AU2012213027A1 - A system and method for measuring the performance of an organisation - Google Patents

Abstract

A system for measuring the performance of an organisation includes a memory for storing data therein. A customer data measurement module captures customer data relating to identifications of customers and customer satisfaction of customers of the organisation and stores the customer data in the memory. A financial data measurement module captures financial data relating to the financial performance of the organisation and stores the financial data in the memory. An activity data measurement module captures activity data relating to the activity of the organisation and stores the activity data in the memory. An analysis module to access the stored customer data, financial data and activity data and to analyse the data to determine performance data indicating the performance of the organisation for a past predetermined period and storing the performance data in the memory. Finally, an output device outputs the performance data to a user.

Description

WO 2012/104813 PCT/IB2012/050500 1 A SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR MEASURING THE PERFORMANCE OF AN ORGANISATION BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION The present invention relates to a system and method for measuring the performance of an organisation and comparing such performance with benchmarks derived from similar operations. The measurement of performance relates to the measurement of the effectiveness of the process within the organisation which create value for the customer, and the measurement involves overlaying customer experience information with financial information with business process activity information. The overlay of the information streams on a single business process allows the system to highlight specific problems with the processes which underpin the measured outcomes. Methods for measuring the performance of an organisation are well-known. However, these always seem to fail in effectively measuring the performance of an organisation in a manner which accurately identifies problems that can be solved by the management. Business profit refers to value creation for customers and capture of some of this value for the business. However, the process of value creation is typically not reflected in financial systems nor process systems nor customer satisfaction systems. The business creates value through their activity chains, and therein lies the competitive advantage and sustainability of that business. Assessment of the activity chain requires simultaneous measurement of the customer, the activity and financial information, although the process of value creation often precedes any recording on financial systems. The present invention seeks to provide an improved system and method for measuring the performance of an organisation in terms of its activity chains from the perspective of the customer, providing and highlighting how this might be improved.

WO 2012/104813 PCT/IB2012/050500 2 SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION According to one example embodiment there is provided a system for measuring the performance of an organisation, the system including: a memory for storing data therein; a customer data measurement module for capturing customer data relating to identifications of customers and customer satisfaction of customers of the organisation and storing the customer data in the memory; a financial data measurement module for capturing financial data relating to the financial performance of the organisation and storing the financial data in the memory; an activity data measurement module for capturing activity data relating to the activity of the organisation and storing the activity data in the memory; an analysis module to access the stored customer data, financial data and activity data and to analyse the data to determine performance data indicating the performance of the organisation for a past predetermined period and storing the performance data in the memory; an output device for outputting the performance data to a user. The customer data measurement module may interact with the activity data module to further capture information relating to which parts of a process a customer has been through thereby allowing the customer data to relate back to the process in question. The customer data may further include: WO 2012/104813 PCT/IB2012/050500 3 customer satisfaction data including answers to customer satisfaction questions posed to the customer after interacting with the organisation; mystery shopping data including answers to customer satisfaction questions of a person that has acted as a customer and interacted with the organisation; and ghost calls data including answers to customer satisfaction questions of a person that has acted as a customer and interacted with the organisation via telephone. The analysis module relates the data stored directly to an underlying process being measured thereby allowing for process correction. According to another example embodiment there is provided a method for measuring the performance of an organisation, the method including: capturing customer data relating to customer satisfaction of customers of the organisation and storing the customer data in a memory; capturing financial data relating to the financial performance of the organisation and storing the financial data in the memory; capturing activity data relating to the activity of the organisation and storing the activity data in the memory; accessing the stored customer data, financial data and activity data and analysing the data to determine performance data indicating the performance of the organisation for a past predetermined period and storing the performance data in the memory; and WO 2012/104813 PCT/IB2012/050500 4 outputting the performance data to a user. The customer data may include: customer satisfaction data including answers to customer satisfaction questions posed to the customer after interacting with the organisation; mystery shopping data including answers to customer satisfaction questions of a person that has acted as a customer and interacted with the organisation; and ghost calls data including answers to customer satisfaction questions of a person that has acted as a customer and interacted with the organisation via telephone. BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS Figure 1 is a block diagram illustrating an example system to implement the methodologies described herein; and Figure 2 is a block diagram illustrating an example method of measuring the performance of an organisation. DESCRIPTION OF EMBODIMENTS The present invention relates to a system and method for measuring the performance of an organisation, benchmarking that performance and providing output related to the processes which drives the business performance.

