Archive

Archive for the ‘News’ Category

Start designing KPI today with free KPI template

Today is the right day to start designing your new KPI, because now you can do it easier with KPI template product that we have prepared for you.

It includes some basic explanations about what properties each KPI has, what values should be there and how to use them. Download and try this free product right now!

Share

News

How to get BSC Designer for free

We have launched a new project www.WinningKPI.com

Join this community to ask professionals to review your KPI and help others to make their KPIs even better.

When you share your expertise and post something you will get credits, that you will be able to use in the shop  to buy Balanced Scorecard products, including BSC Designer.

Become a member of WinningKPI community now!

Share

News

Ask your KPI question and help others design better KPI

We have launched a new project www.WinningKPI.com. Join this community to ask professionals to review your KPI and help others to make their KPIs even better.

When you share your expertise and post something you will get credits, that you will be able to use in the shop to buy Balanced Scorecard products, including eTrainings.

Become a member of WinningKPI community now: Register with WinningKPI.com.

Share

News

Balanced Scorecard in Project Management

We have just run the new project Balanced Scorecard in Project Management – on the official web-page of this project you will find Key Performance Indicators that will help to measure and control project management performance.

Learn more at http://www.bscinpm.com/

Share

News

Chinese localization of BSC Designer was released

We are happy to let our customers from China know that the full Chinese version of BSC Designer was released. It is possible to check online:

The user interface of the BSC Designer was translated into Chinese as well. Choose Chinese when you start the installation process or choose this language manually in View > Language menu.

Share

News

Balanced Scorecard for hotel professionals

We have started a new resource that will help hotel professionals to estimate, measure and control the performance of hotel business. The BSC Toolkit for Hotel already includes 18 scorecards and 298 Key Performance Indicators that will help hoteliers to improve hotel performance.

Share

News

German version of BSC Designer

As you know BSC Designer is available in several languages, we are running now a local German market web-site for BSC Desinger. This web-sites aims to help German-speaking users to understand software better as we for us to improve our positions in German market.

Share

News, Official

Case study on strategy improvement and strategic control in finance

BSC Designer helped CAJA RURAL DE SALAMANCA to improve the strategic and control efficiency

It has been a year since CAJA RURAL had started implementation of the Balanced Scorecard system using BSC Designer tool. Easy to understand but powerful software product became a perfect solution to organize the implementation process softly. Let’s check out the experience,  AGUSTIN GARCÍA, the director of planning and control shared with us!

Introduction

CAJA RURAL DE SALAMANCA is a big financial institution located in Spain. It provides a wide range of financial services including loans, credit card operations, savings, checking and many others. The company showed economic growth in the recent years. Dealing with such great number of activities inside the company and increasing number of customers, the top management decided to implement the system of Balanced Scorecard. After research was conducted, BSC was considered a perfect tool that could help not only to create a well organized structure of activities but also to understand the company’s goals and perspectives and to make a realistic expectations and forecasts of the future performance growth.

The Challenge

The process of localizing changes, mangers expected from Balanced Scorecard system to perform, already helped the heads of the company to better understand the entity of their business and its purposes. The four years plan of implementation consisted of lots of goals to be achieved, including:

  • Development of the strategic department;
  • Building a chart of activities to get the map of company’s perspectives (Strategy map);
  • Reviewing the strategic and planning activity, finding leading and lagging indicators;
  • Establishment of the linking process between strategic and operational activities;
  • Monitoring of the operational activity to be directed on strategic goals;
  • Improvement of company’s performance (as the most important one);
  • And others.

As a department, responsible for strategy, planning and control department started to provide the implementation of Balanced Scorecard as well as choosing the tool, that could present a useful dashboard, saving time and resources. After viewing several dashboard programs, BSC Designer was chosen as a tool providing every function, was needed. Also BSC Designer appeared to be easy to use (that saved a lot of time of teaching personnel how to use the software).

After the dashboard had been chosen, the department of planning and control started implementation, centralizing the utilization of the program. The evaluated areas were commercial and marketing, Human resources, General Intervention, Investments, Organization and Data processing. The calendar has been adapted to the period of performance of each department’s actions. The time horizon is four years, but the actions of the department are in a year.

BSC Designer solution

The director of planning and control became the one, responsible for providing the information to the program BSC Designer in coordination with a group of work that designs and realizes the follow-up of the Strategic Plan. The output information was used by the Headquarter and departments heads.

The technical support was realized in the department of planning and control: their function was to solve any appeared problem along with email and telephone support service of BSC Designer. For example, one of the problems was the need of reports in Spanish; it was successfully solved in several days.

