utilizing the balanced scorecard
Statement1:
• Any experience you have with utilizing the balanced scorecard and strategy map
My only experience with the balanced scorecard is learning about it and its importance in my business strategy class. Dr. Magnini walked through each section and discussed how we could apply it to different companies.
• Ways in which you may be able to utilize managerial accounting and the balanced scorecard or strategy map in your field
The balanced scorecard is a performance measurement framework that can help analyze financial and non-financial indicators. We use four perspectives from the company’s goals to find growth and increase profits. First, we have the financial perspective to improve productivity and increase revenue. Tracking my company’s financial performance can help me in marketing because we need to understand where and why costs need to decrease and which products we should advertise to our target market based on sales. Then the customer’s perspective helps us better our relationship and understand our value propositions. For example, if we have issues with customer loyalty, we have marketing strategies to persuade them to repurchase our products or stay with our company. Our value proposition communicates what we offer our customers and how we differ. In marketing classes, we learn to persuade our customers that we are different, not better than our competitors. Next, the process perspective is how we execute the strategy and if we are efficient. Various processes depend on your position in marketing, but if our customer management could be more efficient, we can improve. Lastly, we have the learning and growth perspective to enhance our human resources, technology, and culture. All of these objectives affect marketing teams. For instance, if the company’s culture is positive, it provides a comfortable work environment of efficiency. Then the strategy map visualizes the cause-and-effect relationships between each perspective’s objectives. Using the framework and strategy map can improve each perspective, increasing profits and leading to many successful outcomes. Many managerial accounting modules help us understand how to find the issues and fix them when measuring our performance. In marketing, we are constantly completing analyses and researching ways to improve. Therefore, we can succeed if we combine our marketing strategies with managerial accounting knowledge.
Statement2:
Any experience you have with utilizing the balanced scorecard and strategy map?
From a financial perspective, the organization I work for looks at our insurance case mix for revenue reimbursement purposes. For example, Medicare, Medicaid, Commercial, and Self-pay. Each payer source reimburses at a different rate for the same services.
Customer perspective: scorecards of patient demographics are created to give insight into the patient population’s income, zip codes within a 25-mile radius from the hospital, and age range. These patients are most likely the individuals utilizing our services frequently. We will also provide a report that provides individuals who utilize our services whose zip codes exceed the 25-mile radius to determine customer growth. A survey is provided randomly to patients that had a recent acute hospitalization. The discharging unit gets the score from the survey.
Process perspective: every department within the hospital setting has processes that are measured to meet the hospital’s mission and goals. Physicians must meet treatment plan standards based on a patient’s diagnosis or symptoms without causing harm. These sets of treatment standards provide an average timeframe a person should be in the hospital. For example, for patients hospitalized with pneumonia, the standard is 3 days length of stay. Length of stay is a metric all departments providing services to a patient are held to or play a significant role. Case management is measured on how long it takes to successfully discharge a place to the next level of care at home with resources after a discharge order is placed by the physician.
Ways in which you may be able to utilize managerial accounting and the balanced scorecard or strategy map in your field.
We utilize managerial accounting for a patient length of stay in the hospital. Loss of revenue is associated with patients staying past the recommended length of stay. The example given previously was 3 days stay for pneumonia. The insurance company will only pay for a pneumonia diagnosis for 3 days unless the patient develops complications despite the treatment plan.
Quality measurements are evaluated based on hospital-acquired infections. This is another financial risk factor for insurance companies. If a patient was hospitalized due to a fall that results in a hip fracture, has the surgery then develops COVID, the insurance most likely only covers the surgery and not the COVID treatment. This is considered a hospital-acquired infection.
Financial data is shared with staff to provide a summary of financial growth and revenue loss in specific service lines. The financial reports are compared to previous years. I enjoy seeing the financial reports that inform us of how we are doing as an organization. As a leader, I use financial reports to help decide where to decrease spending. For example, hiring full-time nurses is extremely cheaper than hiring travel nurses. Travel nurses under a 3-month contract hourly rate can range from $150 to $250 per hour.
Statement3:
• Any experience you have with utilizing the balanced scorecard and strategy map
I have not developed and used the balance scorecard in my current role as an analyst or in my previous role as a logistics management specialist with the government. I have however used bits and pieces of the balance scorecard approach to developing goals and strategies within my team to achieve goals on specific taskers. The same is true with a strategy map, I have never created a full strategy map across all four perspectives of my organization, but I have used a similar process within my analyst team to clearly lay out the strategic objectives of our team and how they relate to the bureau.
• Ways in which you may be able to utilize managerial accounting and the balanced scorecard or strategy map in your field
I think that managerial accounting through the balance score card and strategy map could be used in my field in a few ways. To begin with my analyst team provides our bureau with threat analysis from around the world in relation to our bureau’s missions and assets. A balance scorecard would allow our team to develop an internal strategy map linking our team’s objectives through all four BSC perspectives. In the case of our analyst team objectives at the learning and growth perspective would be “develop employee process improvement on threat collection.” From that perspective objective we would then link it to the process perspective of “reduce process time of report generation” and “improve report quality”. That can then be linked to the customer perspective by “delivering products on time” “offer best quality threat reporting” which would lead to customer retention from bureau leadership and interagency partners. That would then link to the final objective in the financial perspective which would be “increase the value of the bureau within the State Department.” We could then define units of measure for each perspective stage that show how effectively we are meeting our objectives. This could then be stored in a repository to be shared with our bureau leadership when asked about our team’s value added or during Inspector General Audits of our practices. This could also be used to provide justification for the procurement of analysis software contracts by illustrating how our team has mapped and accomplished objectives or by showing that the new contracts would allow our team to accomplish stated objectives.
