An accounting professor and two doctoral candidates received 2011 Excellence in Lean Accounting Awards, sponsored by the nonprofit Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI) at the seventh annual Lean Accounting Summit.
About 275 finance and operations managers and executives from manufacturing and service companies attended the conference, Sept. 15-16 in Orlando.
Sandra Richtemeyer, Ph.D, CMA, CPA, received the award for her years of being “a generous resource of expertise and a source of encouragement to students and accounting professionals advancing lean accounting,” noted Chet Marchwinski, LEI communications director. Richtemeyer is chair of the Accounting Department, Williams College of Business, Xavier University, Cincinnati. She has participated in every Lean Accounting Summit, according to Lean Frontiers, conference organizers.
Dan Harris, a teacher at the Patterson School of Accountancy, University of Mississippi, and Rao Manjunath, a teacher at Maharishi University of Management, received student awards. Harris is working on a doctoral dissertation comparing the performance of companies pursuing lean transformations to companies that are not. Rao’s dissertation will address why a majority of the world’s manufacturers continue to use traditional standard cost accounting even as they adopt lean manufacturing.
What is Lean?
The terms lean manufacturing, lean production, or lean management refer to a complete business system for organizing and managing product development, operations, suppliers, customer relations, and the overall enterprise that requires less capital, material, space, time, or human effort to produce products and services with fewer defects to precise customer desires, compared with traditional modern management.
Making a Lean Leap
Conference organizers said the lean accounting movement seeks a shift from traditional cost accounting practices to methods that accurately measure and motivate companies implementing lean management principles.
The shift is needed because traditional cost accounting does not accurately reflect the performance gains made when companies launch a lean transformation. For example, traditional financial statements do not accurately reflect reductions in inventory or cycle times, or new found capacity in operations caused by a lean transformation. Traditional accounting practices also motivate the wrong behaviors in companies implementing lean principals. For instance, conventional efficiency metrics can motivate management to create excess inventory.
Learn Lean Accounting
The Lean Accounting Workshop from LEI gives you the logic, key principles, and a proven methodology to create a complete lean accounting system that accurately reflects the benefits of the lean transformation. This workshop is not an academic exercise. It’s based on the successful lean accounting transformation performed by The Wiremold Company and it is taught by Orest Fiume, Wiremold’s vice president of finance, during the transformation.
For complete information about workshops discounts, course content, and registration, go to the Education page at https://www.lean.org/Workshops/WorkshopCalendar.cfm, call 617-871-2900, or email registrar@lean.org.
Lean Community Resources
Join LEI’s community of Lean Thinkers at https://www.lean.org to receive newsletters with lean management resources. You also get access to case studies, lean leadership interviews, webinars, insights from John Shook and LEI Founder Jim Womack, who led the MIT research team that coined the term “lean production.”
Lean Enterprise Institute
Lean Enterprise Institute, Inc., was founded in 1997 by management expert James P. Womack, Ph.D., as a nonprofit research, education, publishing, and conference company with a mission to advance lean thinking around the world. We teach courses, hold management seminars, write and publish books and workbooks, and organize public and private conferences. We use the surplus revenues from these activities to conduct research projects and support other lean initiatives such as the Lean Education Academic Network, the Lean Global Network and the Healthcare Value Leaders Network. Visit LEI at https://www.lean.org for more information.
Media: Chet Marchwinski, LEI communications director, cmarchwinski@lean.org, 617-871-2930