders tackle the challenge of sustainability by changing and improving the ways in which activities or business are performed. Therefore, the researchers should not only provide theoretical knowledge but also offer innovative, relevant, and applicable perspectives on those practical problems to realize sustainable BPM.

Future BPM should be designed to integrate the design (process owners, process analysts, and system developers) and execution aspects (process participants). As BPM can be improved by considering five (5) factors (i.e., BPM strategic alignment, governance policy, methods/information technology, people knowledge, and cultural changes), the methods/information technology could be the main focus of this digitalization area. Researchers are challenged to provide a transformational process improvement representing a large-scale re-engineering of the business process to leverage the opportunities for emerging technologies, including change management, ensuring that the associated benefits are realized. Additionally, fast and iterative improvement of the business process, as well as fast evaluation of a new BPM based on performance data or feedback from stakeholders, could be the solution for agile BPM improvement. Another example is to provide a multi-purpose BPM which is a collaborative design of business process and process decisions in line with multiple purposes while leveraging large-scale processes and supporting personal/individual processes.

Finally, we believe that we could draw a great potential from the inter-disciplinary and international cooperation of researchers that integrates business and technical perspectives for sustainable BPM. This Special Issue aims to provide a deep discussion of the sustainability in BPM that may affect the global business due to the Covid-19 pandemic and to allow BPM scholars to provide new insight into dealing with the sustainability of global business. The potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Sustainable BPM;
• Green BPM;
• Sustainable business model;
• Sustainable supply chain process model;
• Business process reengineering (BPR);
• Smart industry;
• Risk management;
• Sustainable resource management;
• Service delivery improvement (SDI).

Dr. Bernardo Nugroho Yahya
Dr. Danny Prabowo Soetanto
Dr. Mahendrawathi Er
Dr. Shuzhu Zhang
Guest Editors

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• sustainable BPM
• future BPM
• supply chain process
• business innovation