Free Essay Sample in the Implementation of the Balanced Scorecard

It is true that a balanced scorecard helps to link both the short-term and long-term value reactions as it measures more than money. It should be admitted that several critical measures incorporated in the balanced scorecard are directly related to marketing as well as strategy. In the case of M&R, the idea behind the balanced scorecard is that strategy could be aligned alongside essential performance objectives to optimize performance and opportunities. A balanced scorecard served M&R as a necessary tool on some cases.

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From the case study observations, it is true that M&R came up with project teams of managers who were tasked to design performance metrics for various operations. About thirty-two were identified, and they included financial, internal, customer, learning among others (Atkinson, 2006). The M&R department ensured that all these strategies were communicated to relevant people in the organization including employees so that the implementation process could be eased. These are some of the primary objectives that are outlined in the scorecard for the effective performance of a corporation. By doing this, M&R ensured that it clarified and gained consensus about the scorecard strategies, informed the whole organization about the strategy, identified and aligned strategic initiatives, defined organization unit goals, and also provide a process of reviewing the strategy

Therefore, some of the strengths of a scorecard are that; it helps to give structure to the adopted strategy as it appears logical and structured to help managers of the organization to ensure that all areas are covered in a way easier to understand. This helps to track the progress of actions easily (Atkinson, 2006). The second is that it aids in aligning business departments and divisions, especially when implemented correctly. The critical objectives of the departments can easily be linked to those of the parent organization to identify how they are rolling out. The scorecard also illustrates how large projects are shared across various divisions. The third strength is that a scorecard makes it easy to communicate the strategies as it outlines all that is needed. Additionally, a scorecard helps employees to observe how their individual goals link to those strategies of the organization. Besides, a scorecard helps to keep the business strategies front and center of the reporting process.

On the other hand, some of the weaknesses of this program are that; it cannot be copied precisely from the given examples, and therefore there can be some disparities. Secondly, a scorecard can sometimes be an overwhelming framework as details contained in it are massive and tedious to go through. Another weakness is that it requires dedicated and strong leadership support for it to be successful, something that might be lacking in most organizations (Atkinson, 2006). Additionally, having established a scorecard, it may at times appear quite too rigid for the way business is managed because all the procedure that is followed daily have been defined. Lastly, another weakness of a scorecard is that it becomes difficult to keep everything on the same page as the different strategies have to be differentiated to avoid mix-up.

It cannot be denied that the adoption of this scorecard by M&R greatly helped to turnaround its financial performance in that as observed before the adoption, the corporation was ranked below its counterparts regarding profits and drained a lot of millions annually from the corporation. However, by introducing the strategies and adopting a scorecard, the fact that the corporation focused on the less price sensitive customer who would buy the global gas alongside shop in the convenient gas store outlets helped it. Also, the use of various functional measures like sales margin and volume, manufacturing cost among others profoundly helped the company to change its financial performance.

References

Atkinson, H. (2006). Strategy implementation: a role for the balanced scorecard? Management Decision, 44(10), 1441-1460.