developing a new approach for product performance evaluation based on balanced scorecard: an empirical study of a dairy company

to survive in today’s competitive environment, companies need continues improvement to achieve goals such as increasing the accuracy of targeting, improving product or service. however, there is no improvement guaranty without performance evaluation. an organization must assess current performance before embarking on any improvement. if it does not, it will have no baseline from which to determine if its efforts have yielded any improvement. product development team must evaluate the product performance to enhance existing products so that they continue to meet changing customer requirements. product performance evaluate the company to maintain market share and leadership. innovation and new product development are important to build market breakthroughs. product performance evaluation is necessary before making any change because new product development require high levels of investment and involve significant risk of product failure.      one of the proper evaluation methods is balance scorecard. in the balanced scorecard approach actual performance is measured, the measured value is compared to an expected value and based on the difference between the two corrective interventions are made as required. such measurement requires three things to be effective: i) a choice of data to measure, ii) the setting of an expected value for the data, and iii) the ability to make a corrective intervention. however this approach cannot consider the combination of measurement factors. in order to overcome this problem, in this paper a novel approach has been developed for performance evaluation based on balanced scorecard and fuzzy analytic network process (f-anp). considering the interdependency of measurement factors, the proposed method increases the efficiency of performance evaluation process.    the proposed method is implemented in product development department of a dairy company. measurement factors are defined based on literature and also expert’s opinions. then the weights are calculated by f-anp. finally, the performance of 4 new products is evaluated by the proposed approach. results obtained, shows the efficiency of proposed method as a practical approach for product evaluation process.