All technological manufacturing steps within an enterprise as well as their controlling managerial enterprise processes such as „budgeting“ or „order processing“ can be described by enterprise process modeling. Today the enterprise process modeling is frequently used to design and plan value creation processes and networks. Mainly economic assessment criteria, such as cost and lead time, are used for planning. However, in the future the social and environmental dimensions will become more important. For example, human factors such as working conditions, prevention of emissions as well as waste and energy savings have to be taken into consideration when designing production and management processes.
The project C1 „Multi-perspective modeling of sustainable industrial value creation“ addresses this challenge. A method and a tool are developed to describe, analyze and communicate the sustainability within value creation networks in their inner relations with the enterprise processes along the value creation. The designers and users can then precisely redesign their enterprise processes based on the sustainability evaluation of their current processes and networks. The practical application in a number of companies will ensure the practicality and derive a reference model for the support.

Results:

For the development of a methodology and a framework to describe, analyze and communicate sustainability within enterprise processes, it was first necessary to get to know which information should be illustrated and evaluated. Therefore, selected use cases of sustainable plants and value creation networks were used to derive the desired aspects for designing and planning sustainable enterprises. To identify the main aspects which are relevant for using enterprise models as a common backbone for the different management disciplines, the Integrated Enterprise Modeling (IEM) and the visualization tool MO²GO has been used to build use case models. Based on the enterprise process models, e.g. all energy and material consumption has been recorded along these processes. The use cases have shown that the associated application of enterprise modeling with e.g. energy and resource efficiency analysis generates added values compared to their separated application. For example, the description of energy and resource efficiency relevant content with the relating personnel or infrastructure, enables new evaluations and cross analysis, e.g. which infrastructure is related to which energy consumed. The experiences with the use case application and the contemplation of existing indicator systems for sustainability leads to a first reference model for multi-perspective modelling. To empower the user in their decision-making process towards a sustainable enterprise orientation, a method and a tool have been developed which uses the enterprise processes as a basis for the different management disciplines. Therefore a model-based approach has been developed. Within this approach specific sustainability indicators are integrated into the IEM-model by mapping them to their related sustainability objectives as well as to enterprise objects (e.g. process steps, machines, products or buildings). Based on this enriched integrated enterprise, several evaluations and cause-effect analysis can be performed. The approach can also be used for the evaluation of global value creation networks. Here the partner within this network can use a common set of relevant indicators within their individual enterprise model. This ensures that only network-relevant information is transferred towards the evaluation and configuration views. In the first step of the application, the „building step“, all relevant input data, like sustainability indicators, real-time data sources and enterprise objectives, are collected and aligned into the enterprise model. In the second step, specific model evaluations under sustainability aspects can be configured and represented within the Process Assistant, a web-based process management tool. It summarizes all model-based information to support enterprise planning and controlling by delivering all the necessary data in a multi-perspective „cockpit-views“.

Learn more about challenges, approach and results of project C1 in this Powerpoint presentation: