Accountancy

Much of Performance Tracks baseline activity such as the Health Check-up is based on value added work a good accountant could or does do, particularly for the smaller business. Collating information, feedback and discussion actions and strategy, verification and auditing are some examples of this.

Much of the traditional accountants work is often perceived as non-value add, that is the information is gathered for audit or smaller tasks but rarely put to practical good use beyond for what it was originally gathered. Using Performance Track the accountant becomes a value added team member able to add value in entirely new dimensions making the core work both cost effective and useful.

This is particularly true for organizations that are dealing with practices that are perhaps smaller and do not have the resources or methods to provide a complete service. For instance, as a business grows there are issues with both IT and Management Consultancy as well as the normal day-to-day activities, legal work, auditing, financial presentation of information and raising equity or sale of business etc.

Only the biggest accountants can offer this level of service to clients since each of these fields are very specialist when undertaken professionally. A disjointed approach often leads to three parties asking the same information.

Accountants for auditing, management consultants for business improvement and IT specialists for systems implementation for instance use process mapping. The areas are so specialized on small unit cannot offer these all to satisfaction and if they do not the information is replicated – meaning money and time is wasted for the small business. Both directly and indirectly in poor unsynchronized communication.

Performance Track has teamed with accountants to offer this integrated service. Specializing in many years of IT and Management consulting for both large and small business, the Performance Track – Accountant combination is a perfect  team.

In order not to restrict Performance Track services to the SME who has a willing and able accountant, Performance Track has teamed with a large SME accountant to offer these integrated services. 

This has the added advantage of honing our processes to ensure they are compatible with accountants and therefore with you, and if in the event you like what Performance Track has to offer but have not an accountant who can offer these services you can switch to Performance Track for an excellent professional service.

No. Being backed by accountants has proven that we have a value added service to provide. We have honed our processes to make sure that the way we can work with accountants is both complimentary and value added. This relationship has and will continue to be invaluable, and ensures that we are always current.

However, we believe that there are many more organizations able to benefit from our services than we are able to manage as accountants so we have adopted a strategy to cooperate with accountants as opposed to competing with them. This is to everybody’s advantage, since many accountants and their clients can benefit from Performance Track value add which is entirely needed and complimentary.

How Does Performance Track ensure confidentiality and non-poaching between accountants and Performance Track Clients if it wants to do accountancy work?

This is on three levels.

i)                      Performance Track has developed it’s services for the SME via accountants because this is the only way to get the reach needed to make it cost effective. Performance Tracks core business is not accountancy. We can offer it to make our service complete, and to keep us in touch, and we believe that this does give us an advantage over traditional accountants. However we believe that we can have more value add to our business and our partner accountants and our clients by working through accountants rather than competing with them. For this reason we would never poach or steal a client or seek to undermine a relationship.

ii)                    This is achieved both on business level and contractual level. It makes no sense for us to act this way on a business level, and our terms and conditions are such that we do not and will not do this on an contractual level.

iii)                   We have internal procedures and systems in place to ensure that no customer / client / partner confidentiality is broken. All information and relationships are secure. This is on a systems level and procedure level.

Performance Track offers the full range of accountancy services which are integrated with all our products. This ranges from Bookkeeping, Business Planning and Execution, to raising equity and business sale. Our Value products are proven to facilitate and add value one way or another to all these activities for business. See here for a full description of our services.

Performance Track’s backers are all qualified auditors.

Performance Track does not provide web enabled accountancy, because our experience shows that for accountancy work most small business still wish to have their own systems. Those that do not can use our systems and services. There is little value add in offering this service. If it is required we can make a recommendation if necessary.

We do however offer web-based services for management information, community, and consulting services.  We have built up extensive experience that can save much time money and effort on both sides for these more value add services. Delivering high value add and effective service is what we are about.

No they don’t, Performance Track offers customers business “Health checks” that are external facing through the use of its comprehensive benchmarking services. These benchmarking services not only include financial information but the essential management and people related information that is required to give the full picture and normally never provided via traditional company accounts by Accountants and Banks. In addition Performance Track provides realistic action plans based on this external information that is essential in the 21^st century competitive business world.

Performance Track through its “Fitness programmes” offers its customers well proven “business execution” tools and methodologies, which enable business advice to be converted into “Doing”! The Balanced Scorecard implements strategy and Six Sigma implements business improvement. Banks and Accountants never get involved in the “Doing”!

Further more, once you are underway with your fitness program, have mastered the scorecard and key customer centric processes, the real power of Performance Track kicks in, to convert this effort into real money, sales and savings. Value Sales, Value Procurement, and Value Product and Service help you extend the fitness programs to a new dimension of value. No accountant or bank will do this.

Six Sigma

Six Sigma is a business improvement methodology, which at its heart seeks to understand what the customer’s true requirements are. Once these requirements are understood the associated business processes are improved and defects eliminated which result in increased customer satisfaction and reduced costs for the company.

