Read the extract carefully and applythe problem-solution pattern of analysis to it.

Process Reengineering at IBM Credit

IBM Credit finances the computers, software and services sold byIBM Corporation. The company is considered one of the world's mostprofitable publicly- traded companies. Processing a financeapplication usually took between six days and two weeks. Theapplication wound its way from the credit department to the pricingdepartment, to an administrator who wrote out a formal quoteletter. When IBM Credit realized that processing an applicationactually took only about 90-minutes, and the rest of the normalprocessing time was spent with the application sitting on a pile ona specialist’s desk waiting to be looked at, they decided toreengineer the entire process. Here’s what IBM Credit did: The fourspecialists who previously processed the application were replacedby a generalist called the deal structurer, who processed theapplication from start to end using templates on a new computersystem which provided all the data and tools each specialistcommonly used. The results of the reengineering program were:Turnaround time was reduced from a typical 7 days to 4 hours.Without any increase in staff numbers, IBM Credit has been able toachieve a hundred-fold improvement in productivity. It can nowhandle 100 times the number of credit applications that werehandled before reengineering was undertaken. Source: ( Adapted fromGrant 2008)

Questions:

a) What is the starting situation?

b) What is the problem?

c) What is the underlying cause of theproblem?

d) What solution has been proposed?

e) How successful is the solution?