One of the workshops held at the Balanced Scorecard Forum 2011 Dubai referred to applying the Balanced Scorecard to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The workshop was facilitated by Alan Fell (Alan Fell Consultancy Ltd, UK).
The Balanced Scorecard emerged in the early 1990s as a new management concept and was immediately embraced by both academics and corporate world (Denton 2005, de Wall 2003, and Bourne 2008). Since then, the potential of this new concept was recognized in various forms, receiving distinctions as the best theoretical framework in 1997 from the American Accounting Association (Norreklit, 2003), while the Harvard Business Review considered that the Balanced Scorecard was one of the most influential ideas of the twentieth century.
A recent Aberdeen Report, released in March 2011, acknowledges that the increased complexity of global supply chain has affected the performance of many organizations through longer lead times, excessive pipeline inventory and the need to control downstream and upstream logistics.
Balanced Scorecard Forum 2011in Dubai generated an environment of intense interaction between participants, speakers and facilitators, giving the opportunity to address questions that for many delegates represented obstacles in implementing or utilizing Balanced Scorecard within the organization.