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Performance measurement and management: what is next?
Edited by Paolo Taticchi
1. Introduction
Nowadays companies are required to compete in globalized and turbulent markets. In order to survive in such a dynamic environment they need to be able to satisfy all their stakeholders and excel at the same time along all performance dimensions ([27] Neely et al. , 2002).
A necessary condition to achieve high performance standards is being able to effectively measure and monitor company's performance. In fact, the truthfulness of some famous sayings like "What gets measure gets attention" or "What you measure is what you get" is widely recognized both among academics and practitioners ([11] Eccles, 1991; [20] Kaplan and Norton, 1992). Therefore performance measurement systems (PMSs) are considered as a means to gain competitive advantages and continuously react and adapt to external changes. According to [27] Neely et al. (2002), "A Performance Measurement System is the set of metrics used to quantify the efficiency and effectiveness of past actions" and "it enables informed decisions to be made and actions to be taken because it quantifies the efficiency and effectiveness of past actions through the acquisition, collation, sorting, analysis and interpretation of appropriate data". Furthermore they highlight that a PMS can be examined at three different levels: the individual measures of performance; the performance measurement system as a whole; the relationship between the PMS and the environment within which it operates.
To be effective a PMS should be dynamic and has to be modified as circumstances change so that performance measures remain relevant ([22] Lynch and Cross, 1991). However few organizations appear to have systematic processes in place for assessing and maintaining their PMS ([21] Kennerley and Neely, 2002).
The ability of keeping the PMS continuously updated is a challenge for every firm, but particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which need to be extremely flexible and reactive to market changes while being characterized by lack of resources and managerial expertise ([15] Garengo et al. , 2007; [19] Hudson et al. , 2001). However, most of the literature on performance measurement treats the subject regardless of the size of the business ([2] Carpinetti et al. , 2008) and even if many performance measurement approaches have been proposed, few are the...