Joe Somebody Business 1010 Dr. Whosit Differences

Joe Somebody

Business 1010

Dr. Whosit

Differences in Balanced Scorecard Implementation across Industries

Business is all about making money, but sometimes in order to make money, you need to ostensibly ignore the money for a bit. If all you look at is the bottom line from day-to-day, there's a lot you can miss. The balanced scorecard (BSC) is a way to derive measurements from an organization's mission plan. There are four categories of measurements, only one of which is directly measuring finances: finances, customer satisfaction, internal processes, and innovation and learning. The goal is to link corporate strategies to individual practices.

The first example of BSC implementation comes from the United Methodist Publishing House. The publishing company was struggling to keep up with changing times, so they turned to BSC to turn things around. First, in the financial dimension they identified three quantifiable measures: sales growth, corporate earnings, and returns on investment. In the customer satisfaction dimension, they decided to measure how well they attracted and retained customers, survey customer satisfaction, and track timely product development and delivery schedules. With regard to their internal processes, they surveyed shipment errors and efficiency in producing high-quality goods on time. Finally, in the innovation and learning dimension, they focused on the number of substantially new products and services, staff competence, and learning goals for all salaried employees. This served to translate long-term goals into immediate action.

Our final example comes from a "St. Elsewhere Hospital" -- a Catholic hospital suffering from its charitable reputation. The hospice unit was deemed both critical to the hospital's success and most in need of improvement and so the administration devised a balanced scorecard for the unit. Their measure of financial performance consisted of increasing the number of patients and the amount of funds raised for facility improvements. They measured customer satisfaction by surveying patients and their families, as well as tracking patient retention and referrals. They used the number of patient complaints and employee turnover rates to evaluate the quality of their internal processes. Finally, they appraised the level of learning and growth taking place by training hours and patients per caregiver. Their indices illustrated a cause-effect relationship from individual employee behaviors to overall organization success.