ABSTRACT
Over the past two decades much attention has been given to the development of performance measurement packages. Different packages have been suggested such as the SMART pyramid (Lynch and Cross, 1991), the Tableau de Bord (Chiapello and Lebas, 1996), the Performance Prism (Neely and Adams, 2001) and the Balanced Scorecard (Kaplan and Norton, 1992; 1996). From a technical point of view these proposals differ mainly in the way they classify the measurements on which they are based and the way the measurements are interrelated (Neely, 2007). However, a common characteristic is that they aim to promote operations that will allow the entity to survive and produce good financial performance. To do this in a corporate context the revenues, costs, investment and funding must all be monitored through the performance system. Thus, performance measurement has a close relationship to cost control. Without the cost consciousness that measurement brings, the cost dimension of performance can be neglected and financial performance can deteriorate.
