The Glue

Wyeth Discusses Their Balanced Scorecard

In a recent KMWorld.com article Wyeth's senior director of clinical strategy management discussed their adoption of the Balanced Scorecard and how they manage it.

Here are some excerpts from the article, entitled Knowledge management: a multifaceted remedy:

• "Wyeth Pharmaceuticals was looking for a way to make improvements throughout its worldwide clinical organization, targeting such areas as customers, finances, internal processes (including personnel) and technology."
• "One approach that interested the company was the balanced scorecard. "It is a well-known methodology ensuring you’re on track for achieving your strategic objectives," says Jennifer Peck, senior director of clinical strategy management at Wyeth."
• "Tracking can be accomplished via spreadsheets, but that approach is labor-intensive and often means spending more time collecting data than analyzing it."
• "When the company looked for a way to automate the process, it didn’t have to look far. One division of Wyeth was already using the personal scorecard module from ActiveStrategy in the research and development side of the business. To get a more holistic view of the company’s strategic progress, Wyeth chose ActiveStrategy Enterprise, a Web-based balanced scorecard that enables authorized users to input data from any location via a Web browser."
• "The application is a key tool used in monthly performance discussions. It includes dashboards, charts and visual representations of the organization’s strategic plan to help present and discuss important trends."
• "The application enables Wyeth to measure adherence to strategy development across its worldwide offices by enabling authorized executives, managers and frontline employees to input information, freeing Peck and her team to interpret the data and make recommendations for improvements."
• "This allows for greater communication and alignment of practices with Wyeth’s global vision," Peck adds. "For us, this is very critical. It’s a very effective tool."

Read the full article at: http://www.kmworld.com/Articles/Editorial/Feature/Knowledge-management-a-multifaceted-remedy--49229.aspx

Are Quality Awards Worth the Effort?

We've seen a recent rise in interest level among our clients in quality awards, both at the national level (Baldrige in the US and NQI in Canada), as well as at the state level.

Why would already busy companies pursue such demanding awards?

What do they really get out of winning?

To start with, studies have shown that organizations that use a quality award process perform consistently better over time. Here is a summary of one such study (from The Alliance for Performance Excellence website; data from Singhal and Hendricks Study):

Many organizations that use a quality award process as a basis for continuous improvement have achieved :            

• 59% Higher Stock Price
• 111% Higher Operating Income
• 116% Higher Sales
• 114% Higher Total Assets         

If that's not proof enough that these systematic processes are worth the effort, our award-winning clients, as well as those that have just begun their journeys toward performance excellence, all say the same thing: the journey is the prize. There are so many benefits that they derive along the way: