BSC Designer is a software solution for designing and managing the Balanced Scorecard.

Managing your Key Performance Indicators

Calculating an Indicators Performance and Progress

Stop Lights and Dynamic Indicators

Key Performance Indicators and Time Points

Importing and Exporting Data in BSC Designer

SQL Indicators

Teamwork with BSC Designer

Three Different Ways to Import Data

Charts in BSC Designer

Strategy Maps

Reports in BSC Designer

It is recognized by business professionals and Balanced Scorecard consultants as one of the

most powerfuland one of the easiestBalanced Scorecard tools on the market.
BSC Designer comes in four different editions:

BSC Designer Standard

BSC Designer Pro (our most powerful and feature-rich version)

BSC Designer Light (our freeware edition)

And BSC Designer Online (our web-based solution).

BSC Designer software helps companies to design, implement, and use the Balanced
Scorecard to measure and improve their business performance. It supports every stage of the
Balanced Scorecard process:
1) Strategic Planning. Designing a Balanced Scorecard begins with defining your strategic
goals and creating a strategy map. Not only can BSC Designer help you to draw your
strategy map; it can generate your map automatically, and link your strategy map with your
Key Performance Indicators.

2) Designing your Key Performance Indicators. BSC Designer includes powerful features
to help you create and manage your Key Performance Indicators. It can track the value of
your indicators as they change over time, and even access your company database to update
these values automatically.
3) Improving your Business Performance. The goal of the Balanced Scorecard is to
improve your business performance by linking top-level strategic goals to line-level actions.
With BSC Designer, you can assign specific performance goals for each indicator, and link
each indicator to the initiatives, tasks, and requirements that will help you to reach those
goals. You can measure and control your progress toward your goals with visual cues like
stop lights, dynamic thresholds, and charts. You can even customize the performance
formulas for each of the indicators on your scorecard.
4) Teamwork and Cascades. The key to successfully implementing the Balanced Scorecard
is to involve all of your employees, from your top managers to your line-level employees.
BSC Designer includes all the features you need to combine your scorecards into cascades,
delegate indicators to lower-level scorecards, and import the values of your low-level
scorecards back into your higher-level scorecards. And to make your collaboration easier,
BSC Designer also allows you to create reports in HTML, MS Excel, and MS Powerpoint
formats, so you can easily share your experience with colleagues at every level of your
organization.
Now, you can try BSC Designer for yourself, and use all of our features, absolutely free, for
your first 30 days. Just go to www.BSCdesigner.com, and download the free trial.

Managing your Key Performance Indicators

BSC Designer provides all the features you need to manage the categories and indicators on
your Balanced Scorecard.

Creating Categories and Indicators

To add a new category, just go to your Strategy Tree, select the root level of your Balanced
Scorecard, and click on the New Category button on the toolbar.

To add a new category, just go to your Strategy Tree, select the root level of your Balanced
Scorecard, and click on the New Category button on the toolbar.
To create a new sub-category, just go to your Strategy Tree, open one of the categories on
your Balanced Scorecard, and click on the New Category button on the toolbar.
To create an indicator, open a category on your Strategy Tree, and click the New Indicator
button.

To create an indicator, open a category on your Strategy Tree, and click the New Indicator
button.
Remember:

You can add categories inside other categories, or on the root level of your Balanced
Scorecard.

Indicators can only be placed inside categories.

Changing Categories and Indicators

Its easy to move indicators and categories on your scorecard. Just use the up and down
arrows on the toolbar, or drag and drop.

Its easy to move indicators and categories on your scorecard. Just use the up and down
arrows on the toolbar.
You can also cut, copy, and paste indicators and categories from one place to another in BSC
Designer.
Copy As a Text
Need to copy an indicator or a category to another program, like your word processor? Just
use our Copy as a text feature. The name, weight, and performance of your indicator will
all be added to your clipboard as one block of text, which you can paste into any program you
like.

Need to copy an indicator or a category to another program, like your word processor? Just
use our Copy as a text feature.
Other Properties
Each indicator on a Balanced Scorecard also includes other details. Just click on indicator on
your strategy tree, and youll see all of its properties:

Name. This is the name of you indicator, as it will appear on your strategy tree and all
of your reports. Ideally, you should choose a descriptive name.

Weight. This is the weight of the indicator: its relative importance, compared to other
indicators in the same category.

