McCord Adopts Analytical Tool

<B>McCord Adopts Analytical Tool</B>

By Megan Hjermstad

As part of its balanced scorecard initiative, McCord Travel Management is embarking on a companywide rollout of Hyperion Performance Scorecard software, a business analysis application it will use to communicate its organizational strategy and goals and monitor its progress towards meeting business objectives.

McCord, which already is using Hyperion Pillar--a budgeting, planning and forecasting application, and Hyperion Enterprise, a financial consolidation, reporting and analysis solution--currently is implementing the Performance Scorecard software at the executive level. By the fourth quarter, it will be on the desktop of every employee in McCord's business travel management unit.

Michael Collins, executive director of operations at McCord, said the leading providers of balanced scorecard analysis software are Hyperion and ERP companies, such as SAP or Peoplesoft, although there are alternatives in the market.

"In my estimate, the most prevalent are typically homegrown products, but to home grow software for 1,200 employees would have been too difficult," said Collins. "We decided to go with Hyperion because we already were a user of their financial analysis software. We knew we needed high performance software and the product was a good fit for us as a midsize company."

McCord for a year and a half has been working on its balanced scorecard, a management system being used internally by many Fortune 500 companies to translate strategy into action. The scorecard typically measures 12 to 15 actions across four key categories: financial, customer perspective, business processes, and learning and growth.

"In our business, the majority of employees are dealing with external people on a regular basis," said Collins. "What is often missing is an understanding of internal organization. The balanced scorecard provides a way of defining and communicating our strategy."

The Hyperion system will provide relevant information on a monthly basis and will be able to measure some elements in real time. "It is obviously very data-intensive," said Collins. "It is meant to tell a story across a broad spectrum." He said that the scorecard also is a method of better measuring customer relationships. "As a service provider, our strategy really has to be based on their strategy," he said. "Our job is to execute it in a fashion that it generates value for our customers."

Over the next year, McCord will be identifying beta clients, and in conjunction with those clients jointly develop scorecards to meet their specific needs. The balanced scorecard, for example, can be used to measure preferred supplier performance for a particular client. "Preferred supplier performance in our business has long been a critical success factor," said Collins. "Our customers expect us to perform at a certain level. Certain clients, key contacts and account managers are aware of those expectations, but this will drive that awareness down to the agent level and show what the desired outcome is and, more specifically, show how that translates to relationships and joint financial performance."

Collins said that so far the traditional approach has been to build a scorecard and deploy it at the corporate level, but McCord will extend the program to the whole employee unit.

"Typically, performance rolls up to someone who evaluates it, begins making decisions and starts pushing them back down to those that are living it every day," said Collins. "This engages employees who typically don't have much to say. Instead of talking to a few managers and administrators, this enables us to better engage a broader population of folks.