Ofafa, G. A.Ndumia, Erastus, N2014-07-222014-07-222014-07-22http://ir-library.ku.ac.ke/handle/123456789/10561Department of Business Administration, 61p.2010In today's competitive environment and globalized economy, customers are demanding more varieties and better quality products with faster and reliable deliveries. New manufacturing technologies are developing rapidly, resulting in new products, innovations and improvements in the manufacturing process, thus requiring a proactive approach by organizations. To be proactive, organizations require innovative methods of performance measurements to assess their progress towards achieving organizational vision, mission and strategic objectives. Generally this project sought to investigate the effect of strategic management practices and scorecards on performance and specifically the effect of strategic management practices in Kangaita tea factory. The factory had 7 managers and the production department had 174 employees. All the managers were interviewed and were selected purposefully for they were in charge of departmental performance. An interview guide was used to interview the 7 managers and a secondary data guide was used to collect data on performance. A questionnaire was sent to employees in each department to fill. Out of the population of 174 employees a random sample of 82 employees was used for this study. The study established that Kangaita tea factory had a clearly stated vision and mission which were developed by top management together with the board and KTDA headquarters and the adopted by all the tea factories managed by KTDA. Kangaita tea factory adopted the vision and the mission in the financial year 2006/2007 when it embarked on ISO 9001:2000 quality management system implementation. The vision and mission were broken down into outcomes to be achieved hence the objectives. This was done by top management with the help of ISO implementation consultants. The introduction of strategic management practices of performance measurement and use of key performance indicators had improved performance. The managers felt that there was improvement in the system losses, better motivation of staff and the factory had acquired new markets. Conversion factor of green leaf into manufactured tea had improved and the top grade percent had also improved. It was also established that energy use efficiency had also improved. The researcher came to conclude that the introduction of strategic management practices lead to superior performance. Comparative studies of other tea factories would increase the reliability of the study.enThesis