Microsoft Business Scorecard Manager (BSM)

Scorecard for Sales Performance - Goal and Commitment Strategy - Business Operations

Business Situation

The FY06 commitment and goal project was initiated to address a large issue facing the Enterprise product selling and management organization. Currently, there is no systemic way for management to capture goals against current year commitments for individual and organization. Current commitment reporting and goal collection is manual, inconsistent, and fractured across the different sales regions. Reports are consistently questioned due to the data quality and there is no way to compare metrics across the different regions. Further, the current manual approach addresses only General Manager and VP level sales professionals.

To meet this goal, companies need better visibility into budget facts and new report and new review processes to refine the vision, to measure customer satisfaction, and to set the right performance targets.  And it needed to end its reliance on exchanging spreadsheets through email to locate the source or to share budget data for trending or analysis.  The required changes include:

• Automated processes for data review; secure, centralized location for storing and accessing real-time budget data.
• Shared access to accurate, real-time data in the Pivot tables dynamic views, ad-hoc reports, and easy integration and collaboration.
• To enhance company's competitiveness, with KPIs in place to measure company's performance in customer-facing activities like project's appraisal-measured in terms of turnaround time; service delivery, which is scored by the number of projects completed on-time and within budget; and customer satisfaction.

Solution - A Tried and True Solution

VTL consulting has identified that the organization needed a Business Intelligence (BI) solution that would consolidate the individual goals and commiments on disparate systems and provide commitment reporting and goal collection in an integrated web application using Microsoft SQL Server database, Integration Services (SSIS), Analysis Services, and Microsoft Business Scorecard Manager 2005. Business benefits working with VTL consulting on BI solutions that customer quickly established the business requirements and built the complete solution within a short timeframe.

Microsoft Business Scorecard Manager (BSM) 2005 is a server based application that provides a platform for organizations to use Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to monitor business performance against their defined business goals.  The architecture of Business Scorecard Manager, and works through steps required to create a data source, scorecard, and KPIs, associate a report with the scorecard, and publish the scorecard and report to Sharepoint, thus enabling you to create a basic BSM project that can allow your users to monitor the progress of their organization against their goals. The article assumes no prior knowledge of BSM.

The solutions of using Business Scorecard Manager, Visual Studion .NET, SQL Server 2005, and ETL framework architecture is to create a comprehensive scorecard and dashboard application that provides employees with deep contextual insight into business drivers. Information is delivered in a collaborative environment for effective business management and action in the performance-driven organization.

Benefits

Business Scorecard Manger provides the tools and platform for a practical, low risk, and complete business performance management (BPM) scorecard strategy for high impact and fast results. To align actions with business strategy, Business Scorecard Manager helps enable employees, processes, and systems to understand business drivers, shape solutions, and execute shared plans.

Define and improve business performance: Understand the organization’s drivers, challenges, and opportunities with scorecards and KPIs which is the key to improve company services and operations as quick, accurate, and comprehensive availability to BI.  SQL Server 2005 is developed with BI in mind and incorporates a lot of essential services and useful tools necessary for BI development.  Visual Studio 2005 offer new   project types and tools for BI support.  And Business Scorecard Manager 2005 bacame   the natural choice for the front-end of company solution:

• Improve decision-making: Use a collaborative environment to analyze data in context, formulate strategies, execute on strategic plans, and improve return on investment.
• With a more efficient supply chain, company will be able to meet release date deadlines more effectively, and as a result, optimise sales.
• Because the is so easy to use, non-technical users can author reports themself
• Company management and production team will have near real-time access to business-critical performance metrics.  They can also analyse new data on a daily basic.
• Because Business Scorecard Manager 2005 integrates seamlessly with SharePoint Portal Server, SQL Server, and the Microsoft Office suite of products, companies can implement the solution quickly and easily.

VTL provides full technical consulting solutions to Business Scorecard Manager on planning, designing, KPI definition, system infrastructures, data warehouse design and modeling (SQL Server Analysis Services - SSAS), building scorecard, scorecard deployment and implementation, training and knowledge transfer to the client team.

Business Scorecard Manager provides easy access to security-enhanced and easy-to-use performance and financial data for scorecards, analysis, and reporting. Rich integration with the Microsoft Office system makes information easily accessible and convertible into graphical reports, charts, and presentations. Seamless integration with ProClarity Analytics enables employees to easily move from monitoring performance in the scorecard to full ad hoc analysis. This helps them gain a complete understanding of the drivers behind KPIs so they can take action on the results. In addition, tight integration with SSRS makes scorecards portable and accessible to employees while they’re traveling.

Figure 2: Consuming a scorecard in Office SharePoint Server 2007