Description. Use this text field to explain what the indicator means, and how to
measure it. Your employees should be able to clearly understand the method or
algorithm to use to find the current value of the indicator.

Measure Units. Use this dropdown menu to choose the units you use when you
measure this indicator.
o You can choose a standard measurement unit from the list.
o You can choose Risk. BSC Designer will automatically switch the
optimization method to Minimize this risk, and it will also display the Risk
diagram next to the indicator for this risk.
o Or, you can define your own measurement unit. Just click on the last option
on the list, <new>, and type in your measurement unit in the dialogue box.

Each indicator on a Balanced Scorecard also includes other details. Just click on indicator on
your strategy tree, and youll see all of its properties

Target Description and Initiatives. These properties allow you to specify your action
plan for the indicator. If your plan is simple enough, you can describe it briefly in the
Target Description text box. For a more complex plan, choose Initiatives, and
you can attach any documents you might need.

Target Description and Initiatives. These properties allow you to specify your action plan for
the indicator.

How to build performance formula with BSC Designer

BSC Designer calculates the performance of indicator according to its current value and the
performance function.
After the installation BSC Designer offers two performance functions: maximization (when
higher value means higher performance) and minimization (when lower value mean
higher performance) both are linear.

BSC Designer Manual How to change performance formula

When designing KPIs business professional might need some sophisticated, non-linear
functions for the performance. Performance formulas in BSC Designer can be customized
with Formula Editor.

Formula builder
To access Formula Builder:
1. Run BSC Designer. Create new indicator or select existent one.
2. Find Optimization field at the bottom and click Performance Editor button:
3. Formula Builder dialog will appear
Lets look at every element that could be used in this builder.
Variables
There are 5 variables in BSC Designer that can be used in formulas:

Min value = mn (builder syntax);

Max value = mx (builder syntax);

Target value = target (builder syntax);

Baseline value = baseline (builder syntax);

Score Value = value (builder syntax).

BSC Designer Manual Indicator Details

Operations
Formula Builder supports Basic mathematical operations: +, -, *, /.
Functions

Click the button Function in the Formula Builder to have a list of supported mathematical
functions:

Sin (a) The sine trigonometry function.

Cos (a) The cosine trigonometry function.

Tan (a) - The tangent trigonometry function.

Power (a, b) Exponentiation with the base of a and the exponent of b.

For example: power (2, 4) = 16;

Exp (a) Exponentiation with the base of e-number and the exponent of a.

Sqrt (a) Square root. Exponentiation with the base of a and the exponent of 0.5.

Pi the function returns the value of pi-number.

Min (a, b) The function selects the smallest among two numbers.

Max (a, b) The function selects the biggest among two numbers.

For example: Min (3, 5) = 3; Max (3, 5) = 5;

Customizing Formula
By default the formula field contains linear formula of maximization ((Score mn) / (mx
mn)) or minimization ((mx Score) / (mx mn)). The formula can be modified and might
contain any combination of available functions and variables. Some examples are listed
below:

Default maximization formula: ((value- mn) / (mx - mn))

(sin(value/mx*2.5) - mn) / (mx - mn)

tan( ((value) - sqrt(mn)) / (mx - mn) )

min((exp(value)*exp(mx)), Power( sqrt(score), Pi)*0.9)

Conditions in the performance formula
There are also special conditions available for the variable called value. User can define
different optimization functions for different intervals of the value. To define function for
the certain interval:
1. Run Formula Builder.
2. Click on Add Condition button.
3. Enter new function.
4. Define the interval for this function below.

Setting up the special function for the values greater than 45. Below is the resulted graph for
these conditions.

The performance graph for this function (after score riches 45 and more the graph begins to
fluctuate)

Grouping Data in BSC Designer

BSC Designer includes easy-to-use charts and reports, so you can see how the values of your
indicators change over time.
But if you define a new value for each indicator every day, your data tables can grow very
quickly. After a month, these tables can be hugeand that means, your charts and reports
can become confusing.
The solution is to group your data, and display meaningful summaries. Just like you group
your indicators into categories to review their overall performance, you can group an
indicators daily values into weekly and monthly values, to easily track the indicators
progress.
Grouping Data by Time Period
Starting with version 4.0, BSC Designer allows you to group the values of an indicator
according to the time period of your choice.

To group the data on a chart, open the Group By dropdown list in the small chart
section.
o To group the data in a report, use the Group By dropdown list in the report
generation dialogue. When you display your report, it will identify the kind of
grouping you used.

