My previous two posts focused on developing objectives for the financial and customer perspectives. Once an organization has a lucid depiction of these financial and customer objectives, the next step is developing objectives for the internal processes and learning and growth perspectives.
In this post, I will dwell on the objectives in the internal perspective.
Value is created through internal business processes. In other words, internal processes create and deliver the value proposition for customers.
Thus, objectives in your strategy map’s internal process perspective must describe how you intend to accomplish your organization’s strategy.
There are so many processes operating in an organization at the same time, each creating value in some way.
It is therefore important to focus on those processes that allow you to deliver on your strategy and differentiate your organization from its rivals.
The challenge for most organizations is selecting those critical few processes that exceptionally drive value for their customers and enable them to achieve the desired financial results.
Robert Kaplan and David Norton, the originators of the Balanced Scorecard, have identified and grouped internal business processes into four categories.
These categories are common to almost any business undertaking and can assist you to identify and focus on those critical few processes that result in the differentiation of your strategy. The four categories are:
Operations Management Processes. These relate to the basic day-to-day processes you use to produce your existing products and services and deliver them to your customers.
For example acquiring raw materials from suppliers, converting these raw materials to finished goods, distributing the finished goods to the market and managing business risks.
Thus, you could have objectives such as Increase throughput, Maximize yield, Attract channel partners and Minimize risk appearing on your strategy map under the internal processes perspective.
Customer Management Processes. These are the processes that enable you to grow and strengthen relationships with targeted customers. Today, customers hold more power than suppliers and have an extensive say about the company’s products and services.
It is therefore more critical to understand your customers and their behaviors in order to win in the marketplace. The critical processes involved in managing customers involve:
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- Customer Selection: Identifying customers based on a set of customer characteristics that describe an attractive customer segment for your company and for which the company’s value proposition is most attractive. Attributes that can be used to define your customer segments include income, wealth, age, family size, lifestyle, price sensitiveness, early adoption and technical sophistication.
- Customer Acquisition: Acquiring the targeted customers through generating leads, communicating to new potential customers, choosing the right entry-level products, pricing the products and closing the sale.
- Customer Retention: Retaining customers by offering them excellent services and being responsive to their requests.
- Deepening customer relationships: This can be achieved through managing existing relationships effectively, cross-selling multiple products and services, and establishing your organization as the most trusted advisor and supplier.
Innovation Processes. These are the processes that focus more on creating new products, processes and services which ultimately help the company to infiltrate new markets and customer segments.
In today’s fiercely competitive environment, an organization must be creative and have the ability to identify opportunities for new products and services.
It must clearly understand its industry, engage its employees and customers to generate new ideas and apply innovative technologies in order to outshine the rivals.
Having identified opportunities for new products and services and generated ideas, a decision has to be made on whether to finance the projects internally, work with joint ventures or outsource entirely.
The next innovation sub-process includes design and development of the new products and services with objectives related to the introduction of new products to the market.
Finally, the new products and services are delivered to the market. It is important to note that the innovation process, for a particular product or service, wraps up when you have achieved your sales and production targets at the desired levels of functionality, quality and cost.
Regulatory and Social Processes. These help the organization to repeatedly earn the right to operate in the communities and countries in which they produce and sell.
National and local regulations inflict standards on companies’ practices. Instead of just complying with the least standards established by regulations, companies must strive to go beyond the minimal standards and perform better.
Having an excellent reputation for performance along regulatory and social dimensions will help the company attract and retain high-quality employees.
Also, avoiding or lowering environmental incidents and improving employee health and safety improve productivity and lowers operating costs.
Thus, companies should have objectives such as Exercise best-in-class governance, Maintain health and safety of employees, Become more involved in our community and Encourage community prosperity on their strategy maps.
Given the vast number of processes available to create value, managers must identify and focus on just the critical few processes that will allow them to execute their strategy effectively.
The selected strategic processes should also be selected from all four categories above. This way, the value creation process is balanced between the short and long term and this also ensures that growth in shareholder value is sustainable over time.
Watch out for my next post on developing objectives for the employee learning and growth perspective.
