ABN AMRO Lease (AAL) is a subsidiary of ABN AMRO Bank (AAB) and is specialized in the funding of asset-based solutions. As a subsidiary, AAL has to follow some compliance regulations from AAB. Although AAL’s functions are separated from AAB, they overlap on an interface that controls the login credentials that enables the employees of AAL to make spreadings and ratings, which are crucial processes for credit requests.
At the moment, AAL encounters serious problems with the way the e-mail confirmation process from AAL to AAB works. To authorize AAL employees, a group of 30 managers of AAL receive an e-mail from AAB with a link that they need to click to confirm their subordinates are still working at the company. This is for security reasons, related to the compliance regulations of AAB. If the manager clicks this link, a confirmation signal is sent to AAB. If this is not confirmed (for example if the manager is on holiday and misses the e-mail) and the confirmation is not sent, the employees under the supervisor will be denied access to the system. It takes a few days for the AAL employee to regain access to the system.
The report will provide an analysis of the underlying cause of this problem and will give a solution based on both the short-term and the long-term. The problem stated by AAL concerning the authorization issue, is actually an underlying cause of the difference in corporate maturity. This can be explained with the theory of the corporate life cycle. According to James (1974) companies are not static, but changing over ‘their life’ as well as can experience multiple curves to facilitate continuous growth. These changes within the curve cycle could be placed into five different phases, namely birth, growth, maturity, revival, and decline. AAL is currently located just at the end of the birth phase (Kloos, 2016) whereas AAB is located in the revival phase. This gap in (technological) maturity results in a difference between the communication and lead times of the two companies.
On the short term, AAL encounters most problems with the way the e-mail confirmation process from AAL to AAB works. To solve this, our first suggestion would be the automation of this process.
On the long term, the consequences of the gap in maturity between AAL and AAB need to be minimized. As Behara (2006) stated, business process modeling (BPM) addresses how organizations can identify, model, develop, deploy, and manage their business processes. It enables enterprises to specify their business processes step-by-step. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is about bridging the gap between business and IT through a set of business aligned IT services using a set of design principles, patterns, and techniques (Behara, 2016). SOA offers services, while BPM uses services and these two meet each other in the business processes.
The proposed solution for AAL is to redefine the BPM and SOA parts parallel to each other.
This blog is written by Annemiek van der Sluijs (369253), Bernice Hiltrop (354824), Eda Yurdakul (34899), and Sanne Wijnands (371387)
