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The Lean Accounting Summit: at the leading edge of Lean (NEW)
Sustaining Lean without Lean accounting "is like pushing a rock up a hill." Leaders from The Association for Manufacturing Excellence (AME), the Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME), and the Shingo Prize for Operational Excellence explain the importance of Lean Accounting to implementing and sustaining your Lean efforts. Watch now:
Video Transcript The Lean Accounting Summit: at the leading edge of Lean
RAPLPH KELLER: My name is Ralph Keller. I’m the president of the Association for Manufacturing Excellence (AME). TERRY BENOCHE: My name is Terry Begnoche. I work with the Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME). BOB MILLER: My name is Bob Miller, and I'm the executive director for the Shingo Prize for Operational Excellence. RALPH: We're involved with the Lean Accounting Summit, because we realize that accounting for Lean transformation is an important part of the sustainability of the Lean journey. If our practitioner members are going to go on this Lean journey, they really have to have their financial people involved as well in order to make it sustainable. Otherwise, they're pushing a rock up a hill. TERRY: One of the barriers to Lean that people are running into was the accounting system quite often would undo or slow down improvement because it was a change. We make these improvements, and then the accounting system causes us to undo them, or gives us grief, and doesn’t give it a chance to prove that it's an improvement. RALPH: Ultimately, what's at stake if you don't change your accounting systems is your Lean transformations will not be sustainable. We've seen it over, and over, and over, and over again. TERRY: I’d say the hope that SME has for participating in the Lean accounting Summit is to help foster learning and improvement so that accounting can become more of an asset, if you want to put it in those terms, to the manufacturing work that's going on in Lean manufacturing operations. I think what people will find out when they come to something like the Summit is, “you know what? The speakers don't have all the answers either. And you know what? They tell you that they don't have all the answers. They’re engaged in helping to find them, and they want my help.” RALPH: It really is about sharing knowledge from practitioner to practitioner; talking to people who have been there and done that, people who have got all the bruises and the scars from their journeys; and learning from them to accelerate other people’s Lean transformations by not making the same mistakes over again. We hate reinventing wheels. BOB: Because of being here, we met lots of people who are on the leading edge or wanting to get to the leading edge. Creating momentum requires a few strong leaders who are willing to step forward and say, “This is the right thing to do.”