WO 2012/104813 PCT/IB2012/050500 5 It will be appreciated that the system and methodology may be implemented by any relevant person or organisation. For purposes of illustration only, the system and methodology will be described with reference to a motor vehicle sales dealership or chain of dealerships. It will also be appreciated that the term organisation need not refer to an organisation in its entirety but may also refer to one part of an organisation which in itself is an organisation albeit part of a larger entity. Referring to Figure 1 of the accompanying Figures, an exemplary system is shown. The system includes a server 12 which includes a number of modules to implement the methodologies described herein. The modules described may be implemented by a machine-readable medium embodying instructions which, when executed by a machine, cause the machine to perform any of the methods described above. It will be appreciated that embodiments of the present invention are not limited to such architecture, and could equally well find application in a distributed, or peer-to-peer, architecture system. Thus the modules illustrated could be located on one or more servers operated by one or more institutions. The system also includes an associated memory that is illustrated as a database 10. It will be appreciated that the memory could take any other suitable form. The system includes a customer data measurement module 14 for capturing customer data relating to the process impact on customers and customer satisfaction of customers of the organisation and storing the customer data in the memory. The process impact on customers is the ability of the business to execute process activities and put them together in a unique way that contributes to WO 2012/104813 PCT/IB2012/050500 6 a sustainable competitive advantage. These activities should all add value to the customer (tangible or not) or remove risk. The present system allows insight into what the customer is experiencing hence "the impact on the consumer". An example is as follows, using the sale of cars to illustrate: - Long before a sale is recorded contact is made - this is an activity. How well this is being done, how fast and how reliably etc is measured and the activity system tells how much is being done of this. - Then a sale process is completed - this is the next activity. How well this is done etc is measured. - Finally the car is sold. Customer Viewpoint Data: Typically, after interacting with the organisation, the customer's details are obtained and the customer contacted either telephonically or via electronic communication and asked to answer a number of questions. The questions relate to the satisfaction of the customer after their interaction with the organisation. The customer's answers to the questions are captured by the customer data measurement module 14 and stored in the database 10. Where the customer's answers are received telephonically, the answers to the questions are typically input by the person interviewing the customer into the customer data measurement module 14. In one example embodiment, the customer is asked a series of predefined questions and asked to give a score in a predefined range as well as capturing verbatim comments where appropriate to improve data richness.

WO 2012/104813 PCT/IB2012/050500 7 In this example, the customer data module 14 includes a user interface device typically in the form of a computer with a screen on which is displayed a template for the interviewing person to capture the scores reported back to them by the customer. Customer identification and loading data is also captured by the sales executives on another screen. The customer data module 14 then writes the captured scores to the database 10. Alternatively, the customer data module 14 accesses the customer information stored in the database 10 and obtains the customer e-mail address. The customer data module 14 then sends an e-mail to the retrieved e-mail address. When the customer opens the e-mail the template described above is displayed to them asking the customer the relevant questions with options to select various scores. A co-operating customer will send the e-mail back to the server 12 via the communications network 22. These will be received by the customer data module 14 which will extract the scores selected by the customer and write these to the database. In a further example, the customer will be directed by the e-mail over the Internet to a web application that forms part of the customer data module 14. The web application will display the template referred to above to the customer. The customer will be able to input their scores as answers to the questions displayed to them over the Internet. The customer data module 14 may also include mystery shopping data. Such data is derived through third party sources that pose as customers and interact with the organisation. They record their findings on a WO 2012/104813 PCT/IB2012/050500 8 predefined scorecard and such information would then be included through data module 14. The customer data may also include mystery shopping data including answers to customer satisfaction questions of a person that has acted as a customer and interacted with the organisation and where such questions relate to the same processes which the activities are related. In this example, answers to customer satisfaction questions posed to a person after posing as a customer and interacting with the organisation via telephone are stored. In the above two examples, the person posing as a customer or conducting the ghost call would also be asked to answer a number of questions and the answers to these in the form of scores would be captured by the customer data module 14 in the same way as mentioned above using the same template with the same or different questions. Alternatively data can be captured through an export where a third party system has been used to capture it. Financial Viewpoint A financial data measurement module 16 is used to capture financial data relating to the financial performance (including intermediary financial performance) of the organisation and stores the financial data 16 in the memory 10. The financial data includes any relevant financial information relating to the organisation and may include revenue, costs, profit or any other financial information. Specifically the information is extracted from the financial/accounting package in use by the organisation. That information extracted is only extracted to be in line with the benchmarked statistics that are measured in other companies and thus can be compared for the client and are relevant to the underlying business processes being assessed.

