Guest editorial

Guest editorial

About the Guest Editors

Christopher Seow is a Senior Lecturer in Operations and Quality Management at the Business School, University of East London, United Kingdom. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Business Process Management Journal and regular Reviewer for the Journal of Operations Management, and for the Academy of Management Conference (Operations Management and Organisation and Natural Environment Divisions). In 2003, he was Guest Editor of a special journal issue in Managing Quality in e-Operations and in 2004, Co-Guest edited a special issue Six sigma for operational excellence. His research interests and publications involve striving for excellence in operations management – with particular emphasis to redesigning business processes for e-enterprise and sustainable development. Christopher Seow can be contacted at c.seow@uel.ac.uk

Ruth Hillary is a Technical Director in Corporate Sustainability for Scott Wilson and a leading researcher in the field of environmental management and corporate sustainability. She is an expert member of the British Standard Institution's ES/1/-/1 SME Panel on Environmental Management Systems and a principal expert to ISO TC 207/SC1 Working Group 2 on ISO 14004 and on the new standard in development for Environmental Communication ISO 14063. Ruth is a member of the advisory board of BRASS – Cardiff University's Centre for Business Relationships, Accountability, Sustainability and Society, giving strategic direction on its short and long-term research strategy. In addition to her role as the Editor-at-Large for Corporate Environmental Strategy: International Journal for Sustainable Business, she is Editor of the Business and the Environment Practitioners Series and the CBI Environmental Management Handbook.

Managing business processes for corporate sustainability

Ruth Hillary can be contacted at ruth@corporatesustainability.co.uk. Corporations are now re-examining their corporate responsibilities and are beginning to integrate sustainability principles into their business strategies and policies. The rationale for this integration is that businesses increasingly recognise that sustainability is an integral part of good business that affects the bottom line and long-term profitability.

Corporate sustainability requires companies to address the issues of economic prosperity, social equity and environmental quality simultaneously. No individual company can be fully “sustainable” within an unsustainable economic system. Managing for long-term success requires a full integration of the principles of sustainability into an organisation's business processes. Working towards the goal of sustainability is a complex journey in which different process concerns may be emphasised at different phases.

This special issue gives an idea of how some organisations are addressing the issue of sustainability. The sequence of articles is categorised into organisational issues, and tools and techniques, and offers insights into these as follows:

Organisational issues

Roome and Bergin start our journey by sharing with us how Ontario Hydro tried to instil such an ethos of corporate responsibility when it was a novel notion back in the 80s. They conclude with an updated reflection on the lessons learned when starting such a journey two decades ago and what this means today. One such lesson espoused by them “... requiring leadership of many individual actors to facilitate the complex process of negotiated transformation,” is corroborated by Gao and Zhang's examination of the concept of social auditing as an approach to engaging stakeholders in assessing and reporting on corporate sustainability and its performance. This thread is continued with Cartwright and Craig's discussion of issues and approaches – including introducing the concept of Earth, the biosphere as a stakeholder – to the required change processes to bring corporate governance into alignment with global sustainability.

Tools and techniques

Sarkis, Meade and Presley describe the deployment of a methodology – incorporating activity-based costing and management, analytic hierarchy process and business process modelling using the IDEFO method – to assist organisations striving for corporate sustainability to make informed decisions. Sadiq and Khan continue on the tools and techniques theme by sharing with us an insight into the application of an integrated approach for risk-based life cycle assessment and multi-criteria decision-making.

The journey towards corporate sustainability is a precarious one. Robinson, Anumba, Carrillo, and Al-Ghassani, attest that knowledge management is inextricably linked to corporate sustainability, and propose a methodological approach – STEPS maturity roadmap – of enabling organisations on that journey. This notion complements that of Jamali's article that suggests that significant progress on this journey can be reaped if the characteristics of a learning organisation can be successfully integrated into a sustainability focused organisational learning (SFOL) process. This then allows organisations to reap the fruits that accrue from the synergy of continuous learning and accumulated experience.

Seitz and Wells conclude this collection of papers with their article which aims to extend the scientific field of closed-loop supply chain management by providing a detailed, in-depth analysis of a real-world product recovery operation, taking the example of automotive engine remanufacturing. They discover that their case study organisation adopted this ethos not for immediate profitability or for social responsible reasons, but for long term strategic support of its brand.

Organisations adopting effective business processes are the cornerstone of modern economic life. The above selection of articles demonstrates that the concept of corporate sustainability can play a significant role in improving those processes. From the news, it would appear that many of today's organisations' success were built on being oblivious to the impact of their business processes on the environment. Today, as a consequence of organisations being socially responsible through a surge in awareness of what constitutes good corporate citizenship, organisations strive for their business processes to have a zero impact on the environment. However, to preserve Cartwright and Craig's interpretation of Earth, tomorrow's organisations must do their utmost to make a positive impact.

The editorial concludes with thanks to the Editor of the Business Process Management Journal for enabling us to initiate such a call for papers and to thank the authors and reviewers for enriching this body of knowledge. We would like to thank the reviewers for their hard work, valuable contributions and co-operation. We would like to take this opportunity to thank all the paper contributors, without whom this special issue would not have been possible.

Christopher Seow and Ruth Hillary

Christopher and Ruth co-facilitate an Internet Forum “Sustainable-org” www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/sustainable-org.html. The primary aim of the forum is to disseminate discussions that reflect current issues about how organisations are implementing sustainability in practice.

We look forward to your participation in extending this discussion.

Christopher Seow and Ruth HillaryGuest Editors