Speakers presented the successful management and execution of strategy in Rohde & Schwarz's global sales organization using balanced scorecards

In mid-February, we continued our User Circle webinar series live from the Rohde & Schwarz film studio at the company's headquarter in Munich. Sales Operations Managers Ute Dehner-Boulahia and Monika Schreck presented the successes, challenges and strategy based on the balanced scorecard methodology in a global corporation. The aim was not only to define objectives in a strategy paper, but also to anchor and operationalize them in the minds of the employees.

Together, they are responsible for the worldwide Balanced Scorecard process at Rohde & Schwarz in the sales area and they offered valuable practical insights for the participants. With the title "Rohde & Schwarz – The Balanced Scorecard as a guide to the future", they illustrated the Balanced Scorecard methodically and technically. The two ladies showed how a successful alignment and the implementation of defined objectives in line with the strategy can be achieved.

Facing the challenges of strategic planning with “cascading”

"For us, the three biggest challenges in strategic planning are 1. defining a good strategy, 2. creating a worldwide alignment for that strategy, and 3. translating the written strategy into action," said Monika Schreck. "We need to question how we communicate strategy to employees and how well we are doing it currently."

Rohde & Schwarz works with a mechanism that is called “cascading”, which means deriving objectives and breaking them down. How does it work? The individual business units, departments and teams derive their objectives from the corporate balanced scorecard. "By doing that we ensure that we are all striving toward the same objectives," Monika Schreck emphasizes.

Rohde & Schwarz started with PowerPoint templates for the individual market segments, regions and countries. In the end, there were about 70 balanced scorecards with a total of more than 1400 pages of strategy information that had to be distributed and updated worldwide. "This analogue process was not very efficient, sometimes very prone to errors and the coordination of this process was very time-consuming. This led to the desire for a tool that supports us digitally," summarizes Ute Dehner-Boulahia.

With Solyp, it was possible to digitize the existing process with the old familiar forms, which has led to a considerable increase in efficiency overall. This made the entire process and coordination extremely efficient. Dependencies between scorecards and targets now became more apparent and the presentation documents for management meetings are generated uniformly by just pushing a button. In future, with the roll-out of Solyp 4.0, we hope to have more cross-organizational views as well as improved tracking of the nevertheless very numerous strategic initiatives.

The speakers

Ute Dehner-Boulahia

Since 1992, Ute Dehner-Boulahia has held various positions in sales and service at Rohde & Schwarz. Among others, she worked as Office Manager of the Beijing and Shanghai offices, Service Manager and QM Auditor in the global service organization. As Sales Operations Manager, Ute Dehner-Boulahia is since 2016 in charge for the "Definition and implementation of the strategic planning process in Solyp".

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Monika Schreck

Monika Schreck, who has held various positions at Rohde & Schwarz since 2003, is working as Sales Operations Manager since 2015. The area of responsibility of the certified "Balanced Scorecard Professional" includes the analysis of sales data, the expansion of sales reporting, process responsibility, and the roll-out of the Balanced Scorecard methodology within the sales organization.

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Rohde & Schwarz at a glance

Rohde & Schwarz develops, manufactures and markets a diversified range of electronic capital equipment for industry, infrastructure operators and government customers. The focus is on solutions that contribute to a secure and networked world.

The independent group is a technology or market leader in all its fields of activity, including mobile radio and RF test and measurement, broadcast and media technology, air traffic control and military radiocommunications as well as cyber security and network technology.

In fiscal 2019/2020, Rohde & Schwarz generated sales revenues of €2.5 billion. The company, headquartered in Munich, Germany, owes this success to its 12,000 highly qualified employees in more than 70 countries.

Please watch a short video about Rohde & Schwarz here.

Would you like to learn more about the Balanced Scorecard process and the support by Solyp? Feel free to send us an e-mail to thinktank@evolutionizer.com.