Would you fly a plane using only your gut or a single instrument? Surely not, as it probably wouldn't end well. Instead, you'd use all the navigation, dials, and indicators available in the airplane cockpit, right? They'll give you the information you need to reach your destination.
The balanced scorecard is the business equivalent of a well-equipped cockpit.
It shows you the company’s performance in several areas simultaneously and guides you toward your key strategic objectives.
Companies who turn to balanced scorecard software often do so because they struggle with having a holistic overview of their performance. They use outdated tools, such as spreadsheets, or disconnected business tools. And when leaders don’t have clear visibility into the company’s status, they waste time and resources on dead-end strategies.
Neither in an organization nor on an airplane would you want to operate with blind spots. In order to make fast decisions and adapt your strategy, you need software that centralizes your strategy in one place to give you real-time insights and a balanced view of your business.
In this article, we’ll show you how Cascade can help you effortlessly implement a balanced scorecard methodology in your organization, monitor progress, and stay on top of your company’s performance.
Use Cascade As Your Balanced Scorecard (BSC) Software
Cascade is the world’s #1 strategy execution platform for companies that prioritize profitability, growth, and fast adaptability. While this claim might sound biased, customer reviews back it up with 4.8-star ratings.
This all-in-one platform combines the most powerful elements of a performance management system, strategic planning, and reporting. It’s a highly customizable strategy execution platform that can be tailored to support teams of all sizes. Our customer success team is made up of strategy experts who used to work at top international consulting firms and are dedicated to helping you execute your strategy.
You can customize Cascade to fit your current strategy management system—whether you use a balanced scorecard, OKR framework, or a combination of strategic planning models, we’ve got you covered. Bring your existing strategic plan, and we will help you import it so you can start using the platform straight away.
Since our launch in 2014, we have been on a mission to help organizations close the strategy execution gap and create high-performing organizations that deliver business results faster.
Today, teams of all sizes and industries around the world rely on Cascade, including Johnson & Johnson, McClaren, and American Express.
So, if you're looking for a tool to help you get started with balanced scorecards in your organization, Cascade is a perfect choice.
👉🏻 Want to try it out right away for free? Play around with Cascade's Balanced Scorecard Template in your free account (no credit card required), or book a demo with one of our strategy experts to see how to set your BSC in Cascade!
How To Set Up Balanced Scorecards With Cascade
If you're using spreadsheets or several project management systems, implementing balanced scorecards can be time-consuming, error-prone, and frustrating. But with Cascade, it’s simple!
Let us show you Cascade’s core features and how to use them:
1. Build your strategic plan using the balanced scorecard framework
A. Add perspectives to your strategic plan
The balanced scorecard (BSC) methodology looks at business activities from four perspectives. You will divide all activities, initiatives, and goals into the following areas:
- Financial perspective
- Customer perspective
- Internal business process perspective
- Learning and growth perspective
With Cascade’s planner feature, you can easily add your four perspectives as "Focus Areas" and set the foundation stones of your strategic plan.
As part of our customer success services, we can also help you set up and import your existing strategic plans directly into Cascade. You can start tracking progress right away and reduce the time needed to implement a new tool.
B. Add Objectives, Projects, and KPIs to each perspective
Next, add all of your strategic goals, projects, and key performance indicators (KPIs) to each perspective.
Adding objectives in Cascade is intuitive, straightforward, and accessible from almost anywhere in your workspace.
You can also add key initiatives or KPIs (measures) in the same step or add them later on in the process.
Within Cascade, you can also build custom fields where you can set and categorize which data and metrics you want to track. For example, you can track specific financial measures like the budget spent, the budget allocated, or internal business process measures like hours worked, weight, and priority. These can then be visualized and reported on to assess the performance (for example, funding resource allocations, operating cash flows, etc.) of your overall strategy and improve the decision-making process.
C. Assign owners to drive accountability
As you can see in the screenshots above, you can assign owners to each objective, project, KPI, or other initiative. No matter the methodology you use, this element is crucial to every strategic plan. Your team members need to have a clear understanding of what is expected of them and take full ownership of progress. This is important for accountability and greater efficiency.
In Cascade, each owner is able to edit, update, and report on the progress he or she is making toward assigned goals. And most importantly, everyone within the team knows who is working on what, which prevents confusion, duplicated efforts, and siloed information.
D. Streamline risk management with Cascade
Cascade helps you monitor risks by giving you the option to add risk to each relevant objective, KPI, or initiative. You can do this on the platform by clicking on a specific objective and following the prompts:
In the next step, you can even add the type of risk, the owner responsible for the risk, and collaborators.
There's more! You can make an action plan for each risk to prevent it from occurring or minimize its effects.
This will help your team be proactive and mitigate risks before they become a serious problem.
E. Cascade your balanced scorecard
It’s difficult to align multiple balanced scorecard documents for each business division or department. Even small companies need multiple balanced scorecard documents, and linkages between them can be hard to identify and track.
Using Cascade, you can build sub-plans for business units and departments and link them back to your top-level strategy. With the Alignment & Relationship feature, your teams can track and report their progress while you have a complete overview of the big picture, completely aware of what’s happening with your plan in one place.
2. Use live dashboards to track performance
Once you’ve defined your objectives, you’ll need to monitor how your organization is reaching its goals. With Cascade, you can instantly visualize your real-time performance and progress using interactive dashboards.
