PJ Express (PJEx) is one of the largest privately owned New England business-to-consumer(B2C) carriers specializing in "last-mile" deliveries. PJEx is a company with new leadership, but also with a 2-year drop in sales and profits, and recently was contacted by a more successful competitor as an acquisition target. The overnight shipments to residential consumers have increased competitive pressures as UPS, FedEx, and Amazon have moved into smaller, Tier-two distribution hubs. Profits for all carriers of consumer products have been squeezed as major retailers have established a "free shipping" benefit that is not going away after peak shipping seasons (i.e., cyber week and holidays).

The PJEx executive team is led by a new CEO who left FedEx Ground after leading a successful turnaround of an acquired carrier. The success was attributed to a focused strategy using the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) framework. The CEO was selected in part because of his success in using the BSC and because PJEx had just recently committed to using the BSC performance measurement framework to align with its 3-year turnaround strategic plan. Last year PJEx charged four teams with developing perspectives for the BSC frameworkthe financial perspective team, the internal business process perspective team, the customer perspective team, and the learning and growth perspective team. To accelerate the strategic turnaround effort, the learning and growth (L&G) perspective team contracted with a BSC consulting company, Balanced Scorecard Systems (BSS). BSS is a strategic planning consulting group specializing in the logistics and transportation industry using the BSC approach. The L&G team efforts are much farther along than the other teams and BSS has presented a first draft of the learning and growth measures.

A partial L&G scorecard focused on improving organizational capacity performance and includes:

Objectives:

Establish a learning organization effort

Improve training effectiveness

Measures:

Add organizational learning components: observe, capture, store, access, disseminate, and evaluate.

Increase percent of Six Sigma programGreen Belts (by 45 percent), Black Belts (by 20 percent), and Master Black Belts (by 15 percent)

Targets:

Develop Knowledge Management System (KMS)

Build High Performance Improvement Teams (HPT)

Initiatives:

Benchmarklearning new concepts from external sources and internal sources on KMS

Planassess where new knowledge is needed as related to key performance indicators

Findlocate a department/division (internal) or organization (external) that performs our identified process (KMS) better for comparison

Observemonitor performance of benchmarked KMS and note differences in performance

Analyzedetermine causes for differences in performance

Adaptselect best practices from benchmarked organization and modify for our KMS

Improveintegrate our new learning into other process improvements

Transition to project based training delivery for Six Sigma content

Analyze department training needsdetermine the number and level of qualified "belts" to have all employees engaged in HPT

Analyze training taskproduce a detailed description of skills required at Green Belt, Black Belt, and Master Black Belt levels

Develop training objective measuresmeasures in quality tool knowledge, statistical analysis, improvement process, and improvement experiment design

Organize training contentsecure training materials and subject matter experts in Six Sigma, DMAIC, and belt requirements.

Determine training methodsproject-based training methodology where training occurs while teams are involved in actual HPT improvement projects

Select training resourcessecure Six Sigma guidebooks

Complete training plan

Deliver training pilot

Assess training pilot, make adjustments and submit to HR for KMS inclusion

The transition with the new executive management team is certain to have some impact on PJEx's recent strategy and planning activities. The new CEO has indicated in preliminary discussions that he would be driving the Balanced Scorecard initiative based on his previous experience and success with BSC. A growing number of employees have been critical in open discussion meetings initiated and delivered by the new executive team. A common complaint in these meetings is that PJEx has introduced several similar companywide programs in the past that have had limited success but huge organizational investments of time and money including Total Quality Management, LEAN management, Six Sigma/Black Belt, Just in Time (JIT), Constraint Theory (TOC), etc. All of the previous programs started out with positive results but efforts, measures of effectiveness and eventually support and commitment waned. In addition, the manufacturing group assigned the internal business processes perspective (IBP) of BSC is presenting an alternative to the BSC all together as an effort to achieve the new management turnaround goals. The IBP group is proposing a shift to the Baldrige Award framework.

Discussion Questions

1. Should the Learning & Growth team sever its relationship with Balanced Scorecard Systems before the new CEO presents the new BSC plan? Develop a Pro/Con response that the Learning & Growth team could present to the BSC steering committee.

2. What advice can you provide the new executive team for their next organizational meeting that addresses the staying power of BSC?

3. Is the Baldrige approach that the manufacturing group is presenting an alternative to the BSC or can it run parallel?