Lean philosophy and balanced scorecard: what’s new?

The evolution of the general economic system through an increasingly frenetic pace, has certainly affected the relational dynamic and dialectic systems that involve firms and the environment: they can be identified as a contrast between the environmental turbulence and the viscosity related to the operating and organizational structures of the firm. In this scenario, the economic globalization and the financial crisis represent the new fundamental challenges that companies must face in order to success within markets made up by more and more particular consumers, that usually need of customized satisfaction coming from customized products. Management solutions inclined towards lean thinking try to solve these kind of defies by focusing on a virtuous corporate functioning, thanks to a shared philosophy that relies entirely on the minimization of any kind of waste. Their main target is to achieve business goals in a way that is absolutely flexible and can be shared at any strategy level within the firm. Furthermore, the role played by the management accounting science is strictly related, also, on how managers can measure performance according to their strategic actions. Often, companies use the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) to control the effectiveness of strategies within firm structures, whereas is not enough to refer only to financial measures, in order to fully understand the firm functioning. The measuring process of firm success represents, nowadays, an issue that managers and researchers need to investigate continuously. Going towards new management accounting paradigms, might the use of the BSC enhance information processing, useful for spreading lean thinking all over the firm and for testing its effects? Moreover, thanks to lean thinking, might we suppose improvements related to the BSC functioning, by streamlining that information processing? According to the literature, little is known about how to answer these questions. By answering them, however, the study tries to find innovative solutions especially needed in turbulent times like these.