Using the widget feature, you can build custom dashboards that suit your audience's needs. Use bar, line, or pie charts to visualize data and stay on top of progress. With more than 1,000 integrations, you can pull data from your favorite BI tools and present it in a user-friendly format.
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3. Build customizable reports
Reporting on progress to your most important stakeholders and holding review meetings are crucial elements of effective performance management. But, spending hours finding and reviewing performance metrics can steal time and resources. Cascade has a better way.
Cascade’s Report feature helps you create customized reports with up-to-date information on progress. There is no need to copy/paste data from multiple spreadsheets, work in multiple tools, or shift through files to find the correct figures for this quarter. You have all the data in one place.
4. Review and update your balanced scorecard in one place
Plans change, and you'll need a tool that makes adapting easier, faster, and better. Fast adaptability is one of Cascade's key advantages. If you make a change in one place, it will be reflected in all linked sub-plans and throughout the organization. You can stop wasting time in meetings to keep everyone informed and aligned.
Teams can easily update their strategic initiatives, performance measures, and revised metrics by using Cascade as a central data source. Less time spent updating multiple files and typing update notifications means more time to execute what needs to be done.
5. Connect it with your favorite business tools
Siloed data and strategic plans result in minimal impact on business performance. That's why Cascade integrates with +1,000 popular business tools. You can pick between multiple collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams or Slack, project management tools such as Smartsheet and Airtable, or other business tools such as Excel, Google Sheets, Salesforce, and Microsoft Dynamics.
A central source of information will help you act faster, plan better, and keep your business running well so that you can make more profit over time.
What Users Love About Cascade 💜
Ok, enough talking from our side. Let’s see what Cascade’s users love about this strategy execution platform:
1. Cascade is easy to use
Cascade doesn't do clunky, laggy, or confusing. From automation to reporting, the platform is designed with users in mind. Every tool, feature, and ability is easy to use and quick to learn, and it will improve the way you do strategic management.
2. Customer success is Cascade's top priority
If your business wants a strategy execution partner and not just another tool, Cascade is what you’ve been waiting for. Besides a comprehensive library of onboarding videos and hundreds of articles in our knowledge base, our customer success agents are ready to help you make the most of the platform, no matter your business size.
3. Cascade helps you drive strategy execution across the organization
Siloed efficiencies won’t take your teams where you need them to be. With Cascade, you’ll be able to bring your entire organization into the fold and enhance business intelligence. It has powerful reporting features that allow strategic thinkers, managers, and team leaders to keep an eye on key metrics and ensure performance.
In comparison to non-Cascade users, 90% of Cascade users report that their strategy is on track.
Here’s what our customers love about Cascade:
4. Cascade helps you view business performance at a glance
Expand to a high-level view of strategic initiatives or drill down to see how team activities are aligned with broader strategic goals. With Cascade’s powerful reporting functionality, you’ll get better insights into what’s going right and wrong at different levels.
5. Cascade scales with you
When we say Cascade is flexible, we mean it. Cascade is great for small, medium, and large businesses. It’s even better for companies that are growing. Why?
Cascade offers an all-in-one platform that scales with your organization. When you grow, you don’t need to add extra tools. It’s a single solution with no hidden fees.
Plans & pricing:
- You can try Cascade’s free forever plan before you fully commit to a new tool.
- Essentials Plan: Ideal for organizations looking to initiate and centralize their strategy execution in a digital format, with a little help from our team of experts—contact sales for custom pricing.
- Enterprise+ Plan: For organizations looking to uplift their strategy, partnering deeply with Cascade’s experts to transform their execution—contact sales for custom pricing.
👉🏻 Visit our pricing page for more details on plans & pricing!
As you scale, so does Cascade.
What Cascade’s customers say:
“With just 50% growth in sales this year, we grew profitability by 800% through continuous improvements to operational efficiency. With Cascade, we are creating visibility, alignment, and accountability and that’s why we think it is a perfect match.” - Marius Turbatu, Corporate Development Director, eSky Group
💜Check out some of our customer stories and case studies to see how they use Cascade for successful strategy execution!
Is Cascade The Right Choice For You? 👀
Cascade is the number one choice of 45,000+ teams that focus on growth, efficiency, and profitability.
If you want to use balance scorecards or build your own custom strategic methodologies, Cascade is the perfect platform to help you master strategic execution.
Want to find out if it’s the right balanced scorecard software solution for your business?
Set up a call with a Cascade expert to get a one-on-one walkthrough of the platform’s features.
FAQs About Balanced Scorecard Software
What is the balanced scorecard?
Created by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton, the balanced scorecard is a strategic management framework that goes beyond traditional financial metrics to evaluate a company's performance from four essential perspectives—financial, customer, internal processes, and learning and growth.
What is a balanced scorecard tool?
A balanced scorecard tool is used in the balanced scorecard methodology to help businesses with strategy planning, tracking, and managing performance. With it, businesses can find performance gaps, make changes, and make sure that their day-to-day operations are in line with their business strategy as a whole.
How do you create a balanced scorecard?
You can make a balanced scorecard for your business by putting all of its KPIs, goals, and objectives into one of four categories: financial, customer, internal business processes, and learning and growth. Then look at each initiative's risks and progress to understand how your organization is performing.
What is a strategy map?
A strategy map is a visualization tool that shows you how balanced scorecard perspectives layer on top of each other. This helps you to visualize and assess the cause-and-effect relationship between strategic objectives.
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