Year ago, when the implementation process started, it was decided to use BSC Designer offline: the goals were evaluated periodically and revised by the working group. But the management thinks over the possibility to set up online functioning of the program, creating a network of dashboards which could improve cascading model of management and reduce the reduce and time waste on providing up to date information.

As for activities and departments monitoring, the group responsible for BSC, proceeded to an analysis of internal processes in collaboration with department heads, bearing in mind the needs of the client and also had begun to receive, collect and analyze the information for Customer, Innovation and Learning and Financial Perspectives.

CAJA RURAL’s specialists used not only project’s tree model of BSC Designer but also some other functions the tool can provide. The mostly used functions were:

  • Imported indicators: the function was used to consolidate information imported from the Entity;
  • Strategy Map: company’s specialists carried out a strategic map with causality entering each of the strategic objectives;
  • Reports: the team used reports (both HTML and MS Excel based) for monitoring the Strategic Plan and to report the results of their work to the upper hierarchy level (Headquarter). The most commonly used reports are were the HTML Report and the Dashboard Report;
  • Custom formulas: specialists use custom formulas occasionally (several indicators needed some special formulas to be calculated).

Result

After a year since the starting date of BSC system’s implementation process, provided by BSC Designer as a dashboard, the company had successfully develop its strategic activity – the important management subsystem, letting the company the direction where to move.

The department of planning and control, the team responsible for system’s implementation had reviewed the strategy, determining the strategic goals and their weights. Inputting this information to BSC Designer’s project step by step, the team had created a clear and exact strategy map. BSC had managed to transfer specific goals agreed with the vision of the Financial Institution. After that, the strategic goals begun to be translated into operational tasks with help of departments heads. The process of this translation is not finished by now but the management has excellent expectations about it.

By now, the level of current implementation is for department of planning and control. All other departments are only starting to work under the system’s coverage. But BSC already gave some benefits to the company. For example, it allowed standardize the Strategic Plan of the Entity for four years. Also, together with the Strategic Plan and BSC, Caja Rural has made a strategic map that supports the actions proposed by each department. This is going to provide and evaluate the objectives of the Plan.

For a big company, it needs time to implement any system or application; even new calculator could be implemented for months. Balanced Scorecard is not something easy to implement, it needs a huge amount of work to link build BSC map and to link it with every subsystem of management. In other words, the entire management system should be overviewed according to the company’s strategy. BSC Designer is aimed to help the brave managers, who decided to implement this system, providing them with useful tools to prevent time and resources waste and make their job easier. After the implementation is over, the program can provide its maintenance, calculating performance values, organizing linking to the parts of database and atomizing the process of BSC functioning in many other ways.

Share

Case Studies, News

Delegate categories with BSC Designer

As company faces new business challenges the Balanced Scorecard of the top-management grows. The number of indicators and categories will increase significantly soon.

To prevent overloading of the scorecard and in order to involve line-level employees some parts of Balanced Scorecard should be delegated to the lower level business unit or employee.

Delegating scorecard step-by-step

Open Balanced Scorecard Project

Step 1. Open Balanced Scorecard Project

Right click on any category. You will have two options - "Delegate as a project" and "Delegate with indicators"

Step 2. Right click on any category. You will have two options - "Delegate as a project" and "Delegate with indicators"

  • Delegate as a project” option. All indicators from your category will be removed. The new project will be created, where the category will be delegated.
  • Delegate with indicators” options. Selected category and indicator will be delegated. The new project will be created.
Select the location where delegated project should be saved.

Step 3. Select the location where delegated project should be saved. Click "Save" button to delegate.

  • You can select local folder or location in the local network.
  • You can upload the project on your FTP sever automatically. FTP sever is better option if your employees will need to access the data from different locations. Learn more about working with projects located on FTP.
Right click on the category that was delegated. Select "Open source document" command. This command will open the project that was created as a result of delegation.

Step 4. Right click on the category that was delegated. Select "Open source document" command. This command will open the project that was created as a result of delegation.

You can also right click on the category that was delegated and select “Edit imported properties” command to access all the settings of delegated category.

Once the category was delegated, you cannot change its values. If you need to change the values, you or your employee should open the delegated project. Once values are updated in the delegated project they will be updated in the parent project too.

Share

Features, News, Screenshots

Special offer for BSC Designer in 2009

 Only in 2009 purchase BSC Designer Standard or Professional and get BSC Designer Toolkit (normal price $210) as gift!

Special action valid only for these who will place order for BSC Designer Standard or Profession versions in year 2009.

Please, note: this special is limited only to year 2009.

In short what is BSC Designer Toolkit:

  • In is the set of several presentations, documents, checklists, todo-lists that covers all possible aspects of Balanced Scorecard design and implementation process! Check more here.
Share

News, Official