About The Balanced Scoreboard
A Tool for Translating Vision to Action - The Balanced Scorecard is a proven approach to strategic management that imbeds a long-term strategy into the management system through a measurement mechanism. The Balanced Scorecard translates vision and strategy into a tool that effectively communicates strategic intent and motivates and tracks performance against the established goals.
 
A vision describes the ultimate goal as “to be the best”. A strategy is a shared understanding about how that goal is to be achieved. The Balanced Scorecard provides a medium to translate the vision into a clear set of objectives. These objectives are then further translated into a system of performance measurements that effectively communicate a powerful, forward-looking, strategic focus to the entire organization.
 
In contrast to traditional, financially based measurement systems, the Balanced Scorecard solidifies an organization's focus on future success by setting objectives and measuring performance from four distinct perspectives.
 
The Learning & Growth perspective directs attention to the basis of all future success - the organization's people and infrastructure. Adequate investment in these areas is critical to all long term success. The development of a true learning organization supports success in the next Balanced Scorecard perspective, the Internal perspective.

The Internal perspective focuses attention on the performance of the key internal processes which drive the business. Improvement in internal processes now is a key lead indicator of financial success in the future. However, in order to translate superior processes into financial success, companies must first please their customers.

The Customer perspective considers the business through the eyes of a customer, so that the organization retains a careful focus on customer needs and satisfaction.

Finally, the Financial perspective measures the ultimate results that the business provides to its shareholders. Together, these four perspectives provide a balanced view of the present and future performance of the business.

Management Cockpit® is a visualization platform for performance indicator presentation in a structured manner. The objective is to give the management team an intuitive approach to streamline communication and accelerate the decision-making process. Mission-critical performance indicators are projected to the walls in the Management Cockpit® room to facilitate management-level communication and discussions. Business organizations can benefit from this innovative approach, whereby communication gaps between the key decision makers can be eliminated and the flow of information is piped effectively and ergonomically right from the data source to the recipients. Management Cockpit® is part of SAP's Strategic Enterprise Management (SEM) solutions based on its 'business information warehouse'. The cockpit is actually a room in which a manager can sit and access strategic information. He can use that information directly to take decisions that will help his organisation to cope with competition. The room consists of four walls that go by the names black, red, blue and white. These walls depict performance parameters, known as mission critical factors, in the form of graphics, which are displayed on wall-mounted screens; six on each wall.

• the black wall shows the principal success factors and financial indicators
• the red wall shows market performance
• the blue wall shows the performance of internal processes and employees
• the white wall shows the status of strategic projects.

A high-end PC, designated the 'flight deck', allows drilling down for detailed information. The combination of the walls and the PC helps bring out essential information that the top level management requires, in terms of corporate structure, the interrelation of various factors, the identification of issues, indicators and areas. the monitoring of all these is achieved with a visually based means of communication. The system integrates external data and non-SAP transactional data to give an overall picture of the company. Together they allow competitive analysis, based on existing market conditions
 
Management Cockpit is a Trade Mark of SAP AG
 
Enterprise Information Architecture

Ö&A provides Best Practice Advice for the transformation towards Enterprise Information Architecture (EIA) and implementation. This transformation is seen as a hybrid expansion in systems and business processes:

1. The complimenting of the existing IT infrastructure
2. The process of implementing consistency and clarity of all data definitions at the transactional and accounting level, in every entity of the company / corporation.
 
Although companies and corporations usually have an overall framework of policies and guidelines on definitions, it is often the case that different constituents are using different definitions and measures within their records. This means that the information generated is often not comparable. Generally, these businesses have recognised the need for comparable information, on which they can judge the future operational performance and their ability to monitor performance at a strategic level. This is an important thrust of EIA, which paves the way to new accounting and reporting principles. As an additional spin-off, Value Based Management (VBM) will be achievable due to an infrastructure that caters for the past as well as for the future.
 
On this foundation, EIA Systems can be built by embracing the entire organisation (e.g. Subsidiaries, Consolidation Unit, Divisions, Business Groups etc.)
 
EIA reduces the need for information reconciliation and enables information to be extracted more easily and consistently from the ledgers into the future applying VBM principles. Changes in company structures can be accommodated and acquired business can be readily amalgamated into existing business structures.
 
However, managing for value requires information that is not readily available to executives and managers. Enterprises must have an information system that is capable of identifying, filtering, and analysing information to make it relevant to their decision-making needs. The principle is based on the following four questions and possible measures:
 
1. How financially successful do we need to be? Measure: ROCE, ROI, Cash Flow

2. How do we retain customer loyalty? Measure: Delivery time, relationship

3. What have we got to be good at? Measure: Internal cost control, productivity, yield/utilisation of resources

4. How can we continuously improve in everything we do? Measure: Speed of new products development, learning time, technological advantage

EIA caters for the following improvements:
• Standardisation of corporate reporting across the whole enterprise
• Integration of external and internal accounting and reporting
• Implementation of value orientated enterprise management
• To make non-financial factors and risk exposures transparent and show the influence on the performance
• Accelerating planning and forecasting processes
• Improving communications between managers
• Business Consolidation and Sourcing, including a Web-based Editorial Workbench for gathering external information.
• Corporate Performance Monitor and key performance indicator (KPIs)
• Stakeholder Relationship Management with mechanism for communicating more effectively with stakeholders such as employees, investors, analysts, customers and suppliers