About performance measurement communication with Carina Larsson, Kristine Säfsten and Anna Syberfeldt at the PMA 2014 Conference

Written by Adelina Chelniciuc on June 30, 2014. Posted in News, Organisational performance

The second day of the PMA 2014 Conference brought the presentation “Performance measurement communication supporting lean production in SMEs”, held by Carina Larsson, PhD student at School of Engineering, Jönköping University, Kristina Säfsten, associate professor at School of Engineering,  Jönköping University and Anna Syberfeldt, senior researcher at School of Engineering Science, University of Skövde.

Their research focused on assessing the current state of performance measurement communication, and both literature review and interviews with managers and SMEs operators were conducted.

One of their main findings was categorizing performance measurement communication in three parts:

• Performance measurement content: the information that is communicated;
• Performance measurement communication process: communication forms, frequency and other operational details;
• Performance measurement communication guidelines.

For each of these categories, Carina Larsson, Kristine Säfsten and Anna Syberfeldt have identified, either through literature review or the empirical study, different components that are currently used by companies, such as:

• Performance measurement content: financial measures (such as sales) and non-financial measures (quality or customer satisfaction);
• Performance measurement communication process: companies have production boards, where meetings are held in order to produce information and follow-up;
• Performance measurement communication guidelines: after implementing lean, all assessed small and medium size enterprises have improved their way of communicating performance measurement.

This categorization could help SMEs companies improve their performance measurement communication, if concrete guidelines are established within each of these steps.

Tags: Performance Measurement, PMA 2014 Conference