Agricultural farms in open economy system are more often than in the past decades forced to adapt operations, plans, diagnosis, strategies, etc. to changes and uncertainties in their legal and business environment. The farmers need to evaluate the eco...
Agricultural farms in open economy system are more often than in the past decades forced to adapt operations, plans, diagnosis, strategies, etc. to changes and uncertainties in their legal and business environment. The farmers need to evaluate the economic situation of his farm regularly, i.e., set up a management diagnosis.
Until now, RDA has been in charge of farm management diagnosis in Korea, using experts to computerize such a diagnosis. They have found that the diagnosis quality is low due to obtain the relative weights of the farm indicators by expert's subjective judgement. Also, traditional performance measurement systems emphasizing short-term profits are detrimental for farm because long-term value creation is ignored. The challenge for farm managers is to measure the unmeasurable, to develop a set of measures that capture the true essence of critical success factors. In this situation, Balanced Score Card(BSC), which was suggested by Kaplan and Norton(1992), is an integrated performance measurement system that includes both financial and non-financial measurement indicators.
According to the theory of competence-based competition, core competencies are derived from capabilities that are managerially valuable to the farms. This paper provides a structured framework for determining the key capabilities using the Analytic Hierarchy Process(AHP). One distinctive characteristic of this framework is that quantitative as well as qualitative measures are employed providing a BSC for capability evaluation. The AHP is known as a very useful decision-marking model developed for obtaining the relative weights of indicators through pairwise comparison in the context of hierarchical structure. For each pairwise comparison matrix, we typically uses the eigenvector method(EM) to generate a priority vector that gives the relative weights at each level of the hierarchy. The final weights were calculated by cross-multiplying the priority weights from main criteria up to sub-criteria. The framework is applied using the korean cattle farms as an example.
The derived weights for each indicator were as follows:
1) The farm business is compartmentalized into four main perspectives. The weights of the financial perspective is 12.9%, the productional and marketing perspective is 27.9%, the internal process perspective is 23.0%, the managerial ability of farmers is 36.2%.
2) The total number of sub-criteria is thirty indicators - note that only a handful of capabilities have simultaneously secured high score with respect to fourth dimensions. for example, the executive index's weight(13.4%), the production cost's and planing index's weight(6.7%), and the intelligence index's weight(6.6%) were rated high. On the other hand, the information index's weigh(0.6%), ROA's weight(0.7%) and manure management's weigh(0.8%) were rated low.
These results may be viewed as a benchmarking exercise in order to find the competency gaps within the farms. These also provide farmers with enough grounds to undertake strategic investment decision such as capability development, outsourcing, focusing or diversification with regard to farm operation and management process. The framework is generic in nature and is applicable to benchmark other farm enterprise or industry organization.