A Lean Accounting Business Novel

Here is a business novel that for the first time explains how accounting and manufacturing personnel must develop a partnership to successfully achieve world class results. This novel takes readers on a successful "Lean Journey" and illustrates how to bring accounting practices into the 21st century in order to compete in today's global market. Often, current accounting requirements and measurements support the creation of waste rather than facilitate its elimination. For example: - Standard cost systems often recognize and reward people for producing parts or products at standard cost, without regard to the Lean requirements of producing only the quantity the customer requires and only when they need it, so that the parts or products do not end up as inventory waste. - Accounting requires suppliers to send invoices to the Accounts Payable department before the supplier can be paid. Why? We have proof we received the material! Why not just pay the supplier 30 days after Receiving says they received the material? Forcing the supplier to invoice us adds cost (which we pay for) without adding value! - We worry about job tracking and labor reporting, often having shopfloor associates spend many wasted minutes and sometimes hours clocking in and out of jobs over weeks and months. In Lean, we try to produce the part or product in a smooth continuous flow so that the amount of time the product is on the shofloor being processed approaches the sum of the individual process cycle times. A must read for all those interested in successfully implementing lean accounting.