At the beginning of 1998 Henderson Company, an international telecommunications com pany, embarked on an environmental improvement

Question:

At the beginning of 1998 Henderson Company, an international telecommunications com¬

pany, embarked on an environmental improvement program. The company set a goal to have all its facilities ISO 14001 registered by 2001. (There are 30 facilities worldwide.) It also adopted the Balanced Scorecard with an environmental perspective added as a fifth perspective. To communicate the environmental progress made, management decided to issue, on a voluntary basis, an annual environmental progress report. Internally, the Ac¬

counting Department issued monthly progress reports and developed a number of mea¬

sures that could be reported even more frequently to assess progress. Henderson also asked an international CPA firm to prepare an auditor's report that would comment on the rea¬

sonableness and fairness of Henderson's approach to assessing and measuring environ¬

mental performance.

At the end of 2001, the controller had gathered data that would be used in preparing the environmental progress report. A sample of the data collected is given below.

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Required:
1. What is the justification for adding an environmental perspective to the Balanced Scorecard?
2. Henderson Company decided to do the following: Obtain ISO 14001 registration, pre¬
pare an annual environmental progress report, prepare internal environmental progress leports, and request an audit of the external report. How do these decisions fit within the Balanced Scorecard framework? To what environmental cost categories do these activities belong?
3. Using the data, prepare a bar graph for each of the three environmental variables provided (registrations, energy, and greenhouse gases). Comment on the progress made on these three dimensions. To which core objectives do each of the three mea¬
sures relate?