LEAN ACCOUNTING BEST PRACTICES FOR SUSTAINABLE INTEGRATIONE phần 8 potx

team (downstream from accounting for problem customers), and manufac￾turing (someone outside the process.)

For this event in particular, we also invited someone from a collection firm.

He joined us for two days during the event, and we were able to learn tips and

gain perspective from his professional expertise. As it turned out, he also gained

knowledge on waste elimination that he was able to put to work at his com￾pany. It was a great partnership. In most events where we invite people from

outside the company, it is pretty difficult to tell who is an employee and who

isn’t within a few hours. It seems that everyone really enjoys the opportunity

to contribute when empowered for change.

In another recent event, one team member, “John,” discovered that the per￾son after him in the process, “Jane”—from a different department—routinely

reorganized the information and “fixed” errors in the data before proceed￾ing. John had no idea that errors were being passed along and was somewhat

embarrassed that it occurred in the first place. Thereafter, he sent the data for￾ward with no errors and even reformatted it to meet the next person’s needs.

John hadn’t known there was a problem, and Jane simply thought that “was

how it was.” The fix was easy and fast and made both people happy.

9.3 HOW TO GET STARTED AND NEVER END

Ten interdependent activities enable enterprises to adopt and support the lean ac￾counting focus areas described in the previous section. While they all overlap,

they are listed in the order that most enterprises are usually capable of follow￾ing as people become engulfed in the full benefits of adopting lean concepts.

1. Plunge into operation’s lean activities.

2. Lead a culture of continuous improvement.

3. Reduce the closing calendar.

4. Optimize financial data usage.

5. Convert to English.

6. Support lean measures.

7. Attack accounting waste.

8. Evaluate and/or eliminate standard cost accounting.

9. Engage kanban.

10. Become a consultative business partner.

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These are not “one time and done” activities. They change most or all busi￾ness processes, everyone’s job becomes more productive, and, frankly, every￾one’s job makes a lot more sense. With ongoing management support, many

employees start looking for possible improvements as a matter of course, re￾sulting in continuous gains as the transformation process moves forward.

While using these activities in my accounting group over a five-year period,

our company revenue doubled while the accounting group stayed the same

size, with two people redeployed to provide entirely new services. In general,

our value-add and reputation company-wide rose immeasurably. Each activity

is described in the following sections.

(a) Plunge into Operation’s Lean Activities

Deploy the accounting members into the various Kaizen and improvement

events in the rest of the company. They might well perform the traditional role

and “bring finance information” to the event, but they also should function as

active participants and full members of the teams by finding and improving the

process in other parts of the company. The sooner each accounting team

member—and most critically the CFO and accounting managers—get involved

with the nonfinancial lean events, the sooner they gain a personal understand￾ing of what is changing in the company and the potential impact in competi￾tiveness, cash flow, and profitability (see Chapter 3 for more on the role of the

CFO).

Many of the benefits will not be directly recognizable as financial benefits

unless it is observed firsthand. Most traditional financial evaluation tools are

focused on the value-adding portions of the process. Traditionally, accountants

know how to “value” reducing the cycle time for manufacturing equipment or

how to measure the benefit of reducing wasted materials. Tools like discounted

cash flow, payback, or return on investment (ROI) are understood and normal

for these activities.

Waste elimination steps in non-value-adding activities are not traditionally

measured by accounting. For instance:

• Moving equipment closer together to eliminate travel time

• Creating standard procedures for cleaning and maintaining the equipment

• Processing one part at a time

These productivity gains, while apparent to those doing or observing the work,

do not often have obvious or immediate benefits found in the results of tradi￾tional financial measurement tools.

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