Coors: Balanced Scorecard

Coors is a family owned business in the beer industry offering 16 different kinds of beers in the US market. Coors has 3 production plants in the US with its Colorado plant being the largest brewery in the world and serving 70% of the US market. Coors has implemented a supply chain management (SCM) software solution from the Computer Integrated Logistics (CIL) project to solve urgent problems in the logistical area such as meeting seasonal demand, surges from promotion and introducing new brands each year. Other issues addressed by the CIL project were filling routine customer orders, filling rush orders and shipping beer to distributors before it was spoiled. The project’s objective was to increase the company’s profitability by reducing cycle times and operation costs while increasing customer satisfaction. The CIL project was followed by the implementation project of a Balanced scorecard (BSC) to maintain CIL’s standards and to focus on continuous improvement, learning to enhance performance and rewarding employees for increased productivity. The traditional cost based performance measures which were developed from the benchmarking data during the CIL project had failed to achieve the desired targets and resulted in performance gaps. Moreover, the unit costs per barrel of beer were still higher than the competitors’. The challenge for the BSC project was to translate Coors’s business strategy into operational and performance-related measures. During a benchmarking process, higher unit costs per barrel of beer were identified for Coors compared to its two main competitors Anheuser-Busch and Miller (Appendix-Exhibit 1). Exhibit 2 identifies gaps in operational measures (load scheduling, load accuracy and production stability) comparing the results of the CIL projects against targets set by management. We identified some possible causes for these performance gaps as follows: * Lack of training and knowledge about new processes and use of new technology