Think of it as the husband who in a bid to please his wife decides to do the weekly shopping. Without asking his wife for a shopping list or her requirements he will surely return home with inappropriate shopping/supplies and disappoint her!

Six Sigma: Is a comprehensive and flexible system for achieving sustaining and maximizing business success. Six Sigma is uniquely driven by close understanding of customer needs, disciplined use of data, facts and statistical analysis and diligent attention to managing improving and reinventing business processes.

Sigma is the Greek letter “s” and in statistical terms means "standard deviation". Traditional statistical process control would indicate that considering a normal distribution, 3 standard deviations each side of the mean would cover 99.73% of the population. Six Sigma extends this to 6 standard deviations each side of the mean and represents 3.4 defects in a 1million and therefore raises the standard for quality acceptance.

No, TQM (Total Quality Management) focused on product quality, had unclear goals, was a "fuzzy" concept, failed to break down internal barriers and was usually run by technical zealots with purist attitudes and only lead to incremental change with many TQM projects ending in failure. Six Sigma by contrast is Customer focused has clear financial goals and leads to exponential change. Six Sigma does use some of the better practical management techniques found in TQM and has used Statistical Process Control as one of its foundations.

No, BPR (Business Process Re- engineering) was about analyzing and process mapping processes and then re designing the processes more efficiently, (Six Sigma does include similar type activities). However BPR's failure was that it did this in exclusion of key factors such as external considerations (customers / suppliers) and soft considerations like people. As a consequence although a fat organization lost weight it was under a butchers knife and very crude. Afterwards much organization knowledge and capability previously unidentified and unrecognized needed to be rebuilt.

Six Sigma really surfaced in the mid 90's and was perfected by GE and Allied Signal. Other larger organizations are starting to jump onto the bandwagon and are reaping the benefits. These larger organizations are a collection of SME's and therefore if a SME within GE can implement Six Sigma then you can too,  given the correct knowledge and help. We believe that Performance Track is the first to bring Six Sigma techniques to the individual SME market.

Like all good ideas it is adopted early by the leading companies (tend to be corporates) and will filter down to the SME level at some stage. Six Sigma will either touch the SME directly or via a Corporate Supply Chain but the SME will be touched!

Six Sigma can be applied equally to Service companies as manufacturing companies in fact service-orientated businesses may have more to gain from a Six Sigma implementation. It has been shown that the cost of poor quality in service based businesses and processes typically run as high as 50% of total budget (in manufacturing operations it's estimated at about 10 to 20%). Analysis of service processes often reveal that less than 10% of total process "cycle time" is devoted to real work on tasks that are important to the customers.

A Six Sigma Black belt is a term used for people who have been trained to a high standard in the Six Sigma methodology, within the large corporates the Black belts are full time project managers responsible for overseeing various projects achieving cost savings and coaching.

Performance Track's consultants will act as Black belts, Master Black belts etc and guide organizations through a Six Sigma implementation. It is advisable that the company nominates project team leaders (not full time) as central focus for contact and knowledge transfer.

Having said that, your organization must understand the philosophy and adopt this for success, since only you can bring about results. Performance Track is the Coach.

No, all you need to know is how to count, how to add, and how to divide - you don't have to be a statistician. The first step is to clearly define what the customer wants as an explicit requirement. i.e. The Critical to Quality characteristics (CTQ's). The next step is to count the number of defects that occur (any instance or event in which the product or process fails to meet a customer requirement). Once we've counted the defects we calculate the "yield" of the process using a handy table to determine the "Sigma Level".

(A Master Blackbelt/Blackbelt would be expected to understand the mathematics behind Six Sigma, this level of knowledge is provided by Performance Track consultants.)

The financial benefits from a Six Sigma project can be astounding, cost savings in GE, Motorola and Allied Signal are well documented and run into $Billions.

Other benefits include:

The main considerations for Six Sigma can be categorized as follows:

Is Six Sigma right for my business depends on the following:

If your answers are Yes, Yes, No you may well be ready to explore further how to adopt Six Sigma in your organization.

The cost is dependant on whether the Six Sigma project is targeted or a company wide project with employee indoctrination etc.

How much will Six Sigma cost/how long will Six Sigma take to implement & what is the return?

Unfortunately there's no answer to that question without examining the improvement opportunities present in your business and planning your implementation to see what the relative pay off will be.

A Six Sigma project requires a commitment to clear a portion of your budget (otherwise the Go/No-Go debate is over) your budget can include the following:

We can help you can maximize your Six Sigma ROI by making careful decisions as to where the investment is most likely to pay off.

We believe that a strictly cost/benefit based decision on a Six Sigma start up is usually not the best approach (the exception would be the limited 1or 2 project effort), but that the culture, climate factors, organisation’s readiness for change, the ability to track and understand customer needs, the tendency to go with "firefighting" versus fire prevention should have as much influence on your go/no go decision as any hard monetary estimates.  