Once you open the Group By dropdown list for your chart or report, you can choose to
group your data by day, or by week, and so forth, or you can choose Customize and define
your own grouping period.
You can also customize your grouping period from the File menu. Just click on Document
Properties, and choose the Grouping tab.
Grouping Types: Summary and Average Values
By default, the value for a group of data is the average of the individual values. For instance,
if you update an indicators value every day, and then group your data by week, the
indicators weekly value will be the average of its daily values that week.
Sometimes, you may prefer to summarize those daily values, rather than calculating their
average. For instance, if an indicator tracks your daily sales, your sales for the week are the
total of those daily sales, not their average.
For each indicator, you can choose whether to summarize or average its value over time. Just
click on the indicator, right-click on Value, open the Grouping Type submenu, and select
Summarize Changed Values or Calculate Average Value.
Default Grouping Types

Rather than choosing the summarize or average grouping type for each indicator one at a
time, you can assign default grouping types by measure unit.
On the File menu, select document Properties, click on the Measure Units tab, and select a
measure unit. Open the Grouping Type dropdown menu, and choose Summarize Changed
Values (or calculate Average Value).
Now, whenever you group the values of any indicator that uses this measure unit, those
values will be summarized (or averaged) by default. Of course, you can still give an indicator
its own individual grouping type, which will override this default value.
Please note: You cannot change the default grouping type for a default measure unit. You can
change the grouping type for the individual indicators that use a default measure unit. But
youll need to use your own, custom measure unit in order to set a default grouping type.
Stop Lights and Dynamic Indicators

BSC Designer provides a wide range of visual cues to help you understand the current state
of your Balanced Scorecard.

Learn more about managing stop lights and dynamic threshold in BSC Designer
manual.

The Strategy Tree view includes stop lights and dynamic indicators to help you understand
how the performance of your indicators has changed.

Stop Lights are small colored circles that show the current state of the indicator.
Typically, stop lights will be green, yellow, or red, depending on whether the
indicators value is good, marginal, or unacceptable.

Dynamic Indicators are arrows which show whether the indicators performance has
improved, remained the same, or gotten worse since the last time point.

Application Options
Stop lights and dynamic indicator arrows are fully adjustable. To access these settings, just
open the Tools menu and choose Application Options. Here, you can choose:

Which arrows to use, and which stop light colors to use.

What the threshold values should befor instance, at what value a green light should
become yellow or red.

Which view to use for your Strategy Tree: the Column Tree View, or the Simple
Tree View. We recommend the Column Tree View, which presents your strategy tree
as a simple table. You can hide any columns you dont need. Just click on the header
at the top of the table, and check off which columns youd like to display.

Strategy Tree Reports

If youd like to share your Strategy Tree with your colleagues, just open the Reports menu
and choose Tree Report. BSC Designer will generate an HTML document with a graphical
image of your Strategy Tree. Notice that the Reports menu also includes a wide variety of
other useful reports, so you can review, analyze, and share your progress at each step of the
Balanced Scorecard process.

Key Performance Indicators and Time Points

The Balanced Scorecard is not a static document. It changes over time: the values of the
indicators change, their weights change, the total performance of the scorecard changes. BSC
Designer allows you to define time points to measure and manage these changes.

Each indicator on your scorecard has a current value. When you select an indicator on your
Strategy Tree, its current value will be displayed in the Value field.

Each indicator on your scorecard has a current value. When you select an indicator on your
Strategy Tree, its current value will be displayed in the Value field.
Indicators and Time Points
The value of an indicator is not fixed; it can and should change over time. Therefore, BSC
Designer allows you to define not just one value for each indicator, but the value of the
indicator on any particular date.
You can use the calendar in BSC Designer to track how these values change.

If a date appears on the calendar in boldface type, that means that at least one of your
indicators, somewhere on your scorecard, has a specific value for that particular date.

If a date appears in normal type, then none of your indicators have special values for
that date.

If a date appears on the calendar in boldface type, that means that at least one of your
indicators, somewhere on your scorecard, has a specific value for that particular date.
You can also click on the calendar to see the value of a particular indicator on that date.
Exact Value

Last Known Value

If this indicator does not have a

If the indicator you chose
specific value for the date you chose,
has a specific value for the
BSC Designer will show you the last
date you chose, the Value
known value of the indicator. In this
field appears in blue.
case, Value appears in gray.

