Elle Meyer

ACC548

Dr. Robinson

31 March 2023

Balanced Scorecard

For this week’s article, I read “A Balanced Scorecard Journey” written by Gail Perry, co-

author of The Institute Way. This article focuses on a company called Shat-R-Shield, who

changed their way of strategic planning to incur record breaking revenues within months. This

article started off with an interview with the companies CEO, Karen Ponce, who believed her job

was to “work ON the business, not IN the business.” (Perry, 2011).

Gail Perry stated the company had introduced strategic planning to integrate a common

goal for the entire organization to work towards. As Shat-R-Shield developed a Key

Performance Indicator Balanced Scorecard, they soon were able to measure success. This

success was measured through performance of things that were important across the whole

organization (Perry, 2011). Some of these measurements included net profit, cost per unit, and

sales per each employee. Having these objectives helped Karen Ponce analyze how many

dollars they needed to bring in to offset every dollar she spent on sales and marketing (Perry,

2011). As Karen continued to develop her strategic planning, she created a balanced scorecard

in 2010 that resulted in a net income than ever before in the company’s history.

Further in the article, Gail Perry mentions how CEO of Shat-R-Shield refined their

balance scorecard to focus on three main objectives while incorporating integrated teams across

all platforms. The importance of having an integrated team was to ensure clarity and alignment

to work towards one main goal. The article has shown how implementing a new strategic
planning method can help your organization grow and succeed in the constantly changing

economy.

The article concluded with CEO Karen suggesting executives to spend 80% - 90% of

their time to work on the business while implementing a balanced scorecard (Perry, 2011).

Overall, the importance of a balanced scorecard is to provide more strategic direction as well a

target to reach their goals. Managerial accounts are equipped with the knowledge to develop a

balanced scorecard for companies to help them determine if they are appropriately measuring

progress. With the help of management accountants, companies can develop a product

differentiation strategy or cost leadership strategy that aligns with their goals. After the strategy

is designed, a balanced scorecard then can help set performance measures that best serve the

framework of either cost leaders or differentiating products (Rajan, Horngren, Datar, et al, 2021).

With both financial and nonfinancial factors, the balanced scorecard can help organizations

across all platforms.

In the article, we can see how the balanced scorecard helped Shat-R-Shield improve their

internal operations to produce a higher operating net profit. With the help of managerial

accounts, companies can develop redefined strategies to achieve greater success. As competition

of the markets increase, I think there will be an increase in demand for managerial accountants to

help companies design this strategic planning mechanism. By identifying key performance

indicators as well as improving teamwork, I think organizations will begin to not only see

external impacts, but positive internal impacts as well.

 Works Cited

Datar, Srikant M., and Madhav Rajan. Horngren’s Cost Accounting: A Managerial Emphasis.

17th ed. Pearson Education, 2021.

Perry, G. (2011). A balanced scorecard journey. Retrieved April 1, 2023, from

https://balancedscorecard.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/BSI-success-story-shat-r-

shield.pdf