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Pilot Balanced ScoreCard helps execs set and monitor goals, but not on enough client platforms yet
PRODUCT SPEC SHEET
Pilot Balanced ScoreCard 6.2
No mean in Pilot Balanced ScoreCard
One Canal Park
Cambridge, MA 02141
617-274-9400
www.pilotsw.com
Pricing: Starts at $37,500
Minimum Requirements: Client- 32MB RAM, 60MB disk, Pentium processor; Server - (for suite) Windows NT, 256MB RAM, 30MB disk, Pentium processor.
It goes without saying that a business's success largely depends on those who run it knowing where they are going, where they have been, and what they are trying to achieve. Getting that good a grasp on the business has always been problematic, however, because it's difficult to get the right perspective quickly enough.
Information presented in a timely manner, it seems, is usually unintelligible. But information presented in a useful form is usually too old. It is a constant struggle, and one that companies specializing in decision-support software strive to alleviate. One such company is Pilot Software Inc. Its newest product, Pilot Balanced ScoreCard, is designed to provide managers with the quickly intelligible measures they need, through the balanced scorecard techniques of performance measurement that Robert S. Kaplan and David P Norton advocate in The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action (Harvard Business School Press, 1996).
Essentially, the balanced scorecard methodology revolves around holistically monitoring multiple performance measures in an organization, instead of looking at perhaps just the traditional financial measurements. In much the same way that a balanced diet is made up of multiple food groups consumed in proportion with each other, so an organization must have a balanced view of the activities and influences affecting it. So, in addition to purely financial measures such as balance sheets and product shipments, you would examine measures such as employee retention, employee training, customer satisfaction, and product return rates.
All of these measures, although perhaps in differing areas, are related. If employee retention drops, then training costs will most likely increase and quality will suffer. Product returns will, in turn, rise and customer satisfaction will fall. As a result, product shipments and balance sheets will finally reflect trouble.
Perhaps if training were increased earlier, it might boost employee retention, thereby increasing quality and customer satisfaction and so...