The bottom line of managing intellectual capital is the ability to measure its elements. Year by year intellectual capital literature and company practice line up new measuring attempts, but only some of them prove to have strong empirical evidence. Notwithstanding, several companies complete their traditional financial accountings with the evaluation of assets which are invisible in the books. First, our study introduces the main issues regarding the measurement of intellectual capital elements. Then it seeks the answer for the question how the EFQM-based self-assessment method can support an organization in its efforts to evaluate some of its intellectual capital elements.

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The purpose of this article is to introduce the so-called Reliability based Customer Satisfaction Evaluation Method that is founded upon the evaluator functions using the approach of logistic-type evaluation. The scorecard based customer satisfaction measurement methods, which are widely used at Electronics Manufacturing Services (EMS) provider companies, were studied to draw conclusions on the goodness, reliability and usefulness of these traditional practices. The approach followed here was to understand the sources of uncertainties of these methods, and construct mathematical models to improve their reliability. The nature of customers' perceptions about the services they receive as functions of the scores they give through pre-agreed scorecards was mathematically modeled in evaluator functions. A method for parameter setting of evaluator functions was developed to make the functions adequately reflecting the customers' satisfaction perceptions.

The purpose of the paper is to contribute to the use of evaluator and utility functions in order to increase the reliability of scorecard based intellectual capital (IC) measurement methods and to express and aggregate the utility of IC components to an organization. The conducted field experiment integrates the results of interviews with 23 brand name customers by examining the customer satisfaction measuring practice of service provider companies. Our main finding is that adequately calibrated evaluator functions assign perceived customer satisfaction to its scorecard based measured values and reduce the distortions of scorecard based measurements. The originality of the research lies in expressing and aggregating the utilities of IC components to the organization by interpreting the evaluator function as a kind of utility function. This application allows the joint use of financial valuation and scorecard based measurement in the same performance management system.

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