Success Stories
Metrics Development
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A marketing services company had ambitious plans for their business, but no good way to measure success aside from financial measures. Their plans required significant changes in their processes, skills, technology and customers and they needed to excel in these areas in order to realize their overall business goals.
Our HSC team worked with them to develop a Balanced Scorecard for their business, including 4 different sets of metrics and how the metrics related to each other as well as to the company’s overall plan. We also recommended how each metric would be defined and how often it would be measured. The new Balanced Scorecard rollout was included in the overall implementation plan.
As a result of our work, the client was able to demonstrate progress towards their objectives as each initiative contributed to both their short and long term successes.
Return to top of page.Consumer Products
A division of a large consumer products company had vast amounts of data but no information, and multiple versions of the "truth". If the company’s president asked his direct reports how their business was doing, he received different answers from different vice presidents, such as:
- “My market share is up”
- “I have achieved my forecasted net sales”
- “We have exceeded our list less allowance sales target”
Each answer seemed to provide positive information, but negative information was not mentioned. The company had a great deal of data, but the data was not kept in one place, so it was difficult for anyone to find what they were looking for. When asked how his overall business was doing, the president could not adequately answer the question.
A consultant and business executive, now an HSC partner, was asked to help resolve the issue. The partner called together the executive team and gave them a quiz on the data to demonstrate the need for a common set of data and data definitions. The partner then worked with each of the executives to determine their information priorities and gained their consensus on a common set of metrics, definitions and reports. The metrics were organized into a balanced scorecard.
Next, the partner defined a business intelligence architecture to show how the data would be sourced, stored and accessed via a common interface, along with a set of dashboards for the metrics. The partner developed a rollout plan and a business case. The partner also helped them set up a centralized business intelligence team. The partner set up a proof of concept demonstration with a sample set of data and implement the system and helped the executive team work through the cultural issues that the new data reporting created.
As a result:
- The company implemented the business intelligence architecture, including a new business intelligence tool
- Once they realized its capabilities, people at all levels in the company embraced the business intelligence tool as a means to access and analyze metrics
- Though some of the executives at first responded with concern at the light in which they were shown by the new metrics, the implementation team was able to work through their concerns. Eventually, the new metrics, reports and dashboards were adopted as the normal way of doing business
- The president, along with the rest of the company, was able to get “one view of the truth”
- The division’s success with this new metrics implementation sparked a global initiative to provide the same type of common metrics and reporting across the entire company
- The business intelligence architecture provided the added benefit of allowing the business intelligence team to quickly respond to reporting requests, enhancing productivity and improving operations (e.g., one complex report request was turned faround in less than 24 hours, saving a team of operations analysts 20 hours each a week and providing rapid reporting to improve order fulfillment)