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.
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!
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 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:
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.
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:
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.
As it is known, Balanced Scorecard concept stands not only for the perspectives and measurements but also for the fast and uninterrupted communications between staff members all over the company. One of the most important communication functions is establishing cascading within the company. The linking process between company’s users needs to be performed as fast as possible and that is why any Business Intelligence software contains a module of importing and exporting tasks between staff members.
Referring to BSC Designer, it certainly provides cascading tools but in earlier versions it had just “imported indicator” function which could only import tasks but not to export them. A description of how to set up cascading within the company using “imported indicator” function might be found in the article “Cascading process in company with BSC Designer”. Also the description of this instrument itself might be found in the article “How to manage data sources with BSC Designer”.
Practically, most of the companies have top – bottom direction of management hierarchy. According to the original Balanced Scorecard concept it is absolutely logical because the strategic level knows exactly the situation with strategy and gives objective strategic goal to the operational level. Only then the strategic goal translates into detailed tasks for specialists. It means the need of managers to have an opportunity to delegate tasks to lower hierarchy level staff.
The latest version of BSC Designer software product now allows delegation via the new tools called “Delegate category” and “Delegate as a project”. It is an easy to operate and really useful function aimed to set up top to bottom cascading directly. Now every manager might set tasks for the specialists or managers he or she stands under in hierarchy as well as CEO might set tasks and delegate responsibilities to their vice precedents.
“Delegate as a project” function with BSC Designer
Please make sure you have the latest version of the program to use “Delegate” function. This function might work correctly in BSC projects only if the *.bsc file was created by the new version of BSC Designer. It might happen that files created by older versions could not present the information of delegated categories correctly.
Current users need to download BSC Designer installer and overwrite the software. No system’s reboot is needed. After the installation is done run the program and use all new functions and features!
Not a user yet? Well join us by downloading a full function software product and use it 30 days long for free! After that the program’s license might be bought.
The new function provides new ways of setting up cascading within the company. Read the article “Improved cascading with BSC Designer PRO” to learn how to use “Delegate” function and how to set up the linking process between employees according to the hierarchy of the company.
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:
We are happy to present a new diagram in BSC Designer program called “Gauge”. It is now available in diagrams and charts dialog field. Learn more about diagrams and charts in the article “How to visualize data with BSC Designer: diagrams and charts” (First part, Second part).
Also now the current “Time” diagram is filled with basic colors showing the performance rate’s level.
Gauge diagram shows the percentage of performance value for any item in the tree (indicators, sub categories and the whole project). The hand shows current performance values at the moment comparing to “min” (the left starting point) and “max” (the right finishing point) values.
To select gauge diagram turn all diagrams on at first. In order to perform this run BSC Designer and click on “Chart Options” button right under chats dialog field. After a new dialog window appears mark every diagram type. Now click “OK” button to save changes. Now when all the diagrams had been turned on select “Gauge” tab in chats dialog field.
Gauge diagram for one of the indicators
Red, yellow and green colors mean the same as stop lights’ colors. Read more about stop lights in the article “How to visualize data with BSC Designer: signal icons“. As for colors’ borders it could be changed the same way as stop lights’ colors intervals. In order to manage color intervals click on “Tools” -> “Stop lights” and select “Options” sign. A new dialog window will appear with two lines – one for Red light and one for Green. Drag sliders in both lines until the needed interval is chosen.
Colors’ intervals management dialog field
Such tool and “Time” chart is now colorized using three basic colors. This update aims to make the graph easier to understand and monitor. Since color’s borders are set by the user it is now so easy to notice when some indicator or category does not suit company’s plan. For example the critical percentage value could be set on 50 percent. Now all the values under this border will be red colored so it will help manager to notice what exact indicators or categories for what exact dates he or she is not satisfied with. Oppositely green color might help manager to notice what specialists had made great job in some period of time and need to be awarded.
“Time” chart’s new look
HTML reports is a common type of reports in BSC Designer. Read more about HTML reports is the article “Reports with BSC Designer“. Advanced HTML reports now present not only “Time” chart but also “Gauge” diagram. This diagram’s usage in reports might help for better understanding presented information by visualizing not only time progress but also current values comparing to minimal and maximal borders. Colorized visualization might be especially useful while presenting reports to persons without special knowledge about balanced scorecard and Business Intelligence concepts like shareholders and investors.
HTML reports’ new look (the first part of it)
HTML reports’ new look (the second part of it)
Current users need to download BSC Designer installer and overwrite the software. No system’s reboot is needed. After the installation is done run the program and use all new functions and features!
Not a user yet? Well join us by downloading a full function software product and use it 30 days long for free! After that the program’s license might be bought.
This week we have released Portuguese version of BSC Designer, also, we have launched a Russian language web-site for BSC Designer and Balanced Scorecard.
BSC Designer updated so it now supports 
Portuguese language! All the menu functions are now available on Portuguese as well as on:
Czech
German
English
French
Spanish
Russian
We would be happy to offer our software product to 
Brazil market which is the world’s tenth largest economy at market exchange rates as well as
Portugal with its highly developed of the high-tech and other economy sectors.
Current users need to download BSC Designer installer and overwrite the software. No system’s reboot is needed. After the installation is done run the program and use all new functions and features!
Not a user yet? Well join us by downloading a full function software product and use it 30 days long for free! After that the program’s license might be bought.
In order to select language run BSC Designer and click on “Tools” button in the top menu. Now select “Language” sign and choose the language from the list. As an example Portuguese will be chosen as program’s language. Now Balanced Scorecard Designer became much more convenient and easy-to-operate for Portuguese-speaking users!
Tools -> Language -> Portuguese (PT)
Program’s new look: “File” menu
Program’s new look: bottom dashboard
Check latest news and blog discussions about Balanced Scorecard, Metrics, KPIs – in Balanced Scorecard News section.
We have released a BSC Designer Light – a freeware version of Balanced Scorecard Designer software.
Who will find this tool useful?
No more cracks and stolen serials for BSC Designer:
We have released BSC Designer SaaS (Software as a Service), which is a web-based balanced scorecard solution.
Another release is BSC Designer PRO – which is a professional version of BSC Designer Standard. PRO version includes strategy maps, custom performance formulas. Check comparison table for more details.
We are still glad to suggest our affiliates and partners great partnership program, details are here.
We are open for co-operation with members of Balanced Scorecard groups, drop us a message if you are interested and have any ideas.
