Rainbow Department Store, headquartered in Shenzhen, China, is a 29-store retail department store chain. For 2007, it had $1.1 billion in sales, more than 8,300 employees, and was ranked as number 33 in China’s Top 100 chain stores. Rainbow adopted the scorecard in 2004 to help implement a new strategy in the face of China’s rapid growth and increasing competition. The BSC provided strategic context for Rainbow’s ISO 9000 and Lean Six Sigma programs. Prior to the scorecard’s adoption, the opening of 6 to 8 new stores opening each year strained and elongated engineering and preparation time. Three years after the BSC management system was implemented, store opening cycles fell from 139 to 91 days, and operating profit grew from $24 million to $50 million. “The BSC is a system that balances internal and external aspects of the company, process and results, shareholders and employees, current and long-term,” says William Lai, Managing Director. “It has helped us identify strategic focuses, improve work efficiency, and achieve our objectives against well-planned targets.”