Processes are in fact corporate assets, just like production machinery, so they need to be managed by the same yardstick," says Jörg Decker-Conradi, one of the initiators of the process analysis at Bayer HealthCare. The team at Bayer HealthCare has spent three years sifting through hundreds of business processes, visualizing them and standardizing the related documentation. A process owner is then determined who is authorized to decide on adjustments or changes and on any regional exceptions that may be warranted. "We obviously don't want to over-regulate. The main question we always ask is: Does what we're doing benefit the business?", Decker-Conradi explains. "But whenever we identify scope for taking sensible action to reduce complexity, then that's what we do."