Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

The supply chain KPI – Compact vigilance

Sunday, August 30th, 2009

The organizations throughout the world are trying to get involved with cutting edge to improve their organizational competitiveness. With our economies being virtually connected they have become dynamic in nature. The main targets of the corporate entities are to enhance their level of responsiveness with the objective of being flexible and agile to the changing marketing requirements. This can be achieved by opting for support systems that is connected with integrated suppliers, partnering firms and supply chain. Supply chain management is an approach that has evolved out of the integration of these reflections.

With its predetermined  Key Performance Indicators like; Defects Per Million Opportunities, Inventory Months of Supply, Claims percentage for freight costs, On-time pickups, Transit time, On Time Line Count, Customer Order Promised Cycle Time, providing a flexible way to improve supply chain unit performance through Balanced Scorecards, provides a step by step guide to evaluate the processes at every level. Supply chain management via Balanced Scorecards is an innovative approach to structuring integrated strategies of entities. It encompasses processes right from the time of initial planning and monitors physical infrastructure, tracking policy and ensures communication between various product stations.

How Balanced Scorecard works is really simple. According to the factors of supply chain certain categories have been specified in the software. Each of these categories further is divided into groups of indicators or metrics defining various tasks and activities according to the solution focused approaches involved at different levels. These indicators are expressed as ranges and rated with scores according to the performances assembling data which is easy to compare and detect the shortfall of inefficiencies. The condition of assigning numerical ranges as weights is compulsory as is the uniqueness of each indicator. However, personalized indicators can also be created which need to be categorized by the user according to their nature. Once the indicators are rated, they are compared against the set standards and visualized through strategic maps. The use of stop light is also worth mentioning here. These are tri-colored indicators which signpost a red, yellow or green triangle and appear next to the indicators that require attention. However, they can be adjusted according to specific performances and turned off as well. These spot lights can also be used in the reports for the purpose of data communication. This allows data to become easy to be tracked and comparable against its defined measures.

Balanced Scorecards is one software that offers to categorize various key business processes along its flow. That means in will entail all the processes right from suppliers to manufacturing to end users and collects the useful information collected alongside to add value customers and the other stakeholders.

Identifying Workplace Productivity Drivers with Balanced Scorecard

Thursday, August 27th, 2009

Workplaces and their workers are two key assets in ensuring the best strategic fits for corporations and their successful present and future. With the corporate entities shaping our lives and lifestyles it is actually the people behind these entities who both individually and collectively affect our environments  with their ideas, novelties, personal capabilities, capital and beliefs. How productive an organization is depends on how successful it is in uniting workers, skill-pool, resources, technology, capital and other related factors.

Many of the organizations today are inclined towards investing heavily in employee productivity-enhancing activities that will eventually lead to increased returns. The efficiency on any firm is the key indicator of on-going innovation and improvement in all outlooks of the organizational management and operations and play an important role in boosting productivity.

For this reason organizations who envision themselves as the capacity building firms of today, are investing in information based real time supporting system like Balanced Scorecard that helps structure their strategies and eases implementing them. The methodology of this software is very logical and user friendly. The first step towards commencing any task like that of identifying productivity drivers is collecting realistic, attainable productivity indicators as the metrics which have numerical values assigned to them, either as scores or ranges etc. Also these metrics or indicators are unique and cannot be repeated.

Based on organizational vision each department can form its own set of goals and assign task to their workers based on them, so that the internal affairs can be handled effectively and make evaluation easy and precise. This software is compact and brings to focus KPI (Key Point Indicators) for any given situation like identifying productive drivers which include; Finance Saved, Time Saved, Target costs, Target time, Goals efficiency, Problems solving efficiency, Projects Success Rate, Total Performance in group and many more which are categorized aptly.

Weights can be assigned to these indicators and drivers which range from 0 and 10 with 10 being the most important or closest to the goals. However, the values of actual performances keep changing according to efficiencies and can later be compared to the assigned weights to find how close actual performance was to the set standards.

This allows firms to analyze its productivity levels from different angles. Limiting the values of the productivity drivers or indicators curbs them from moving out of range thus making tracking and composing results easier. This software enables to bring out objective, accurate and precise results that can be shared as attractive strategy maps with the management. It also keeps employees motivated and witness transparency of actions in organization’s implementation procedures.

Identifying the productivity drivers should be a collaborative effort of the management and the workers and be recorded and organized properly using the Scorecard for further improvisation or future references. Building focused effort and approaches stimulates raising workplace productivity and identifying its drivers signifies greater gains for everyone.

Workplaces and their workers are two key assets in ensuring the best strategic fits for corporations and their successful present and future. With the corporate entities shaping our lives and lifestyles it is actually the people behind these entities who both individually and collectively affect our environments  with their ideas, novelties, personal capabilities, capital and beliefs. How productive an organization is depends on how successful it is in uniting workers, skill-pool, resources, technology, capital and other related factors.

Many of the organizations today are inclined towards investing heavily in employee productivity-enhancing activities that will eventually lead to increased returns. The efficiency on any firm is the key indicator of on-going innovation and improvement in all outlooks of the organizational management and operations and play an important role in boosting productivity.

For this reason organizations who envision themselves as the capacity building firms of today, are investing in information based real time supporting system like Balanced Scorecard that helps structure their strategies and eases implementing them. The methodology of this software is very logical and user friendly. The first step towards commencing any task like that of identifying productivity drivers is collecting realistic, attainable productivity indicators as the metrics which have numerical values assigned to them, either as scores or ranges etc. Also these metrics or indicators are unique and cannot be repeated.

Based on organizational vision each department can form its own set of goals and assign task to their workers based on them, so that the internal affairs can be handled effectively and make evaluation easy and precise. This software is compact and brings to focus KPI (Key Point Indicators) for any given situation like identifying productive drivers which include; Finance Saved, Time Saved, Target costs, Target time, Goals efficiency, Problems solving efficiency, Projects Success Rate, Total Performance in group and many more which are categorized aptly.

Weights can be assigned to these indicators and drivers which range from 0 and 10 with 10 being the most important or closest to the goals. However, the values of actual performances keep changing according to efficiencies and can later be compared to the assigned weights to find how close actual performance was to the set standards.

This allows firms to analyze its productivity levels from different angles. Limiting the values of the productivity drivers or indicators curbs them from moving out of range thus making tracking and composing results easier. This software enables to bring out objective, accurate and precise results that can be shared as attractive strategy maps with the management. It also keeps employees motivated and witness transparency of actions in organization’s implementation procedures.

Identifying the productivity drivers should be a collaborative effort of the management and the workers and be recorded and organized properly using the Scorecard for further improvisation or future references. Building focused effort and approaches stimulates raising workplace productivity and identifying its drivers signifies greater gains for everyone.