I promised a few Master Black Belts to provide information of writing Macros in Minitab.  They have described a real labor intensive effort to produce scorecards using Excel macros.  I do understand the issues. You can do a lot with Minitab Macros.  First, there is a help function just for macro functions.  Now that Minitab [...]

I see many company scorecards as I coach my students.  Well over half of the companies have adopted a red/yellow/green color coding for their scorecards.  Generally they are made with the conditional formatting functions that are in Excel.  I know that the stoplight symbolism is great, but what the scorecards have done is convert a [...]

You will find a lot of complaints about Red/Yellow/Green (RYG) scorecards on this Blog and in the writings of Forrest Breyfogle. Most of the complaints relate to the decision to set the color based on an arbitrary set of goals. The adoption of the RYG format implies a stop sign type behavior: Stop if Red, [...]

When I read the book “Real Numbers, management accounting in a lean environment,” by Cunningham and Fiume, the authors make an excellent case why a business that measures performance as a variance to a plan or variance to a goal will develop performance problems.  If you have not read the book, you may want to.  [...]

Early this week Smarter Solutions attended a CFO conference in Dallas.  It was a great experience to become part of discussions on topics that Chief Financial Officers are interested in. I was surprised how isolated the CFO folks I talked with as related to non-financial business issues.  There focus, in this conference was that the [...]

I read a Wall Street Journal article yesterday “Why you shouldn’t buy those quarterly earning surprises” from July 2nd.  It states that it is the 9th quarter in a row that 2/3 of the public companies surprisingly exceeded there earning projection.  Think about it, if the investor revenue estimates are legitimate, then there should be [...]

If you read Forrest Breyfogle’s Integrated Enterprise Excellence books you would find references to the problems with the balanced scorecard system.  If you make only a cursory look, you might come to think that Forrest recommends companies avoid the balanced scorecard methods completely, but that is not true.  The problems with the Balanced Scorecard methods [...]

An article on Mutual Fund rankings in the Wall Street Journal 4/4/2011 shares a concern on mutual fund metrics that exists in many parts of business. Michael Pollock writes about how the scores on mutual funds do not represent what you may think they mean.  It is very interesting to learn if you are an [...]

I find many of my clients are adopting the Net Promoter Score (NPS) method for evaluating their voice of the customer measures.  It is based on questions and surveys of your customers on how well they would promote you to others.  It is a method to evaluate the customer loyalty rather than their satisfaction. A [...]

I had a conversation today, with Forrest Breyfogle.  We were talking about how silo metrics get created.  I came to realize that all the standard metric selection methods almost force the use of silo metrics because they depend on the org chart to pass down performance goals. In the Balanced Scorecard, you pick your strategies [...]