«Management control systems must be simple, timely and effective. With but a few numbers they must allow management to understand how the company is doing under the economic, financial and operational aspects. For this reason we believe that lean accounting is an effective tool useful for every kind of company»
Alberto Canepari
Board Member
A significant number of companies all over the world has applied the principles and methods of Lean Thinking achieving good results in terms of shorter delivery times, shorter production lead times, shorter set up times, smaller production batches, lower inventory, better quality.
These same companies has soon realized that traditional management accounting systems based on product standard costs are both complex and incapable to provide meaningful measures of the results of a lean transformation. Sometimes these methods are in contradiction with reality and common sense showing worse results (for instance negative variances) in the face of unquestionably better performances.
Lean Accounting is an innovative approach to management accounting which pursues two objectives: simplicity and capacity to measure the real results of a lean transformation.
Read more: The Pillars of Lean Accounting
Read more: Articles on Lean Accounting
Read more: Lean Accounting from a company perspective
Cost reduction: eliminating standard cost accounting systems and replacing them with a value stream accounting system drastically reduces times and costs.
Simplicity: value stream cost accounting provides the right information in a form that is easily readable to everybody in the company and not only to specialists.
Effectiveness: management control is made much more effective since lean accounting provides both economic and performance measures using a tool, the so called Box Score, which is quite easy to understand and makes it possible to understand the correlation between operational performances and economic results.
Timeliness: information are provided on a weekly basis and within one day, so they are not only complete but also timely.
Company involvement: because of the simplicity of the system the barriers between the Accounting Area and the rest of the company are tore down. Accounting becomes friendly and familiar to a large number of people even without accounting competence or experience.
Support to Lean Transformation: the information provided, unlike those of traditional systems, makes it possible to measure the effects of the lean transformation process.
In these last few years we have carried out many successful projects of Lean Transformation and we have proposed many training events on Lean tools and methods during which we use advanced Lean games and present real cases of Lean Transformation projects.
Planning and control systems should be simple, effective and timely. With as few numbers as possible they must show a company’s operational performances as well as its economic and financial results.
For this we believe that Lean Accounting is a planning and control system useful for every kind of companies, whether they are well advanced in the Lean Transformation or not.
Training – Master Classes and Workshops on Lean Accounting
GC&P propose the first and only Lean Accounting Master Class in Italy. This intensive course has been developed in the U.S. thanks to the experience and the ideas of Brian Maskell and has been improved during scores of sessions held all over the world. GC&P and BMA Europe propose a new version of the Master Class adapted for European and Italian companies. The course, which is in Engllish, incudes two intense days of theoretical and practical sessions during which methods and tools of Lean Accounting are presented and discussed. It is offered for a single company or for a group of companies.
Topics of the lean accounting Master Class
Read more about the next Workshop
Consulting
Our experts can assist the company in all the phases of a Lean Accounting project: initial training, creation of a pilot model, extension of the model to the whole company.