WO 2012/104813 PCT/IB2012/050500 9 The system design, therefore, relies on this prior understanding to customise the analysis and checking. The data is then presented only in line with the benchmarks. Further consolidation of the financial data occurs into operationally meaningful terms which can then be directly managed by the departmental or relevant manager. This then underpins the ability of the system to deliver incremental value to the organisation in financially measureable ways. Moreover, this bridges the gap between the accounts and the operations where the results are actually generated. The financial data measurement module 16 obtains the financial information by accessing a database which may be the database 10 or may be another database and retrieving the requested financial information. Alternatively, the financial data measurement module 16 receives the financial information from a third party server via the communications network 22. In this example, the financial data measurement module 16 will then store the financial data in the database 10. Activity Viewpoint: An activity data measurement module 18 is used for capturing activity data relating to the activity of the organisation with specific note to the business processes and their intermediary steps of that business and storing the activity data in the memory. Activity could mean any activity of the organisation. In the illustrative example embodiment of a car dealership the activity would be the number of sales of vehicles including the various models, colours and other vehicle package information. The activity could also include the number of potential customers visiting and/or phoning the dealership and furthermore could include the number of these potential customers that are converted to sales. Each process within the department / organisation is mapped and critical steps are identified WO 2012/104813 PCT/IB2012/050500 10 which allow measurement of progress along the process. Such understanding of the process is critical to defining all (financial, customer and activity) metrics. Once the process and the critical steps are identified/ prioritised then the activity module captures information relating to the completion of such steps by the organisation with any customer. In a car sales environment this includes: o Meetings with customers o Demonstrations of vehicles " Complete physical walk around sale " Signature of OTP " Submission of finance application In order to monitor the effectiveness of a department, this data is aggregated according to both the executives and the managers (an data has the flexibility of belonging to multiple managers through salespeople interacting across product and functional lines. The ability to convert the disparate data into comparable and benchmarked numbers drives the outcomes and the ability to analyse the same, An analysis module 20 accesses the stored customer data, financial data and activity data and analyses the data to determine performance data indicating the performance of the organisation for a past predetermined period. Analysis of the data within the system by the analysis module 20 is conducted as follows. The analysis module 20 benchmarks whereby the aggregation of a large number of metrics across similar business units allows information regarding the best expected performance from a given process to be provided. This in turn allows analysis of the movement of respective product lines and market sensitivity to advertising on given product lines.

WO 2012/104813 PCT/IB2012/050500 11 In addition, comparison of different brands and the efficiency of a process for them are provided. Benchmarking occurs using all three data sources described above namely the customer, financial and activity data. This allows the system to check processes within the business and modify as appropriate. Using an example of the sales process in a motor dealership, the activity data, because it can be overlayed on a process will show the relative efficiency of sales steps. Customer information data will show where process quality is critical and further insight for a given step is needed. Within some steps where self report may not be adequate, customer data both provides integrity checks and a qualitative insight into the performance of that part of the process by means of e.g. verbatim or standardised questions which can integrity check the data captured by employees. The analysis module 20 also aggregates data to improve management accessibility. Certain business functions can be very opaque to managers due to the volume or complexity of the processes and embedded know-how required An example in a motor dealership is the spare parts process. Since a single franchise may have 40 000 part lines available and the ordering process is opaque to managers we aggregate the data into predefined groups which allows us to monitor the efficacy of the ordering process of that manager without needing to view each order.

WO 2012/104813 PCT/IB2012/050500 12 Used Vehicles are another example of specialized knowledge. The system categorizes cars by similarity and then decides whether or not such stock is appropriate. This is opposed to the current reliance on the finite knowledge of the manager. Thus the system enables sales data to be used to align stock holding with such data. In sophisticated businesses there are numerous variations on stock. In order to drive optimal stocking and accounting provisions 'good' vs 'bad' stock must be identified before it has aged (the historical method is to wait until it is old then recognize it). By collecting data on the characteristics of the stock the system is able to determine such stock and therefore provide live feedback regarding the situation from a macro level. This is novel in that it allows the control of large group of businesses without the senior manager needing to analyze each unit in stock nor have any direct historical information regarding its performance. In addition, the system is able, by collecting activity data and financial data and integrating into supplier systems, to assess the performance of various suppliers. This is done through the comparison of performance whereby they can be compared both with each other as well as with normal performance benchmarks as established above. The collection of the data and the mapping of it to the underlying process allows the analysis module to extend to determining the problematic policies and procedures that a company may have in place. Such discrepancies are highlighted through the comparison of performance of the process to normal, and then the use of the financial data or customer data to analyze each step as may be required. The use of the process mapping means that with that data, a target point for investigation can be identified and then modifications suggested. Current systems offer typically one viewpoint which limits the usefulness of the data they generate. Further the lack of insight that the data provides into the underlying process contributes to data overload without defined WO 2012/104813 PCT/IB2012/050500 13 processes to fix within the business. Managers and front line employees therefore face numerous targets which may or may not connect with the roles they perform daily. Closing this gap is what drives the gains in productivity. The performance data is then stored in the memory 10. Finally, an output device is used to output the performance data to a user. The output device could take any one of a number of forms including a screen or a printer or any other sort of output device. Such output is available real time or daily allowing managers and front line employees to have direct and visible feedback on their performance thus driving their behaviour and outcomes. Because the financial data is presented in benchmark format, and the activity and customer viewpoint data similarly map onto the process (which mapping is done prior to system installation) the combination of the data is so structured as to provide insight into the actual problem area in terms of business process. Thus the business processes (activities) are encoded in the system together with several overlays representing customer perspective of process, financial or intermediary accounting perspective and process relevant supplier data. A unique contribution is the overlay of the data thus captured and stored which is thereby able to view the business process from a perspective of customer value creation and directly assess the impact on financial value creation. Many business processes relate to final financial outcome however, the typical financial recording may only begin after much of the value creation has occurred and the system therefore measures such value creation prior to the financial records and then once financial data is available continues to measure the further processes now overlayed with the financial information. Furthermore the system provides such analysis in WO 2012/104813 PCT/IB2012/050500 14 an automated manner and is integrated with the underlying financial package, relevant supplier system(s).

