ACC 542 Accounting Information Systems

1.In what ways do Business Process Innovation, Business Process Management or Workflow help support both Key Performance Indicators and/or the Balanced Scorecard?

 

2.Are there ways in which they detract from KPI and the Balanced Scorecard?

 

3.Or are these concepts not related in your opinion. Why or why not?

1.Business process innovation essentially refers to applying a strategic perspective to the work processes, and the units and scope of work in order to make it possible to separate as to what is required and what is not. In simpler terms a business process is essentially a process that has been structured  with a set of activities fundamentally designed to produce a specified output by a particular market or client. Business process innovation is the innovation of such a process for the sole purpose of improving operational performance of the organization.

Business process management on the other hand refer to the systematic approach that is applied on the workflow of an organization to make it more efficient, effective and adaptive or more prone to adapting to the always changing business environment.

Now, in order to measure the effectiveness of the business process management or the business process innovation employed by business different performance measurement tools have been utilized. Essentially, the performance measurement tools that have been utilized for this purpose are the balanced scorecard approach and  the  key performance indicators.

For instance, a particular organization may implement innovation and learning in its processes by the setting up of the following goals:

• Leadership in technology
• Manufacturing learning
• Focus o the product
• Market timing

Now, in order to measure the effectiveness of the above established goals the balanced scorecard approach has been used by the management of the organization. The balanced scorecard essentially develops a number of perspectives based on the respective goals whose effectiveness has to be measured. In this case, the perspectives that the balanced scorecard can develop in order to aid the innovation techniques implemented by the organization are:

• Time to develop the next batch of products
• The process  time required for maturity
• Percentage of contribution of the new line of products to sales
• New product introduction versus competition

All of the above mentioned perspectives of the balanced scorecard approach are dependent on the company goals that have been set in alignment with the concept of business process management and business process innovation.

The next performance measurement that has the ability to substitute the balanced scorecard is the key performance indicators. The key performance indicators are established with the aim to determine whether a particular process is running as desired. The key performance indicators may be divided into long-term indicators and real time indicators depending on the company needs. Key performance indicators (KPIs) are essential to measure and subsequently improve business processes in an organization. Therefore, it can be clearly understood from the above discussion that balanced scorecards or key performance indicators are the tools via which the effectiveness of the business process management and business process innovation implemented in business is measured (Harmon, 2015).

2.No, there are no ways in which these business processes detract from key performance indicators or the balanced scorecard approach as business process management or business process innovation utilize these performance measurement tools to measure the effectiveness of the implemented goals (Tjader et al., 2014).

3.The balanced scorecard approach or the key performance indicators and the business process innovation or business process management are the two respective faces of the same coin and are intricately connected with each other (Tjader et al., 2014).

References

Harmon, P. (2015). The scope and evolution of business process management. In Handbook on business process management 1 (pp. 37-80). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

Tjader, Y., May, J. H., Shang, J., Vargas, L. G., & Gao, N. (2014). Firm-level outsourcing decision making: A balanced scorecard-based analytic network process model. International Journal of Production Economics, 147, 614-623.