Nextgen Corporation has its head office in Sydney and operates throughout Australia and New Zealand. There are three main divisions:

. Newspaper division – which owns leading tabloid newspapers in several cities

. Cable television division – which operates cable television services in Australia

. Brewing division – which operates major breweries in Perth and Brisbane

Sophia Thompson has just been appointed as the new management accountant in the head office, charged with redesigning the performance measurement system.

Required:

(a) Sophia is considering expanding the divisional targets to include not only financial measures but also non-financial measures by developing a balanced scorecard for each division. For the Brewing division, she has drafted a set of objectives to support the four perspectives of the balanced scorecard. For each objective, provide one relevant lag indicator and one corresponding lead indicator. Write your answers in the table provided. (4 marks)

Perspective	Objective
Financial	Increase ROI
Customer	Increase market share
Internal business processes	Increase the variety of beers
Learning and growth	Improve skill levels of production employees

(b) Sophia has also recommended that the performance measurement system should make greater use of benchmarking. Why would she recommend benchmarking? Describe a form of benchmarking that Sophia can undertake to benchmark the performance of the Brewing division and identify the advantages and limitations of this form of benchmarking. (4 marks)