The usefulness of a performance measurement system in the daily life of an organisation: a note on a case study

Abstract The design and introduction of performance measurement systems in business organisations continues to be one of the areas within Management Accounting that attracts a great deal of interest. We have focused on this field using the case study method, a research approach which is helpful for the development of greater understanding of innovative management accounting systems, discarding other methods, such as data collection through surveys. The research work we present here aims to examine the usefulness of performance indicators in a Spanish subsidiary of a North American multinational company dedicated to the car sector. The present performance measurement system, which undergoes annual revisions, was designed and introduced by the management team of the Spanish plant and does not exist in any other plant in the group with the same structure and complexity. How it works is not therefore the result of any imposition by headquarters but is rather the result of negotiation and consensus within the plant itself, its main aim being to motivate behaviour. Access to a wealth of both quantitative and qualitative information has enabled us to (i) observe the integration of this performance measurement system within the organisational structure of the plant, its continuing revision, the resources it has at its disposal, its usefulness for achieving employee involvement, its capacity to motivate learning, its relation with the incentive system, and also (ii) to suggest a correlation between certain measures of the performance measurement system and profitability.