No Known Value

If you have not defined

any date-specific values
for this indicator, Value
will appear in black.

Changing an Indicators Value

There are several ways to change the value of an indicator on your Balanced Scorecard.

Enter the data manually. Just select the indicator, and enter its new value in the
Value field.

Use the Value Editor. Open the Strategy Tree menu and select Edit Values to
access the Value Editor. Here, you will see all of the time points you have defined,
and all of the indicators settings for each one: its weight, min and max values,
baseline and target values, and its current value. You can edit any of these values, or
even Add or Delete new time points at the bottom.

Import data from an external data source. For instance, BSC Designer supports
Imported Indicators and SQL Indicators.

Importing data in Balanced Scorecard from external data

source
Typically, your Balanced Scorecard will use data from a variety of sources.

3 Different Ways to Import Data in BSC Designer

You will input some data manually, retrieve other data from your corporate database, and
import more data from tables and spreadsheets.

On the other hand, you might also need to export some of the data on your Balanced
Scorecard to use in another application.
BSC Designer includes all the features you need to import and export your data.
Exporting
Exporting the value of an indicator from BSC Designer to another application is simple. Just
right-click on the indicator, and choose Export Values to launch the Export Wizard. The
wizard will help you to specify exactly what data to export, and what format to use.
Importing
You will usually want to import some of the data for your Balanced Scorecard from external
files, like MS Excel spreadsheets. Here is the process to use, step by step.
Here is the source project file:

The source data in MS Excel file

For testing purposes you can download this Excel file.

Step 1 Select a destination

Where do you want to put the data youre going to import? Choose an indicator or category
on your Balanced Scorecard, right-click on it, and select Import Values.

Choose an indicator or category on your Balanced Scorecard, right-click on it, and select
Import Values.
Step 2 Select the data source

You can import your data from a MS Excel file, a CSV (Comma-Separate-Value) spreadsheet
file, or you can choose enter source data manually to copy and paste from your data
source. If you do enter your data manually, you can choose some special settings to tell BSC
Designer how to interpret the data.

Select the source file with data

Step 3 Select the type of import

What should BSC Designer do with this data? You can:

Import new data for the category or indicator you chose as your
destinationfor instance, its name, weight, and description.

Create a new indicator, using the imported data.

Or, import new values for several indicators at once.

Indicator Names

If you choose to import data for several indicators at once, your spreadsheet or other data
source should include the name of each indicator and the name of the category in which it
belongs.

Import several indicators at once

In this case, you will need to choose between two special options.

The names of the indicator and its category might be in two separate
columns on your spreadsheet. If so, you need to select the first option:
Names of parent categories for the indicators are specified in separate
column.

Or, the names of the indicator and its category might be in the same
columnfor example, in the format, Category/Indicator. In this case,
you need to choose the second option. And you will also need to specify
what character separates the category from the indicatorin our example,
a slash.

Associating Columns with Indicator Properties

Once you have chosen your destination, the source of your data, and the type of import to
perform, there is one final step. You need to tell BSC Designer how to interpret the columns
in the data you are importing.
For instance, column 1 might have the name of the category, column 2 might have the name
of the individual indicator, column 3 might have the value of the indicator, and so forth.

If you chose to import data to create a new indicator, you will see a
dropdown menu where you can choose which column includes the Name
of the indicator.

If you chose to import data for several indicators, and the names of the
indicators and their categories are in two separate columns, you will see
two dropdown menus. Choose which column includes the Name of the
indicator, and which has the name of its Parent category.

Columns in source data need to be associated with properties of indicators.

Importing Dated Values
Finally, you can import data about the value of your indicators on particular dates.

If your spreadsheet includes values from several different dates, you can
select which column has the date for each set of values. That way, BSC
Designer can associate each set of values with the appropriate date.

If you are importing data about just one date, you can choose that date on
the calendar in BSC Designer, and then select the option, Use current
date from calendar.

Or, you can import the new data as default values for one or more of your
indicators, with no reference to any particular date.

Associating columns with indicators' properties. Click to check details.

BSC Designer software will show you the preview of imported data:

Preview expected results of import

When you will finish import process, you will see imported indicators in the BSC Designer.
Click on the dates in the calendar to make sure that right data was imported for right dates:

Results of import in Balanced Scorecard Tree