Balanced Scorecard Designer

What KPI to include in the map?

While defining and selecting KPIs to be included into management level KPIs map, the special corporate concept is forming, aimed to create and form set of criteria for indicators to be satisfied with the needs of the company. The list of them could be mostly like the following (starting with the highest weight value and finishing with the lowest one):

• The KPI present the key aspect of the company’s business activity (key business process);
• The KPI’s value is an important condition, influencing managerial decisions;
• The KPI could be managed directly, i.e. responsible managers might influence on the performance of activity, measured by the indicator;
• The KPI has a potentially stable cause – effect relationships with other indicators;
• It is easy to collect and calculate data referring to the KPI. It also easy to report KPI’s value to the higher level;
• The KPI is based on economical (statistical) meaning at consolidation (aggregation) on higher levels of responsibility.

Deciding whether to include the particular KPI to the responsible manager’s dashboard or not, it needs to use the clearest and most common (referring to the business sector, or to the company, or to the department) term, conditions and criteria.

Perspectives distribution of both leading and lagging indicators could be performed the following way: leading KPIs are going to the perspectives, related to human resources, company’s development, internal technological and business processes, PR and marketing (Customer, Internal Process and Innovation and Learning Perspectives, according to the original BSC concept); while lagging indicators are going to the perspectives, related to the financial and accounting activities (Financial Perspective, according to the original BSC concept).

It needs to be noticed that KPI based Management offers to use not only financial indicators, but also other, non material ones to measure the whole company’s performance. It is not enough to use the only financial KPIs not only for top managers to gain an objective dashboard, but also for translating the strategy of the company and its priorities to employees and group managers. Nevertheless for-profit organizations need financial indicators as an important measure, good performance of which could result for company to succeed. But the map of KPIs needs to balance the weights of perspectives the way to pay a bit more attention to leading indicators, because the activity they present might be managed directly and fast. Leading KPIs provide top managers with an opportunity to react rather fast to the problems appearing, preventing their growth into local crisis. Also leading indicators help managers to better understand the key processes and ensure managerial decisions to cause a long term effect. As for lagging indicators (most of which are related to the financial activities), they oppositely provide a short term view and managerial decisions based on their information are not able to cause a long positive effect. But not absolutely all the KPIs in Financial Perspective are lagging ones. “The index of budgeting management quality” as a KPI, related to Financial perspective could be a good example, presenting leading indicator of financial activity.

As it is known, the system of budgeting management is mostly focused on financial indicators, the meaning of which are linked directly to measures of operational plans and budgets. That is why it needs the system of KPI management to be focused on non material indicators, which measure the customers’ satisfaction, internal process effectiveness, the potential of staff, innovation ideas and other activities, oppositely to budgeting system. KPI management concept in this case is based on the idea to improve non financial activities in order to increase financial ones; in other words, it is aimed to gain profit (certainly, not always right away, but absolutely always in long term perspective). But however the range of KPIs to be focused on is not limited by the only indicators, which are linked directly to the budgeting measures: there are also KPIs, the linking between which is sometimes hard to determine and formalize, could be used in a map. However those links are hard to determine and formalize, it could be used to put forward a strategic hypothesis (for example, such cause and effect point as “The market capitalization increase depends on satisfaction of consumers”). It increases the number of KPIs and motivates managers to look for initiative solutions to realize and support those links between indicators and the activities, they are associated with.

The map of the article

• Part 1: This part introduces the basic statements of KPI based management. Also it defines the term KPI;
• Part 2: BSC management system’s methodology;
• Part 3: Leading and Lagging indicators concept as an inherent part of KPI based management;
• Part 4: This part presents the basic criteria of what KPI to include in the map;
• Part 5: Cause and effect relations between KPIs;
• Part 6: The beginning of Cascading description: classification of indicators for management according to their importance
• Part 7: Conclusion of Cascading description: Indicative and Imperative KPIs

Expert_KPI Uncategorized balanced scorecard, BSC, key performance indicator, kpi, strategy, studies, theory

Leading and Lagging indicators concept as an inherent part of KPI based management

It certainly is not enough just to create and use the set of indicators measuring such activities as financial results (effectiveness) and cash flow to manage the company in balanced way. Such indicators show only one part of operational activity, which appeared as a result of fulfillment of current plans and budgets.

It is usual for practice of companies that most of financial indicators of efficiency actually are derivative of the approved financial budgets, i.e. forming the structure of distribution of the resources, but not of processes. But for purposes of management it needs to fund KPIs, which could be influenced directly by managers. It is knows, that the only way for manager to influence on indicator is to know exactly all the chain of delegation (all the part of cascading) referring to this indicator, translating to the set of more and more detailed and specified tasks. For example, the return on assets as the major indicator (which is derivative of the budget of incomes and costs indicators and the balance of forecast) is usually controlled by the financial executive officer. Certainly, it needs to control all the chain of parent indicators to receive a precise value of this KPI. In this case the chain consists of: Profitability of earnings and asset turnover, which, in turn, depends on productivity of resources, success of realization of investments into development of the company and a stable market share.

Lagging indicators are mostly historical metrics; they are aimed to measure the performance of company’s past activities. For example, most of financial KPIs are actually lagging indicators. Managers are not able to receive up to date information from lagging indicators (reports might be received once quarter or even a year). That is why they are not able to monitor these processes directly. Lagging indicators present the performance of the overall system’s work and there are lots of factors that influence on them. These metrics show the results and effects of management actions that already have been applied.

Leading KPIs are the metrics that refer to the current and future effects. Oppositely to lagging indicators, leading ones are linked with manager’s decisions directly. After a decision is taken, it could be resulted in changing the performance of activity, that leading indicator show. Lagging indicators are needed to be used as a tool to manage the company’s future (which is actually one of the most important goals of the Balanced Scorecard concept).

It needs to be known that leading and lagging KPIs terms might be used by both strategic and operational management. As for strategic management, it uses those KPIs as elements of the strategic map. As for operational management, the current planning might use leading indicators of efficiency as a part of an operational cycle frameworks. Since the duration of operational cycles is usually from a week to a month, it is necessary to make special demands to periodicity of reports on leading KPI’s, because those indicators allow to measure the performance of process and actually refer to up to date problems of subsystems.

The map of the article

• Part 1: This part introduces the basic statements of KPI based management. Also it defines the term KPI;
• Part 2: BSC management system’s methodology;
• Part 3: Leading and Lagging indicators concept as an inherent part of KPI based management;
• Part 4: This part presents the basic criteria of what KPI to include in the map;
• Part 5: Cause and effect relations between KPIs;
• Part 6: The beginning of Cascading description: classification of indicators for management according to their importance
• Part 7: Conclusion of Cascading description: Indicative and Imperative KPIs

Expert_KPI Uncategorized balanced scorecard, BSC, key performance indicator, kpi, strategy, studies, theory