Objectives-based business process redesign in financial planning - a case study

Semi-structured processes appear in many domains. Especially within multinational enterprises, it is often impossible to implement completely structured and standardized processes because of a rapidly changing environment. Nevertheless, semi-structured processes have a potential for improvement. In order to meet or even outreach compliance and governance requirements it is essential for an enterprise to exploit such a potential. Yet, existing approaches either focus on entirely unstructured or fully structured processes. The goal of this paper is to present a framework for innovative process redesign to improve a semi-structured process and to illustrate the potential of such a theoretical framework, taking Bayer AG as an example. We achieve this goal in three steps: (i) we present our Objective-Based Business Process Redesign Model, including a list of objectives for the improvement of semi-structured business processes; (ii) we conduct the case study by executing our Redesign Model; (iii) we present the practical process along with its implementation and evaluation. The evaluation of our case study shows the vast potential for improvement in semi-structured processes, implemented by a considerable reduction in time and complexity.