By using the BSC to tie its own results to that of its customer's achievements, Kotra truly is a strategy-focused organization.
Established in 1962, Kotra is a government-subsidized, non-profit, membership-funded investment and trade promotion business. They operate 117 Korean Trade Centers at home and abroad (75 countries), have a budget of $200M, and employ 1,000. Kotra adopted the BSC to systematically evaluate worldwide organizational performance. Since then it has added 6,000 companies to its membership roster and has almost doubled its income by promoting trade.
"KOTRA introduced a BSC in order to systematically evaluate the performance of its worldwide organizational units. The program was carefully designed to reflect customers' achievements, and not the achievements of KOTRA business unit itself, so that high marks on the evaluation clearly indicate that customers are appreciative of the services received. While the business unit leader is responsible for the performance of his or her unit, the unit members share the responsibility for specific evaluation indexes according to the duties they assigned. With the BSC, management can check the performance of all the overseas and domestic units on a real-time basis. Since the evaluation is tied with customers' achievements, they have no choice but to place more focus on customers. Our automated BSC system, together with our CRM system, made the management objective of "Achievement-Oriented Evaluation" possible"
Soo-Ik Kim, Senior Executive Vice President