A framework to relate business improvement actions and performance measurement

This thesis reports on the development of a performance improvement framework thatformally represents causal relationships between performance measures, factors ofperformance, improvement actions and the overall strategy of a business.The measurement of business performance has received significant attention from boththe academic and business worlds. Literature suggests the benefits of implementingbalanced performance measurement. However, practitioners in the field of performancemeasurement do not seem to deliver the significant results anticipated by the researchcommunity.The research reported in this thesis delivers a performance improvement framework thatallows practitioners to integrate the operations knowledge in an organisation with aformal performance measurement system, in the form of causal relationships inimprovement actions. This gives an improvement focus to measurement and at the sametime ensures that improvement actions are aligned to the overall strategy of theorganisation.The development of the framework was based on methodological theory developmentand empirical case studies. The process to apply the framework and a set of web-basedtools to support its implementation were also built. These were tested in a processindustry environment.The research contributes to knowledge by extending the concept of performanceindicators to incorporate factors that affect them, the potential improvement actions,their constraints and their relationships. For organisations that have establishedperformance measurement systems and are working with a performance measurementculture, use of this framework allows them to systematically evaluate actions forcontinuous improvement.