Amanco Company: Sustainability Scorecard Essay

Considerations in Makin”g Successful Benchmarks in Companies

Various lessons can be learned from the implementation of the sustainability scorecard at Amanco. These lessons relate to the global business climate and the implementations in multi-cultural areas. This paper looks into the case of Amanco and points out some of the lessons that can be learned.

Lack of Involvement of all stakeholders in decision making

Globally operating companies need to involve the stakeholders before they engage in any decisions that will affect them. The formulation of the ‘Triple Bottom Line’ scorecard in Amanco was done at the corporate level, but the stakeholders are not shown to have been involved in any part of the formulation (Kaplan & De Pinho, 2008, p.5). This later leads to a situation where the other managers did not have a sense of tenure in the scorecard leading to its change later. After the introduction of the sustainability scorecard in Amanco, a lot of positive changes were observed in the company. This was due to the involvement of all the stakeholders in decision making from the customers, subordinate workers to the senior management.

Predefined leadership in global companies

Amanco as a company lacked a clear form of leadership in its subsidiaries companies before introducing the sustainability scorecard. This led to a situation where accountability was not easy to be implemented. The company had some regions being led by Human resource managers as owners while others were marketing managers (Kaplan & De Pinho, 2008, p.6). The company would lack a clear way for managers to be answerable which led to some of them even not implementing the stipulated scorecards.

Lack of a structured way for corporate to come up with scorecards

In the modern world, management in companies tends to change from day today. This would lead to companies hiring managers with different opinions. If companies do not have a structured way defined to come up with the scorecards, each manager will end up with a different scorecard which would be costly for the companies. This situation is well portrayed in the case of Amanco limited where Grupo Nueva introduced the ‘Triple Bottom Line’ scorecard but immediately after Pierre Roulet joined the company he introduce the ‘Sustainability Scorecard’ (Kaplan & De Pinho, 2008, p.6). These are some of the scenarios that companies might avoid in having well-laid down procedures of coming up with the scorecards.

Considerations of differences in Business environments

Multinational companies are not supposed to try implementing a similar business strategy in different regions basing it on success in another region. This comes into place due to the difference in the business environment in different regions. In some countries, there might be policies of 100% involvement of the locals in the management of a business while, in others, it might not exist. If a company has been using a strategy of using imported labor, in its markets it might get in trouble if it tries implementing the same strategy in a country whose regulations eliminate such strategies. Companies should also take into consideration the competitiveness of the markets that they are trying to venture into. This comes into play when a company wants to introduce new merchandise in a bazaar with a well-established rival company, and in another market where there is no well-established business offering the same products. In Amanco, when it started to produce the irrigation equipment in Brazil it had to note that its main competitor had a market share of 40% (Kaplan & De Pinho, 2008, p.12). Amanco also noted that Brazil had a different management style and microeconomic structure making it hard to operate like other markets of the company.

The hiring of Linguistics experts to translate business documents

Multinational companies operate in different countries where different languages are used as national languages. These companies would like to operate all their subsidiary companies with the same objectives and visions. This becomes possible if any document written in a certain language is translated into another language perfectly. If care is not taken in translation, the intended message to the managers might be delivered differently. To avoid such a problem, there is a need for the involvement of linguistics experts in the translation of these documents. Amanco had most of its literature in English despite operating in various multilingual countries. This was after coming up with the ‘Triple Bottom Line’ scorecard. There was the emphasis that direct translation of the literature in Portuguese would not deliver the intended meaning. This made it harder for other branches to implement the scorecard in the way that it was intended (Kaplan & De Pinho, 2008, p.5).

Having a reward system for the workers and Managers

Managers and workers feel motivated to work for the company if they are rewarded for working towards achieving the goals of the company. Managers and workers who are under any reward scheme will tend not to act on any information they have which would be necessary for the company. In the Amanco case study, a reward system had to be introduced to reward those managers who drove the business towards its global goals. This led to growth in businesses in most branches (Kaplan & De Pinho, 2008, p.8).

References

Kaplan, R. & De Pinho, R. (2008). Amanco: Developing the Sustainability Scorecard. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School.