We use a Six Sigma Road Map consisting of the following steps:

The Road map is not the only path to Six Sigma improvements, you will very likely need to adjust the order of the steps, or even start more than one simultaneously.

Balanced Scorecard

The Balanced Scorecard is a collection of Key Performance Indicators presented in four perspectives, Financial, Customer, Internal Business Processes and Learning & Growth in a manner that tells the story of the company's strategy. The balance comes not only from the four perspectives but also from a balance between performance drivers & outcome measures and lagging & leading indicators. The Balanced Scorecard facilitates the translation of the company's strategy into actions, which are measurable down through the organization.

The Balanced Scorecard first surfaced in the early 90's in a paper by Kaplan & Norton in the Harvard Business Review. They published their classical book on the subject in the mid 90's. Only in the last 2-3 years with the wide use of ERP systems and OLAP tools to provide the information for multi leveled scorecards have large corporates really adopted the BSC and have been reaping the benefits.

Like all good ideas it is adopted early by the leading companies (tend to be corporates) and will filter down to the SME level at some stage. The Balanced Scorecard will either touch the SME directly or via a Corporate Supply Chain but the SME will be touched! The Balanced Scorecard if adopted by the SME not only gives the company a method to translate strategy into actions down its organization but also will give the company a competitive advantage when dealing with larger companies/corporates. The Performance Track Balanced Scorecard has been specifically designed for the SME market without the need to purchase expensive systems and OLAP engines.

All companies have strategic goals and are required to try to achieve them (including SME's), the Balanced Scorecard has proved to be the best way of translating strategic goals down the organization into actions. 90% of organizations do not achieve their strategic goals (fortune) however companies that use a Balanced Scorecard do achieve their strategic goals and do so quickly (2 years). The SME in the most competitive market conditions ever faced require a proven methodology that helps them to understand and implement strategy fast and effectively.

This has been made applicable to the SME in a practical, easy use format at cost suitable for the SME market.

Yes, The Performance Track Balanced Scorecard is specifically designed for the SME using a generic world recognized structure. It can be used to plan and execute strategy as well as being used as a practical day-to-day tool.

No, The Balanced Scorecard is a selection of KPI's grouped into four perspectives, Financial, Customer, Internal Operations and Learning & Growth, which tells the story of the company's strategy through a series of cause and effect relationships, outcome measures and performance drivers.

Yes, the Balanced Scorecard includes a Customer perspective and the Balanced Scorecard by Performance Track also includes Supply Chain integration within this "external" perspective.

The Balanced Scorecard as a concept is approximately 10 years old but has only recently been taken up as an "alternative" to strategic planning and execution. The World’s leading IT system supplier now has a Balanced Scorecard offering included in their new strategic enterprise management software!

Yes, there are various companies offering Balanced Scorecard systems, these companies tend to be IT companies who are selling systems and OLAP engines with "bolt on" BSC's. These systems range from £20k + implementation to the £1millon mark.

The information that is required for a Balanced Scorecard has always "existed", larger companies have always had the resources to obtain the required information. For the SME the very act of trying to develop a Balanced Scorecard will result in understanding where your information deficiencies lye and what is critical. By Adopting the process of developing a Balanced Scorecard by Performance Track the "missing" information will be obtained and a continuous improvement process started.

The Balanced Scorecard works because it forces you to "balance" the four perspectives (financial, Internal Operations, Customer, Learning & Growth) holistically. i.e. what impact will my actions in one area have on the others and the overall effect? It also forces you to question in objective manner elements of your strategy and to put in place measurable KPI's with associated targets.

The Performance Track Balanced Scorecard turns a static reporting tool into a execution system.

The Balanced Scorecard by Performance Track is different to classical business planning because it includes an execution system. The top level Balanced Scorecard is translated down the organization to more detailed Balanced Scorecard's for departments or sections (to individuals if required) in this way delegation can take place easily. Traditionally business planning/strategy has been communicated poorly down through the organization.

The Market

We specialize in the SME sector and our products are applicable to all industries. If you have any special requests or questions please contact us.

Technology

eRoom.net is a digital workplace used by Performance Track for e-business project management and client collaboration. Projects can falter on inefficient use of documentation and communication (which the client pays for) therefore eroom.net provides a single central depository for documents, templates, tools and communications which the Client, Performance Track and 3rd Parties all use with integrated version management.

This tool has proved to be very efficient in use and has also been used for extended Supply Chain Management, the following well-known companies benefit by using this tool:

HP, Cisco, 3Com,AT Kearney, Delotte Touché, Ernst & Young, GE Capital, Gillette, KPMG and Andersen Consulting etc.

Performance Track has pioneered collaboration technology like Video conferencing for project management/administration and management consultancy (1st in the UK). Remember YOU are paying for a consultant’s time (including traveling time) therefore Performance Track methods keep down costs and make experts accessible.

Without technology and the use of technology you cannot play or you won't be playing for long. How many blacksmiths are making a living today!