A paper considering the benefits of Business Process Improvement during strategic goal and objective planning.

As the economic crisis continues to ravage businesses around the world, more and more companies will look to efficient business solutions and improved products and services as a means to cut costs and increase profitability when undertaking strategic goal and objective planning. Strategic goals should not only focus on financial performance but should also include goals relating to customer value, competitor advantage, business operations that drive value to the customer and shareholders and the capabilities of human resources and other assets.

To facilitate the journey to implement corporate strategies, executive teams often use the Balanced Scorecard (Robert Kaplan and David Norton 1996) technique to partition and frame strategic goals into specific categories in addition to financial output, for example Customer, Internal Business Processes and Learning and Growth.

• Financial goals focus on finance and accounting themes that directly affect the bottom line for example: reduce internal costs by 15% this year; increase sales by 10% this year.
• Customer goals focus on how the customer perceives value from the business (cost and quality).
• Internal Business Processes goals focus on the value the organization offers to its customers in its products and services (cost and quality).
• Learning and growth goals address new product development, organizational skills development and application of technology and productivity tools

These themes answer questions such as:

• Who are our customers and how do they see us?
• How do we get the best results and returns for the money we spend?
• What must we excel at in terms of our core business?

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