"Motivating Lean Behavior: The Role of Accounting"

Peter Brewer and Frances Kennedy

Cost Management

November/December 2006, pp. 22-29

This article contends that "lean accountants" can help build a culture of intrinsic motivational commitment in five ways:

• Enable process ownership
  • Use measures that can be understood by all employees
  • Use measures that show employees how their efforts drive overall success
  • Provide information when it is needed to make decisions
• Think sales growth first
  • Provide information to help answer questions about what the process constraints are and how to alleviate them
  • Treat employees as assets, and redeploy people as improvement efforts make them available
  • Use layoffs only as a last resort
• Adopt the enterprise lean view
  • Define value steams from the customer's point of view
  • Use value stream maps to streamline the information management side of the business
  • Satisfy financial reporting and SOX compliance with fewer resources to free up people for lean accounting
• Become a business partner
  • Seek to learn from those with process knowledge
  • Participate in kaizen events and readily recognize their success
  • Build shared commitments and goals with value stream and cell team members
• Adopt a long-term view
  • Proactively manage expectations regarding short-term hits to the income statement as inventory shrinks
  • Recognize nonfinancial performance improvements in value streams and cells as the drivers of future financial success
  • Participate in recognition events for nonfinancial improvements

This article also discusses six elements of the "lean measurement mindset":

• Lean measurement systems are strategy-driven
• Lean measurement systems capture the voice of the customer
• A lean measurement system tracks measures related to process excellence
• Lean measurement systems provide visibility
• Lean measures build shared commitment
• Lean measures motivate a continuous improvement culture

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