Enterprise Architecture for a Facilitated Transformation from a Linear to a Circular Economy

Abstract

The circular economy is central to the agenda of responsible production and consumption with propositions for the conservation of natural resources and a broader understanding of the obligations of enterprises and product developers. The circular economy is challenging traditional operating models of enterprises due to the need to manage larger parts of the product life cycle and value chains. A linear economy will normally address a smaller part of the life cycle. The operating models of companies are supported with respect to information and technology with an enterprise architecture model. This article examines the necessary steps for analysing and designing the enterprise architecture model, aiming to facilitate the transformation of an enterprise from operating in a linear to operating in a circular economy model. The fundamentals and requirements of the circular economy enterprise are extracted to isolate the design requirements for the operating model, entailing cross-enterprise collaboration, traceability, and a broader value chain understanding. Furthermore, it conceptualizes enterprise architecture and its role and importance in connecting business strategies and operating technologies. This article develops an enterprise architecture framework, named the Circular Economy Enterprise Architecture Framework (CEEAF), which can form and support the effort of transitioning companies or be embedded into existing enterprise architecture frameworks. The CEEAF differs from traditional enterprise architecture frameworks by addressing the broader responsibility of the enterprise, the extended enterprise, the elimination of end-of-life perspectives and mind-sets, and the capabilities of the individual enterprise and its design activities.

Management of the sustainable development of machine-building enterprises: a sustainable development space approach

“…Vitiea and Lim affirm that the enterprises should collaborate with local community in the framework of the development of environmental protection and corporate social responsibility (Malesios et al , 2018). Malesios et al formed a model and analyzed the impact of the SME's management on its economic growth by means of sustainability (Laumann and Torben, 2018). Laumann and Torben created a new way to influence optimization cost and transformation of the work of the enterprise from the linear model to the circular economy (Prieto-Sandoval et al , 2018).…”

Effects of Circular Economy Policies on the Environment and Sustainable Growth: Worldwide Research

“…On other hand, the Chinese researcher Geng, Y., from Tongji University, is the author with the most articles published (21), the most citations (1285), the best average number of citations per article (61.19), and the highest h-index (16). The most prolific institution in this area of research is the Chinese Academy of Science, with 40 published articles, 1434 citations, and an average of 35.85 citations per article.…”

“…The economic model that has been established since the Industrial Revolution is the linear economy, whose basic principle is the disposal of products after their use. According to this model, all products have a linear cycle, comprising the extraction of raw materials; processing and transformation into products; the distribution and sale; the use; and, finally, the disposal as waste [19][20][21]. In the linear model (extraction, manufacturing, use, and disposal), there is no recovery or reuse of products, so the materials that were previously products or merchandise become unusable waste [22].…”

“…The author who heads Table 4 is Yong Geng and belongs to Tongji University (Shanghai, China). This Chinese author has the highest number of articles (21), h-index (16), and total citations (1285). He stands out for being the author with the longest research career, since his first article-"Implementing China's circular economy concept at the regional level: A review of progress in Dalian, China" [102]-was published in 2009.…”

Corporate Strategies for a Circular Economy: A Comparative Study of Energy Companies

“…Recurrent topics focus on manufacturing companies (Lieder et al, 2017;Vogtlander et al, 2017;Bianchini et al, 2018;Oghazi and Mostaghel, 2018;Portillo-Tarragona et al, 2018), construction companies (Christmann, 2018;Gorecki, 2019), small and medium enterprises (SMEs) (Calabrese et al, 2016;Zamfir, Mocanu and Grigorescu, 2017;Caldera, Desha and Dawes, 2019) and industrial symbioses (Walls and Paquin, 2015;Wen and Meng, 2015;Velenturf, 2017). Conceptual analyses and framework developments have also been proposed (Korhonen, Honkasalo and Seppälä, 2018;Laumann and Tambo, 2018;Masi et al, 2018). Aspects for integrating CE in business models include reconfiguration of revenue models and cost structure, collaboration with partners (Oghazi and Mostaghel, 2018), integrated strategy, continuous improvement and stakeholder engagement (Caldera, Desha and Dawes, 2019), mapping of organizational and material relations of the business (Jørgensen and Remmen, 2018), organizational innovation in addition to technological innovation (Gorecki, 2019).…”