Strategy maps as improvement paths of enterprises

To locate and prioritize the improvement needs of an enterprise, a strategy map merging managerial principles of the BSC with quality principles stemming from the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award and the European Foundation for Quality Management is proposed. It comprises four hierarchical levels: business objectives, competitive priorities, core processes and components of the organizational profile. The implementation methodology for supporting its application in an individual enterprise makes use of quality function deployment (QFD), a quality design tool. A strategy map here represents a bottom up cause and effect potential improvement path of an investigated enterprise, starting from an improvement of its organizational profile towards an improved realization of its business objectives, thus providing a global perspective on the important linkages between its weakest components at different hierarchical levels. Analysis of two test cases for implementing strategy maps revealed strategy maps that differed from one company to another and discontinuities in some of the maps. We found processes, considered as core processes by interviewees that did not support any competitive priority and a competitive priority, strongly recommended by interviewees, that was not supported by any core process. Such findings call attention to the complex cause-and-effect relationships influencing the enterprise system behaviour, to the lack of management understanding of this behaviour and eventually they add motivation and support to the continuation of our work here.