Performance management in SMEs: a Balanced Scorecard perspective

There have been substantial changes in business performance measurement in the last 20 years, which has led to the development of new performance-measurement frameworks, of which the Balanced Scorecard (BS) concept is considered to be among the most popular. The BS has been widely implemented in large organisations all around the world as a performance measurement framework and a strategy implementation methodology. This paper presents research of the BS from the perspective of manufacturing Small- to Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) based in the West Midlands region of the UK. The results suggest that SMEs are not aware of the BS and hence, the usage rate is very low compared to large companies. Furthermore, SMEs were found to be oriented towards day-to-day activities resulting in largely ineffective performance management of important but intangible assets such as employees, information systems, organisational learning and innovation. A BS implementation plan for SMEs is proposed, which adopts the catchball process from the Japanese strategy implementation technique known as Hoshin Kanri or policy deployment.