Madison Paper Company (MPC) is a manufacturer of specialty coated and medium weight coated paper products. In August of 2003, in response to a less than robust coated paper market and several operating challenges, MPC revaluated its strategic plan and began to develop a more aggressive path forward.

MPC turned to the Balanced Scorecard as a framework to help manage their new focus as well as their product development efforts, operations and cost structure.

How We Helped

Palladium Group, Inc. worked closely with the leadership team at MPC to develop a scorecard to drive execution of their turnaround plan. With Palladium's help, the team quickly learned how to use the scorecard to focus on critical, strategic issues and communicate performance to all employees at the plant.

Palladium and MPC built a simple reporting solution using Microsoft� PowerPoint�. After several months, MPC wanted to consider a more robust reporting capability. Their sister company, Madison Paper Industries (MPI), had been using a Microsoft� Excel�-based Balanced Scorecard report for a few years and were also interested in a better reporting tool.

Palladium upgraded them from PowerPoint� and Excel� to Palladium's Executive Strategy Manager (ESM), simplifying data entry, communications, and version control.

Results

Six months after implementing its turnaround scorecard, MPC greatly improved its results. Both MPC and MPI have migrated their monthly management meetings to a paperless meeting, and now they review performance results online, drilling down from their strategy map to assess performance of their measures and initiatives.

Before each meeting, all of the objective, measure, and initiative owners go online to update their information. According to Kevin Kuliga, MPC's President, "we get a lot of mileage out of our scorecard - it doubles as a management tool for me and my team as well as a communication tool for our entire company."

Myllykoski North America has been so impressed with MPC and MPI's use of the Balanced Scorecard that the CEO, Robert Olah, implemented a BSC at the corporate level in 2004. Leveraging the early success and momentum of the Balanced Scorecard program, in 2005 Olah turned to the Personal Scorecard module within the ESM to support its redesigned performance management process, which links personal goals to the corporate and mill scorecards.

According to Olah, "by aligning our top 150 managers to the results tracked in the scorecard, I think we will be able to drive even greater results in the future."