Question 1

Discussion & Background

It is integrated approach that means to consider overall business performance by determining the performance impacts of one department to another. Essential characteristics of approach involves encouraging information exchanges and feedback system, setting performance targets, overall business performance evaluation, and quality considerations from strategic point of view. Contrary to balanced scorecard approach, benchmarking is also good approach to evaluations. Benchmarking is also formal and detailed process just like balanced scorecard approach. However, benchmarking is relatively simple and efficient approach compared to above discussed approach. Most challenging factor in benchmarking is the choice of company as benchmark or standardization process that should be careful as organization can incur great loss if it conducts poor standardization.

Question

What limitations do you see of balanced scorecard and benchmarking process?

Question 2 

Discussion & Background

Indeed, sometimes speed does compromise the quality of production, bringing down standards. it is sometimes understandable how managers can compromise quality(not always intentionally)due to the pressures that they face from competitors, who are all aiming to gain competitive advantage by meeting or even exceeding customer expectation and perceptions. However when a service or product quality plummets and "problems occur, the customers confidence in the firm hangs in the balance"(Berry, 1994, p. 37). Sometimes, the issue lays in the fact that there are differences in the way that customers view quality to those of firms. Firms may view product quality as a "precise and measurable variable"(Garvin, 1984). For instance a high quality ice-cream may have a high content of butter and a high quality rug have a large number of knots per square inch. This approach has a vertical or hierarchical approach to quality and may be ranked according the number of attributes they may possess. "However, an unambiguous ranking is possible only if the attributes in question are considered preferable by virtually all buyers"(Garvin, 1984). And these attributes also bring into question the issue of price. They suggest that higher quality bring with it higher price because "quality reflects the quantity of attributes that a product contains, and because attributes are considered to be costly to produce, higher-quality goods will be more expensive"(Garvin, 1984).

This then brings me to the issue of price and how developing countries would struggle to keep up in competing with more developed and financially well off businesses from developed markets that already have comparative financial advantage. A study by Ju& Wei, 2008 states that "countries with a higher level of financial development have a higher export share in industries that use more external finance"(p. 3). For example, in terms of quality products you will find that people in developing countries import goods from countries like the UK and USA, however, it is very rare to find a person from the UK or USA ordering a product from Angola because of higher quality.

Question

So my question is, how are low financial businesses to compete with financially stable organisation in quality where quality is linked with price and high costs?

Reference style: Harvard style