Product-based design of business processes applied within the financial services

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is an important instrument to boost the performance of business processes. In this paper, the Product-Based Design method is presented that supports BPR. It is especially suitable to reengineer processes that support informationintensive products such as bonds, mortgages, and loans. Inspired by manufacturing principles, the structure of an information-intensive product is decomposed into a structure of informational elements which are used to derive the lay-out of an improved process design. Using this formal approach, many problems encountered with prevailing BPR practice are circumvented. This paper includes a description of the application of this method to credit processing within the ING Bank Nederland, a large Dutch bank. In this particular case, substantial savings in cost and flow time are achieved.