A Scorecard is an effective tool to transform strategy into action. It is a result-measuring system, designed to communicate the business strategy to all levels of the organization and to lead the company to the achievement of objectives. To do so, goals must be reached.
Goals are the essence of the business and are used to control processes. It is based on these goals that financial and non-financial indicators will be elaborated, to measure the results of the organization's management.
From these values, more accurate decisions can be made according to the obtained deviations.
Scorecards provide visual information on the performance of the organization through the monitoring of indicators.
These indicators are used to determine trends and projections.
For each one of the indicators, the desired goals are set.
When these are achieved, they are shown in green. If they are displayed in yellow, it means they are still within the admissible deviation range, and in red when non-admissible values are present. Indicators can be viewed both as traffic lights and speedometers.
The Scorecard displays indicators hierarchically organized in groups, subgroups and strategic objectives. This structure is shown in the panel on the left, where the user can drill each hierarchy observing the results obtained by the indicators.
Groups and subgroups are collapsed and expanded choosing the symbol associated to each of them. Besides, links are offered to facilitate the expansion or collapsing of all the hierarchy of indicators. These links are situated on the top-left-hand corner of the page and are known as "Expand all" and "Collapse all".
When selecting a group, the pane on the right displays several tabs that show information on the state of the indicators.
The first tab contains the summary of all the subgroups or group indicators, and the remaining tabs correspond to each one of the indicators or subgroups of the group and show detailed information on each of them.
When selecting an indicator, the pane on the right shows a unique tab containing the detail of the data on which the indicator has been defined. That is, for each element of the indicator, the obtained value together with the goal and tolerance.
Below the left pane, there is a link to open the strategy map. In this map, you can appreciate the state of affairs as to objectives within each perspective. In this way, a global vision of the state of all the strategic objectives defined is integrated.
The elements of the map, (strategic objectives and indicators) are colored in the same way as the indicators to reflect the reached state according to their last measurements. If an element of the map is selected, the scorecard focuses on the group or associated indicator, becoming a scorecard drill mode from a higher level of abstraction.
This enables you to go over the results of the company, improve operations, analyze underlying trends at the time of planning and implementing corrective actions, and compare company performance with its major competitors and best market practice.