meeting see Southern, 1994 with all users at the different levels taking part in a large Conference Hall in Ghent. At this meeting, the Director General of the Zone explained the
strategic importance and the objectives of the change project. Changes in attitude within the processes were very difficult to achieve. An example of
this was the change to reading, analysis, evaluation and synthesis directly from the screen instead of making use of printouts. The necessary changes in attitude needed more than
simply expecting the users to adopt the new work methods, training and on going assis- tance being required.
The analysis had to cope with many challenges. Everything was new: centralisation, the transfer to industries or sectors, and the switch to a written culture a credit opinion could
no longer be clarified before the Credit Committee. The technological revolution was dramatic for the decision makers. They had problems, in particular, in adapting to the new
style of making decisions on the basis of a written analyst’s report rather than on the basis of an explanation given by the credit analyst in the Credit Committee. It is obvious that in
the case of such fundamental changes as these, one has to go through a learning process and participants need to remain motivated especially in the start-up phase of the project.
In addition, new human resource challenges emerge. The top and operational level of the Bank were very enthusiastic about the project and supported it from the beginning.
However, problems arose with the middle management because of the decreased impor- tance of their traditional role. The contracting phase was soon to be reengineered as,
currently, analysts and contracting employees do not share workplaces anymore at the Office-level and this causes communication and coordination difficulties. Integration of
case management teams has to be achieved, consisting of analysts and contracting employ- ees at the Zone level. This may be very difficult to bring about because most of the
contracting people are part time employees with a lower educational level and this will make empowerment more difficult. Moreover, they are not so mobile or are less willing to
commute every day to the Zone.
Further, it is clear that implementing organisational changes will be an ongoing activity within the Bank. As indicated earlier, the reengineering of the contracting
process was already planned. Even during our interviews with the key people concerned with the credit processes, a new quite fundamental idea emerged: why
is it that one event an individual credit application must lead to one analysis and one decision? A differentiated project cycle whereby one analysis can be reused for two or
even more credit decisions for an individual company could result in more savings and a greater decrease of the cycle time.
8. Lessons learned
As indicated in Section 1, Belgian companies only recently started to implement BPR concepts. This is certainly the case for the financial sector, so it is important that the
findings of this particular BPR project are generalised to other companies offering finan- cial services and also to enterprises in other sectors and industries. The following lessons
can be extracted from the Corporate Credits project of Ge´ne´rale de Banque:
W. Van Grembergen, J.-L. Van Belle Journal of Strategic Information Systems 8 1999 63–81 77
8.1. Lesson 1: choose the right processes The Corporate Credit project was embedded in the Systems Plan of the Ge´ne´rale. The
motivation for this project was that benchmarking showed it to be a very labour intensive process, and hence suitable for reengineering. It was never questioned in any fundamental
sense whether it was the right process to reengineer. In his book, The Process Edge, Keen 1997 defines the process paradox. He illustrates this paradox with the well-known BPR
case of Mutual Benefit Hammer, 1990 in which they reengineered successfully their insurance issuance process but fell afterwards into insolvency. Clearly, the wrong process
was reengineered in this instance.
As we hoped, this article shows the Corporate Credit project to be a success for the bank in terms of reduced cycle time, increased productivity and improved quality of risk
analysis. When explicitly asked, Ge´ne´rale de Banque stated that it was the right process to reengineer because “the payback period is approximately two years, not even taking
into account the more intangible benefits such as an improvement of the quality of the risk management and the positive result of a better client service”.
The crucial question, however, still is how this project redesigning the credit process affected the Ge´ne´rale’s business and whether, consequently, they reengineered the right
process. The search for the right project can be done with the SalienceWorth Matrix developed by Keen 1997. This matrix shows the importance of the business processes
to the enterprise Salience and whether it increases or decreases the value Worth. It is clear that what are called Identity Processes which differentiate a firm from its com-
petitors are the appropriate candidates for reengineering and are an asset to the company. Thus, a crucial question for the Ge´ne´rale is to assess whether or not Corporate Credit was
one such process.
8.2. Lesson 2: challenge the limitations Hammer and Champy 1993 conclude that processes often suffer from division of
labour and old business rules, and that, therefore, a clean slate approach is needed. The Credit Charter, with its principal division between instruction and analysis, was never
really challenged during the BPR exercises. The Ge´ne´rale was not yet ready to change its culture and ditch the principle of dual responsibility. The question—can responsibility be
replaced by IT measures, without losing control?—was never raised. From the beginning of the project, the Credit Charter was seen as a limitation to the BPR exercise. As
explained earlier, the argument was that this is necessary in order to cope optimally with credit risks.
8.3. Lesson 3: go for radical redesign and dramatic improvements The basic question of the Corporate Credit project was “how can we perform credit
decisions and issuance more efficiently?” Within the constraints of the Credit Charter of the Bank, some fundamental changes were made: the cycle time was shortened and the
credit decisions became a result of a partnership between account managers and credit analysts the Credit Committee only approves. During our interviews, it became clear that
W. Van Grembergen, J.-L. Van Belle Journal of Strategic Information Systems 8 1999 63–81 78
this BPR project is only the start of further fundamental organisational changes within credits, as is illustrated by the idea of a differentiated project cycle.
However, BPR is about dramatic improvements, not about 10 but about 90 decreases in cycle time as accomplished by IBM Credit Corporation Hammer and
Champy, 1993 or by Harley-Davidson who cut its delivery time for new motorcycles from 360 days to fewer than three days Keen, 1997. The results achieved by the Cor-
porate Credit project of Ge´ne´rale de Banque are of another magnitude: a decrease of the cycle time by a few days, and in the analysis phase a productivity gain of 25. The
question is whether this was a radical or an incremental improvement. Although not dramatic in relative terms, the Bank considers it to be a significant improvement, and a
great success.
8.4. Lesson 4: consider the new human architecture In the BPR literature, it is often stated that human resources are important enablers
within a BPR project. Davenport 1993 refers to it as “organisational and human resource enablers of process change”. The Ge´ne´rale’s Corporate Credit process again demonstrated
that the design of a new human architecture was of considerable importance and a neces- sary condition for success. But, as observed in other Belgian BPR cases, there was no real
involvement of the HRM department at the beginning of the project. They were only involved when rumours began to circulate about the ongoing BPR projects. This problem
was tackled by a plenary session for all participants of the process. This was certainly a good way of responding to the problem, but still, the new human architecture is yet to be
clearly developed. Following Kettinger et al. 1995, “a redefinition of job titles and positions affected by changes in cross functional processes” and “incentives and reward
structures based on group performance and an individual’s team contribution” have to be incorporated. Developing a new human resource architecture was also a crucial but very
difficult issue within the BPR project of Ge´ne´rale.
8.5. Lesson 5: consider the new IT architecture The enabling technology was imaging and workflow management software, implement-
ing these new technologies was no real problem, but reengineering the existing and old computer network appeared to be a serious and underestimated problem. This differs from
the opinion often expressed that technological issues are more easy to solve than human resource challenges in the sense that more adequate technology can always be purchased.
In the case of Ge´ne´rale, the technological problems substantially did delay the project.
9. Conclusions
