The method of multiple scales is a global perturbation technique that has resulted to be very useful in perturbed ordinary differential equations characterized by disparate time scales. The general principle behind the method is that the solution to the differential equation is uniformly expanded in terms of two or more independent variables, referred to as time scales. In this article, we present a mathematical object based on a Poisson series to apply the method of multiple scales via specific symbolic computation. Copyright (C) 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.