Accounting for Lean

This workshop is designed for both manufacturing leaders AND their financial counterparts to encourage a greater level of alignment between Lean operations and accounting.  It covers a wide ranging set of topics including Lean tools, organization culture, value streams and deep-dives at Lean business management practices through the lens of both the customer (operations) and the supplier of information (accounting).

This workshop will illustrate the value and competitive advantage of Lean principles and practices via a hands-on simulation that includes Lean’s impact on operations and financial statements. Implementing a Lean Business System typically sends the wrong signals and negatively impacts financial results during the early stages. Unlike traditional Lean simulations, this workshop will include financial statements for each stage of the simulation in both a traditional format and then a simplified Plain English P & L format in order to demonstrate the importance of alignment between operations and accounting.

The workshop will clearly illustrate why traditional cost management techniques are often at odds with Lean thinking and provide answers on how to develop a set of financial reports, including “Plain English” financial statements, that allow the user community to truly understand performance. Exercises will demonstrate how traditional transactional processing needs to be changed in lock-step with Lean changes occurring in manufacturing, and how a working partnership between operations and accounting supports an effective Lean transformation. Attendees will need to bring their laptops and be prepared to dive into the numbers as this is a very intensive hands-on workshop.