Business Process Reengineering has introduced new vigor into IT, but it has also fallen from grace because it was over-hyped and often installed with little consideration for the overall impact on the enterprise. Much "baby was thrown out with the bathwater" by ripping out departments, laying off personnel with company wisdom and experience, and other highly publicized faults.

Despite several heavy-handed implementations, much good has come from looking at the business processes globally. Our experience was positive, by cutting the time to market for a key business process, home mortgage processing, we increased the competitive position of a major player in the New England home mortgage marketplace.

The overall incentive to review this area was done with the help of a major consulting firm, which showed the bank that great improvement was both possible and necessary to maintain a competitive stance in the market. Our role was one of the requirements- gathering and in implementing the selected solution.

In reviewing the workflow of documents, we found over 80 steps and stations where documents were handled. In some cases, documents piled up and stayed for some days while bottlenecks prevented downstream stations even to be aware of the backlogs. This was changed by:

1. Building a database tracking documents electronically, and
2. Processing elements in parallel where appropriate, instead of serially,
3. Combining processes functionally to reduce the steps to less than 20.

Selected improvements included pooling processing in stations instead of to individuals, incenting certain groups to speed performance, and creating competitive incentives across teams as well as to individuals within the teams. Further incentives for cross-selling were set up as a cost-free byproduct of the mortgage processing.

Certain activities were outside the bank, such as legal, title, and occasionally appraisals. These were improved by noting the pipeline of loans, scheduling and lining up the outside resources, and improved communications through the data base, such as direct electronic links to credit agencies.