Claims (18)

1. A system for measuring the performance of an organisation, the system including: a memory for storing data therein; a customer data measurement module for capturing customer data relating to identifications of customers and customer satisfaction of customers of the organisation and storing the customer data in the memory; a financial data measurement module for capturing financial data relating to the financial performance of the organisation and storing the financial data in the memory; an activity data measurement module for capturing activity data relating to the activity of the organisation and storing the activity data in the memory; an analysis module to access the stored customer data, financial data and activity data and to analyse the data to determine performance data indicating the performance of the organisation for a past predetermined period and storing the performance data in the memory; an output device for outputting the performance data to a user.

2. A system according to claim 1 wherein the customer data measurement module interacts with the activity data module to further capture information relating to which parts of a process a customer has been through thereby allowing the customer data to relate back to the process in question. WO 2012/104813 PCT/IB2012/050500 16

3. A system according to claim 1 wherein the customer data further includes: customer satisfaction data including answers to customer satisfaction questions posed to the customer after interacting with the organisation; mystery shopping data including answers to customer satisfaction questions of a person that has acted as a customer and interacted with the organisation; and ghost calls data including answers to customer satisfaction questions of a person that has acted as a customer and interacted with the organisation via telephone.

4. A system according to claim 1 wherein the analysis module relates the data stored directly to an underlying process being measured thereby allowing for process correction.

5. A system according to claim 1 wherein the customer data measurement module receives customer data via a communications network from a customer.

6. A system according to claim 5 wherein the customer data measurement module receives customer data from the customer over the Internet, which data has been filled into a web application by the customer in response to questions displayed to the customer over the Internet.

7. A system according to claim 1 wherein the financial data includes any relevant financial information relating to the organisation.

8. A system according to claim I wherein the financial data includes revenue, costs, profit or any other financial information. WO 2012/104813 PCT/IB2012/050500 17

9. A system according to claim 1 wherein the activity data includes at least one of the number of sales, the number of potential customers visiting and/or phoning and the number of these potential customers that are converted to sales.

10. A method for measuring the performance of an organisation, the method including: capturing customer data relating to customer satisfaction of customers of the organisation and storing the customer data in a memory; capturing financial data relating to the financial performance of the organisation and storing the financial data in the memory; capturing activity data relating to the activity of the organisation and storing the activity data in the memory; accessing the stored customer data, financial data and activity data and analysing the data to determine performance data indicating the performance of the organisation for a past predetermined period and storing the performance data in the memory; and outputting the performance data to a user.

11. A method according to claim 10 wherein the customer data measurement module interacts with the activity data module to further capture information relating to which parts of a process a customer has been through thereby allowing the customer data to relate back to the process in question. WO 2012/104813 PCT/IB2012/050500 18

12. A method according to claim 10 wherein the customer data further includes: customer satisfaction data including answers to customer satisfaction questions posed to the customer after interacting with the organisation; mystery shopping data including answers to customer satisfaction questions of a person that has acted as a customer and interacted with the organisation; and ghost calls data including answers to customer satisfaction questions of a person that has acted as a customer and interacted with the organisation via telephone.

13. A method according to claim 10 wherein the analysis module relates the data stored directly to an underlying process being measured thereby allowing for process correction.

14. A method according to claim 10 wherein the customer data measurement module receives customer data via a communications network from a customer.

15. A method according to claim 14 wherein the customer data measurement module receives customer data from the customer over the Internet, which data has been filled into a web application by the customer in response to questions displayed to the customer over the Internet.

16. A method according to claim 10 wherein the financial data includes any relevant financial information relating to the organisation.

17. A method according to claim 10 wherein the financial data includes revenue, costs, profit or any other financial information. WO 2012/104813 PCT/IB2012/050500 19

18. A method according to claim 10 wherein the activity data includes at least one of the number of sales, the number of potential customers visiting and/or phoning and the number of these potential customers that are converted to sales.