The Balanced Scorecard: application in the Italian SMEs.

This thesis was born as part of the curricular internship carried out in Open srl, a strategic and financial consulting company for SMEs. The subject of the work is the Balanced Scorecard, a tool for evaluation and strategic business planning developed by American researchers Kaplan and Norton. The objective of the internship is to analyse the tool in order to adapt it to the target customers of Open srl, the SMEs. Therefore, the thesis aims to present the work done during this project and the results obtained. The main reference for this work are the texts of Kaplan and Norton on the subject, in particular "Balanced Scorecard", "Strategic Maps" and "The enterprise oriented by strategy", as well as numerous articles and thesis works that developed issues related to the Balanced Scorecard and SMEs. After a bibliographic research, a first generic Balanced Scorecard was developed, strongly linked to the notions reported in the text "Balanced Scorecard", and then compared with other Balanced Scorecards developed in different business contexts, in order to make a collection of possible indicators that can be used for the development of the tool. This was followed by an analysis of the various case studies in order to extrapolate the indicators that would be more commonly used and more significant, and at the same time an assessment based on the user base for which the tool would be used. The result of the work is a Balanced scorecard, developed for a specific client of Open srl: Notarianni srl, a company that deals with printing labels mainly for oil and wine bottles. To this end, an analysis of the company was carried out in line with the BSC tool, through an analysis of the balance sheet and an interview with the client. Then a strategic map was developed, a business planning tool, and a Balanced Scorecard, a tool for assessing the current and future health of the company, based on the objectives designated in the strategic map. The strategic map and the Balanced scorecard, complete with all the selected indicators, are the result of this work and the beginning of a path of strategic reorganization of this promising SME based in Piedmont.