Changing Products, Changing Processes: Dealing with Small Updates in Product-Based Design

In the method of "product-based design" (PBD), a direct relation exists between the design of a business process and the characteristics of the end product that such a process should deliver. This offers many benefits over more traditional business process redesign approaches. This paper takes into consideration that any end product is subject to (frequent) change. While it is technically feasible with PBD to generate a new design from an updated product specification, it may be more efficient to update the existing process design directly when a change is small. In this paper, such small product changes are investigated and it is described how a process design should be changed in accordance with them. The presented results contribute to an improved application of PBD in practice in the field of process management.