Английский язык. Практический курс для решения бизнес-задач - стр. 64
The best process is to first create a clear business model, and then to select measurements based on that model. This increases commitment, brings more agreement on the direction of the organization, builds accountability to company goals, and increases the speed of change. The first part of the process is creating a model for the scorecard. First, review and clarify strategies. The next step is agreeing on what capabilities are needed within the company to actually pursue the strategy. The final part is creating the actual model. This is where you set up a simple diagram that reflects how you think the business works.
Larger organizations usually adopt a top-down approach: a balanced scorecard is first installed at the top, where commitment is most vital to success. It is then cascaded throughout the organization, to align departments’ goals with the overall company goals. For single stores or small companies, this step might be unnecessary.
The final step is getting people to use the scorecard as a routine matter – making it part of the culture. This is where most management initiatives go wrong, leading to this sage advice: If you want something to be a useful tool, make it the only initiative you try this quarter, give it your full attention, and don’t take any shortcuts. Otherwise, an initiative becomes a fad and eventually appears in the Dilbert cartoons.
Once created, the scorecard should become a part of your business’ daily life; it should be embedded into a company’s operations as a standard decision-making tool. The BSC leverages common sense into a substantial competitive advantage.
Source: www.quickmba.com, www.balancedscorecard.org, Paul Arveson, 1998
Happy customers are good, but profitable customers are much better.
The Balanced Scorecard introduced customer metrics into performance management systems. Scorecards feature all manner of wonderful objectives relating to the customer value proposition and customer outcome metrics – for example, market share, account share, acquisition, satisfaction, and retention.
Yet amid all these measures of customer success, some companies lose sight of the ultimate objective: to make a profit from selling products and services. In their zeal to delight customers, these companies actually lose money with them. They become customer-obsessed rather than customer-focused. When the customer says «jump,» they ask «how high?» They offer additional product features and services, but fail to receive prices that cover the costs for these additional features and services.
How can companies avoid this situation? By adding a metric that summarizes customer profitability.
Consider the situation faced in the 1990s by one of the nation’s largest distributors of medical and surgical supplies. In five years, sales had more than tripled to nearly $3 billion, yet selling, general, and administrative (SG&A) expenses, thought by many to be a fixed cost, had increased even faster than sales; margins had declined by one percentage point and the company had just incurred its first loss in decades.
The experience of this company is hardly unique. Companies often capture additional business by offering more services. The list is wide-ranging: product or service customization; small order quantities; special packaging; expedited and JIT delivery; substantial pre-sales support, etc. While all of these services create value and loyalty among customers, none of them come for free. For a differentiated customer intimacy strategy to succeed, the value created by the differentiation has to exceed the cost of creating and delivering customized features and services.