Question 1 Freshmart is a grocery and general merchandise retail chain that had grown since the founding years about three decades ago. It now has supermarkets located in most towns and cities in its home country. In the early years of the business, the owners had emphasized on the-importance of financial nerformance. In line with this. the management was tasked to keep a tight control on expenses and major expenditures. To avoid hefty depreciation charges that will affect the bottom line results, Freshmart had refrained from investing incapital expenditures. Over the years, it had relied on an outdated and aged payment check out system to serve customers paying at the checkout counters. The system does not have any optical scanning capabilities and depends on the cashier staff inputting the prices of the merchandise manually into the system. The process is slowed down due to frequent errors made by new staff as most of the experienced pioneer staff had gradually retired in recent years due to old age. Due to the expanding business and the inefficient_checking out process, long queues had been forming at the checkout counters leading to many impatient and frustrated customers leaving behind negative verbal feedbacks to the staff. Apart from the long waiting time at the checkout counters, customers have also experienced dissatisfaction with the staff's lack of product knowledge. This has been mainly attributed to the high staff turnover rate occurring in Freshmart as most new staff are very rapidly de-motivated by the negative feedbacks from customers and majority made the option to leave before there is sufficient time to gain a good understanding of product knowledge. Due to the high turnover of staff, Freshmart believes it to be a waste of resources and time to train new staff. To protect its profits, Freshmart had therefore, significantly reduced its budget on training. Over the recent years, profits have fallen despite the tight control on spending and Freshmart has recognized that it has paid insufficient attention to certain lead indicators in performance measurement, particularly the non-financial indicators. In an attempt to regain the loyalty of its customers, Freshmart has introduced a loyalty card scheme that rewards customers with discount vouchers based on their spending at the supermarkets. The management is also considering the introduction of a balanced scorecard approach to better manage the performance of its stores. Required: (a) Construct an objective and a suitable performance measure for each of three nonfinancial perspectives of a balanced scorecard that Freshmart could use to support its new strategy of impmoving-the_ustomer experience. In your answer, you should state three (3) perspectives and recommend with reasons an objective and a performance measure for each one of your three perspectives. (20 marks) (b) Assess the use of non-financial measures and financial measures in Freshmart. (10 marks)