Abstract

This study raised the necessity of developing performance indicators for measuring the management efficiency and effectiveness of school food service, and as a means of helping its implementation, a balanced score card (BSC) approach developed by Norton and Kaplan was adopted. This study established BSC in seven phases through literature: Phase 1 Defining a school food service and the scope of working activities, Phase 2 Establishing the vision of a school food service, Phase 3 Setting strategic goals, Phase 4 Identifying critical success factors (CSFs), Phase 5 Developing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Phase 6 Extracting cause and effect relationship, and Phase 7 Completing a preliminary BSC. The preliminary BSC was turned into a survey, which was administered to food service related people working at the Office of Education and School Food Service including 16 offices, 209 dietitians, 48 school administrators both from self-operated and contract-managed, and 9 experts in areas related to school food service. They were asked questions about strategics from 4 different perspectives, 12 CSFs, 39 KPIs, and the cause and effect relationships among them. As a result, among the CSFs based on 4 different perspectives, all factors other than "zero sum on profit/loss" from the financial perspective turned out to be valid. In terms of KPIs, manufacturing cost percentages, casualty loss count/reduction rates, school foodervice participation rates, and sales goal achievement rates were found to be valid from the financial perspective, while student satisfaction index, faculty satisfaction index, leftover ratio, nutrition educational performance count, index of evaluating nutrition education, customer claim count/reduction rate, handling customer claim count/reduction rate, and parent satisfaction index were found to be valid from the customers' perspective. Besides, nutritional requirement sufficient ratio, nutritional management score, food poisoning outbreak count, employee safety accident count, sanitary inspection assessment index, meals per labor hour (productivity index), computerization ratio, operational management index, and purchase management assessment index were also found to be valid from the perspective of internal business processes. From the perspective of innovation and learning, employee turnover ratio/rate of absenteeism, annual education and training count, employee satisfaction index, human resource management assessment index, annual menu-related customer feedback, food service information index for employees and parents/schools were also found to be valid. The significance of this study is to present indices for measuring overall performance of school lunch food service operations without putting any limitation on types of school food service management, and to help correctly assess the contribution of the current types of school food service management to schools and students.

• Keywords: school food service; balanced score card; critical success factors; key performance indicators; perspectives