a b s t r a c tManufacturing firms operating in rapidly changing and highly competitive markets have embraced the continuous process improvement mindset. They have worked to improve quality, flexibility, and customer response time using the principles of Lean thinking. To reach its potential, lean must be adopted as a holistic business strategy, rather than an activity isolated in operations. The lean enterprise calls for the integration of lean practices across operations and other business functions. As a critical component for achieving financial control, management accounting practices (MAP) need to be adjusted to meet the demands and objectives of lean organizations. Our aim is to help both researchers and practitioners better understand how lean MAP can support operations personnel with their internal decision making, and operations executives and business leaders in their objective of increasing lean operations performance as part of a holistic lean enterprise strategy. We use survey data from 244 U.S. manufacturing firms to construct a structural equation model. We document that the extent of lean manufacturing implementation is associated with the use of lean MAP, and further that the lean MAP are related in a systematic way: simplified and strategically aligned MAP positively influences the use of value stream costing, which in turn positively influences the use of visual performance measures. We also find that the extent of lean manufacturing practices is directly related to operations performance. More importantly, lean manufacturing practices also indirectly affect operations performance through lean MAP. These findings are consistent with the notion that lean thinking is a holistic business strategy. In order to derive the greatest impact on performance, our results indicate that operations management cannot operate in a vacuum. Instead, operations and accounting personnel must partner with each other to ensure that lean MAP are strategically integrated into the lean culture. In sum, lean MAP provide essential financial control that integrates with and supports operations to achieve desired benefits.

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Medical and health sciences educators are increasingly employing team-based learning (TBL) in their teaching activities. TBL is a comprehensive strategy for developing and using self-managed learning teams that has created a fertile area for medical education scholarship. However, because this method can be implemented in a variety of ways, published reports about TBL may be difficult to understand, critique, replicate, or compare unless authors fully describe their interventions.The authors of this article offer a conceptual model and propose a set of guidelines for standardizing the way that the results of TBL implementations are reported and critiqued. They identify and articulate the seven core design elements that underlie the TBL method and relate them to educational principles that maximize student engagement and learning within teams. The guidelines underscore important principles relevant to many forms of small-group learning. The authors suggest that following these guidelines when writing articles about TBL implementations should help standardize descriptive information in the medical and health sciences education literature about the essential aspects of TBL activities and allow authors and reviewers to successfully replicate TBL implementations and draw meaningful conclusions about observed outcomes.