Horngren Problem 15-35 1. Caltex’s strategy is to focus on ‘service-oriented customers’ who are willing to pay a higher price for services. Even though petroleum is largely a commodity product, Caltex wants to differentiate itself through the service it provides at its retailing stations. Does the scorecard represent Caltex’s strategy? By and large it does. The focus of the scorecard is on measures of process improvement, quality, market share, and financial success from product differentiation and charging higher prices for customer service. There are some deficiencies that the subsequent assignment questions raise but, abstracting from these concerns for the moment, the scorecard does focus on implementing a product differentiation strategy. Having concluded that the scorecard has been reasonably well designed, how has Caltex performed relative to its strategy in 2015? It appears from the scorecard that Caltex was successful in implementing its strategy in 2015. It achieved all targets in the financial, internal business, and learning and growth perspectives. The only target it missed was the market share target in the customer perspective. At this stage, students may raise some questions about whether this is a good scorecard measure. Requirement 3 gets at this issue in more detail. The bottom line is that measuring ‘market share in the overall petroleum market’ rather than in the ‘service-oriented customer’ market segment is not a good scorecard measure, so not achieving this target may not be as big an issue as it may seem at first. 2. Yes, Caltex should include some measure of employee satisfaction and employee training in the learning and growth perspective. Caltex’s differentiation strategy and ability to charge a premium price is based on customer service. The key to good, fast, and friendly customer service is well trained and satisfied employees. Untrained and dissatisfied employees will have poor interactions with customers and cause the strategy to fail. Hence, training and employee satisfaction are very important to Caltex for implementing its strategy. These measures are leading indicators of whether Caltex will be able to successfully implement its strategy and should be measured on the balanced scorecard. 3. Caltex’s strategy is to focus onthe 60% of petroleum consumers who are service-oriented, not on the 40% price-shopper segment. To evaluate, if it has been successful in implementing its strategy, Caltex needs to measure its market share in its targeted market segment, ‘service-oriented customer,’ not its market share in the overall market. Given Caltex’s strategy, it should not be concerned if its market share in the price-shopper segment declines. In fact, charging premium prices will probably cause its market share in this segment to d
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Term
Spring
Professor
Feusse
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