Cascading the Balanced Scorecard to Customer level: Case Points

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to understand how Balance Scorecard can help organisation’s strategic planning process and how Balanced Scorecard is cascaded to other levels of the organisation. The research aims to understand what are the key factors that need to be taken into consideration when setting up a Balanced Scorecard as well as what are the objectives and KPIs in the customer level that the organisation should be using in their customer level Balanced Scorecard. Cascading the Balanced Scorecard to other levels of the organisation can help understanding how the actions in the lower level in the organisation contribute towards the overall strategy.

The theoretical framework focuses on two areas: strategic planning and management and Balanced Scorecard. A Balanced Scorecard is a strategy management tool which is used for measuring strategy execution. A core idea of Balanced Scorecard is to give a more balanced view of the business performance by having non-financials measurements as well. Balanced Scorecard has become one of the most used strategic tools since David Norton and Robert Kaplan introduced it in 1992. The research is done with a case study method, and the data is collected by having semi-structured interviews and a focus group after which the Balanced Scorecard is developed by analysing data utilising content analysis method.

Balanced Scorecard is a useful tool which can help the organisation in its strategic planning. Measuring non-financial metrics can reveal valuable information about the business performance and can help the organisation to identify areas of improvement prior they are impacting the financial results. Based on the interviews and a focus group customer level objectives and KPIs were identified, and a customer level Balanced Scorecard was developed. The customer level Balanced Scorecard enables the teams to identify which areas need improving so that the customer level goals are able to be met.