In today's environment of competitiveness and demands for business excellence, managers face the great challenge of keeping the company's strategic information up-to-date and easily accessible, to ensure assertiveness and speed in decision-making.
Software BSC – Balanced Scorecard
For this, a management methodology becomes necessary to assist managers in their task. In this context, the Balanced Scorecard It is a very popular tool, created by Harvard Business School professors Robert Kaplan and David Norton in 1992. Since its creation, this management methodology has been widely used in corporations worldwide, based on a business evaluation model that develops strategic management as a whole within the organization. The BSC covers the company's vision, from which critical success factors, performance indicators, and the definition of goals and measurement of results in the organization's main areas are created, providing the manager with a broad view of their business and enabling the company to define which paths to take to implement the strategy.
According to Guilherme Barbassa, director of Stratec, one of the main differentiators of the BSC methodology for a company's strategic management is the fact that the Balanced Scorecard structures the company's strategic objectives in a cause-and-effect relationship and within the business perspectives. “These perspectives are typically: financial, customer and market, internal processes, and learning and growth,” Barbassa comments.
According to Kaplan and Norton (1997, p. 25), the Balanced Scorecard translates the balance between short-term and long-term objectives, between financial and non-financial measures, between trend and occurrence indicators, and also between internal and external performance perspectives.
Managing so much information requires organization and practicality. Having an automated system that provides accurate, compiled data in the form of charts or spreadsheets to facilitate analysis is a differentiator for those seeking business success.
The use of software that systematizes the implementation of the BSC makes it easier to link and analyze the cause and effect relationship between strategic objectives. “Using Stratec's Strategic Management software, the manager can navigate along this line of cause and effect relationships between objectives and indicators, enabling a more precise analysis of the information,” says Barbassa.According to Stratec's director, the BSC, as well as being a strategic management methodology, has practices that lead to the aid and communication of the strategy within the organization. The automation of this methodology, therefore, has to fulfil this purpose - that of facilitating the communication of the strategy throughout the organization. “When you work with software that makes managers more involved in strategic management, and provides strategic maps that make it easier to analyze and communicate data, you can say that the main tool of the BSC methodology is being used, in other words, the communication of the strategy's execution is being carried out. In addition, this execution is also monitored using the software, involving everyone in the organization around the company's strategy,” Barbassa concludes.
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Sources:
NORTON, David and KAPLAN, Robert. The Balanced Scorecard – Translating Strategy into Action; 1997, 344 p.
