基于平衡记分卡的企业核心KPI体系构建外文翻译.doc

外文文献翻译译文
题　　目：　 基于平衡记分卡旳某企业关键KPI体系构建　　
一、外文原文
原文：
Linking the Balanced Scorecard to Strategy
Kaplan Robert S, Norton David P
Many managers and consultants who agree to the basic rationale for a Balanced Scorecard believe they have created one when they supplement traditional financial measures with non-financial measures. But many of the most popular non-financial measures, such as customer satisfaction and employee attitudes, have some of the same limitations as financial measures. First, they are lagging measures, reporting how well the organization's strategy worked in the past period but providing little guidance on how to navigate to the future. Second, the non-financial measures they use are generic and are not related to specific strategic objectives that will provide sustainable competitive advantage. Scorecards built upon lagging, non-strategic indicators represent only a limited application of the full power of the Balanced Scorecard.
Our experience in observing and building more than 100 scorecards reveals that the financial and non-financial measures on a Balanced Scorecard should be derived from the business-unit's unique strategy. The Balanced Scorecard provides executives with a comprehensive framework that can translate a company's vision and strategy into a coherent and linked set of performance measures. The measures should include both outcome measures and the performance drivers of those outcomes. By articulating the outcomes the organization desires as well as the drivers of those outcomes, senior executives can channel the energies, the abilities, and the specific knowledge held by people throughout the organization towards achieving the business's long-term goals.
Many people think of measurement as a tool to control behavior and to evaluate past performance. Traditional control and performance measurement systems attempt to keep individuals and organizational units in compliance with a pre-established plan. The measures on a Balanced Scorecard are being used by executives in a different way—to articulate the strategy of the business, to communicate the strategy of the business, and to help align individual, organizational, and cross-departmental initiatives to achieve a common goal. These executives are using the scorecard as a communication, information, and learning system, not as a traditional control system. For the Balanced Scorecard to be used in this way, however, the measures must provide a clear representation of the organization's long-term strategy for competitive success.
Choosing Strategic Measures for the Four Perspectives
The four perspectives of the scorecard permit a balance between short-term and long-term objectives, between desired outcomes and the performance drivers of those outcomes, and between hard objective measures and softer, more subjective measures. While the multiplicity of measures on a Balanced Scorecard seems confusing to some people, properly constructed scorecards contain a unity of purpose since all the measures are directed toward achieving an integrated strategy.
Financial
The financial performance measures define the long-run objectives of the business unit, While most businesses will emphasize profitability objectives, other financial objectives are also possible. Businesses with many products in the early stage of their life cycle can stress rapid growth objectives, and mature businesses may emphasize maximizing cash flow. For our purposes, we can simplify somewhat by identifying just three different stages:
• Rapid Growth
• Sustain
• Harvest
Rapid Growth businesses are at the early stages of their life cycle. They may have to make considerable investments to develop and enhance new products and services; to construct and expand produaion facilities; to build operating capabilities; to invest in systems, infra-structure, and distribution networks that will support global relationships; and to nurture and develop customer relationships
Probably the majority of business units in a company will be in the sustain stage, where they still attract investment and reinvestment, but are required to earn excellent returns on their invested capital. These businesses are expected to maintain their existing market share and perhaps grow it somewhat from year-to-year. Investment projects will be more directed to relieving bottlenecks, expanding capacity, and enhancing continuous improvement, rather than the long payback and growth option investments that were made during the growth stage.
Other business units will have reached a mature phase of their life cycle, where the company wants to harvest the investments made in the earlier two stages. These businesses no longer warrant significant investment—only enough to maintain equipment and capabilities, but not to expand or build new capabilities. Any investment project must have very definite and short payback periods. The main goal is to maximize cash flow back to the corporation.
The financial objectives for businesses in each of these three stages are quite different. Financial objectives in the growth stage will emphasize sales growth; sales in new markets and to new customers; sales from new products and services; maintaining adequate spending levels for product and process development, systems, employee capabilities; and establishment of new marketing, sales, and distribution channels. Financial objectives in the sustain stage will emphasize traditional financial measurements, such as return on capital employed, operating income, and gross margin. Investment projects for businesses in the sustain category will be evaluated by standard, discounted cash flow, capital budgeting analyses. Some companies will employ newer financial metrics, such as economic value added and shareholder value. These metrics all represent the classic financial objective—earn excellent returns on the capital provided to the business. The financial objectives for the harvest businesses will stress cash flow. Any investments must have immediate and certain cash pay-backs. The goal is not to maximize return on investment, which may encourage managers to seek additional investment funds based on future return projections. Virtually no spending will be done for research or development or on expanding capabilities, because of the short time remaining in the economic life of business units in their "harvest" phase.''
Customer
In the customer perspective of the Balanced Scorecard, managers identify the customer and market segments in which the business unit will compete and the measures of the business unit's performance in these targeted segments. The customer perspective typically includes several generic measures of the successful outcomes from a well-formulated and implemented strategy. The generic outcome measures include customer satisfaction, customer retention, new customer acquisition, customer profitability, and market and account share in targeted segments (see Exhibit 3). While these measures may appear to be generic across all types of organizations, they should be customized to the targeted customer groups from whom the business unit expects its greatest growth and profitability to be derived.
Customer Retention
Clearly, a desirable way for maintaining or increasing market share in targeted customer segments is to retain existing customers in those segments. Research on the service profit chain has demonstrated the importance of customer retention.^ Companies that can readily identify all of their customers—for example, industrial companies, distributors and wholesalers, newspaper and magazine publishers, computer on-line service companies, banks, credit card companies, and long-distance telephone suppliers—can readily measure customer retention from period to period. Beyond just retaining customers, many companies will wish to measure customer loyalty by the percentage growth of business with existing customers.
Customer Acquisition
Companies seeking to grow their business will generally have an objective to increase their customer base in targeted segments. The customer acquisition measure tracks, in absolute or relative terms, the rate at which a business unit attracts or wins new customers or business. Customer acquisition could be measured by either the number of new customers or the total sales to new customers in these segments. Companies such as those in the credit and charge card business, magazine subscriptions, cellular telephone service, cable television, and banking and other financial services solicit new customers through broad, often expensive, marketing efforts. These companies could examine the number of customer responses to solicitations and the conversion rate—number of actual new customers divided by number of prospective inquiries. They could measure solicitation cost per new customer acquired, and the ratio of new customer revenues per sales call or per dollar of solicitation expense.
Customer Satisfaction
Both customer retention and customer acquisition are driven from meeting customers' needs. Customer satisfaction measures provides feedback on how well the company is doing. The importance of customer satisfaction probably can not be over-emphasized. Recent research has indicated that just scoring adequately on customer satisfaction is not sufficient for achieving high degrees of loyalty, retention, and profitability. Only when customers rate their buying experience as completely or extremely satisfying can the company count on their repeat purchasing behavior.'
Customer Profitability
Succeeding in the core customer measures of share, retention, acquisition, and satisfaction, however, does not guarantee that the company has profitable customers. Obviously, one way to have extremely satisfied customers (and angry competitors) is to sell products and services at very low prices. Since customer satisfaction and high market share are themselves only a means to achieving higher financial returns, companies will probably wish to measure not just the extent of business they do with customers, but the profitability of this business, particularly in targeted customer segments. Activity-based cost (ABC) systems permit companies to measure individual and aggregate customer profitability. Companies should want more than satisfied and happy customers; they should want profitable customers. A financial measure, such as customer profitability, can help keep customer-focused organizations from becoming customer-obsessed.
Internal Business Process
In the internal business process perspective, executives identify the critical internal processes in which the organization must excel. The critical internal business processes enable the business unit to:
• deliver on the value propositions of customers in targeted market segments, and
• satisfy shareholder expectations of excellent financial returns.
The measures should be focused on the internal processes that will have the greatest impact on customer satisfaction and achieving the organization's financial objectives.
The internal business process perspective reveals two fundamental differences between traditional and the Balanced Scorecard approaches to performance measurement. Traditional approaches attempt to monitor and improve existing business processes. They may go beyond just financial measures of performance by incorporating quality and time-based metrics. But they still focus on improving existing processes. The Balanced Scorecard approach, however, will usually identify entirely new processes at which the organization must excel to meet customer and financial objectives. The internal business process objectives highlight the processes most critical for the organization's strategy to succeed.
The second departure of the Balanced Scorecard approach is to incorporate innovation processes into the internal business process perspective (see Exhibit 5). Traditional performance measurement systems focus on the processes of delivering today's products and services to today's customers. They attempt to control and improve existing operations—the short-wave of value creation. But the drivers of long-term financial success may require the organization to create entirely new products and services that will meet the emerging needs of current and future customers. The innovation process—the long-wave of value creation-is, for many companies, a more powerful driver of future financial performance than the short-term operating cycle. But managers do not have to choose between these two vital internal processes. The internal business process perspective of the Balanced Scorecard incorporates objectives and measures for both the long-wave innovation cycle as well as the short-wave operations cycle.
Learning & Growth
The fourth Balanced Scorecard perspective. Learning & Growth, identifies the infra-structure that the organization must build to create long-term growth and improvement. The customer and internal business process perspectives identify the factors most critical for current and future success. Businesses are unlikely to be able to meet their long-term targets for customers and internal processes using today's technologies and capabilities. Also, intense global competition requires that companies continually improve their capabilities for delivering value to customers and shareholders.
Organizational learning and growth come from three principal sources: people, systems, and organizational procedures. The financial, customer, and internal business process objectives on the Balanced Scorecard will typically reveal large gaps between existing capabilities of people, systems, and procedures and what will be required to achieve targets for breakthrough performance. To close these gaps, businesses will have to invest in re-skilling employees, enhancing information technology and systems, and aligning organizational procedures and routines. These objectives are articulated in the learning and growth perspective of the Balanced Scorecard. As in the customer perspective, employee-based measures include a mixture of generic outcome measures—employee satisfaction, employee retention, employee training, and employee skills—along with specific drivers of these generic measures, such as detailed indexes of specific skills required for the new competitive environment. Information systems capabilities can be measured by real-time availability of accurate customer and internal process information to front-line employees. Organizational procedures can examine alignment of employee incentives with overall organizational success factors, and measured rates of improvement in critical customer-based and internal processes.
资料来源：Linking the Balanced Scorecard to Strategy. California Management Review[J],1996(39), Issue 1,p53-79.

二、翻译文章
译文：
连结平衡计分卡与方略
Kaplan Robert S, Norton David P
许多同意平衡计分卡这一基本原理旳管理者和顾问相信，他们已经发明了一种补充老式旳金融措施与非金融措施旳理论。不过许多