With that perspective, I often find opportunities to level a great deal of the process, and isolate the truly parts of the flow so they do not disrupt the main line.

Excellent information regarding heijunka; I’ve implemented heijunka in a Build to stock environment (much easier to do it…); what’s your suggestion about how to apply heijunka in a high mix, high volume, Customized orders operation?; in my new job, we handle up to 16,000 different product types, our daily avg. demand is 5K units and a minimal change of components between orders impacts forecast big time.

The Maskellian VS model is just one approach to VS alignment. This article was not meant to be an endorsement, or even a guide, but rather a 30,000-ft. examination of the basic theory and operating assumptions supporting that model. The article is necessarily simplistic; every company’s situation is a little different, so the response details will vary.

I agree that Lean Accounting can/should be embraced immediately, but Accounting for Lean – if implemented before enough enablers are in place – ends up as just another flavor of “wrong”, and may sour further efforts.

ON THE OTHER HAND, as you so appropriately noted, understanding Accounting for Lean can help a company change the way they think about their business and move toward leaner policies and practices. Implementing the simplified accounting practices, though, is better done in coordination with actual changes to the operational aspect (as Maskell himself suggests).

“The net effect is, as I am writing this, the specialist’s office is calling the referring dentist and asking them what, exactly, they want done.” You have to hope that the “specialist” talks directly to the the dentist.

My first observation is that behaviors which received positive reinforcement tend to be repeated until they become a habit (a default pattern of behavior). A corollary observation is that everyone involved in the process (including the managers) have existing habit patterns that do not include the new behaviors.

Therefore, successful changes must be sufficiently rewarding, prolonged, and repetitive that the associated new behaviors become habits.

Second, Value Streams appear to have fractal characteristics — similar patterns recur at different levels of observational detail. There’s a natural bias to assume that the map is the territory — that the Value Stream Map is the same as the Value Stream mapped. While this may be mostly true for those people completely inside the mapped Value Stream, the manager who “owns” the Value Stream is part of a larger Value Stream (a higher-level fractal). At that level, the initial Value Stream is competing with multiple other concerns (resources, relationships, and objectives). I think that most “management resistance” can be tracked back to an insufficient application of the WIIFM principle (What’s In It For Me?). This principle of enlightened self-interest appears to drive most behaviors, and may help to explain “management resistance” (i.e., management isn’t resisting the Lean tool, or the improvement, they just haven’t subjectively recognized that the new process is much more rewarding [to their higher-level value stream] than the current process.

I hope someone wiser can explain this in more depth, to affirm, refine, or reject it.

v/r;
John

Imitation is the sincerest compliment.

Keep up the good work!

John

Start executing “Lean Accounting” right now and…
Start understanding “Accounting for Lean” right now.

Lean accounting is a do tommorow proposition. There is no reason not to start eliminating waste from the accounting processes right away. For me, the difference between “lean accounting” and “accounting for lean” is not nearly as black and white as some people make it out to be. In my mind, accounting for lean is a description of the ideal state of accounting.

In manufacturing you can eliminate a lot of waste without a deep understanding of the ideal state for a value stream but the improvements will falter as soon as the low hanging fruit is picked. I think accounting is the same way. You need to start eliminating accounting waste right now but at the same time you need to start putting a vision together for where your accounting systems are going. You don’t wait until the manufacturing processes are all lined up to put this vision together. You put this vision together at the same time you put the vision to line the manufacturing up. These things should be going in parallel, not series.

Like so many things in the thinking production system, lean accounting and lean manufacturing are paradoxical. You need to have good stable lean manufacturing in order to have lean accounting but you also need lean accounting to drive you to good stable lean manufacturing. I think Maskell’s maturity path is one of the best descriptions I have seen of one way to overcome this paradox. It proposes that you need “x” stabilty in lean manufacturing before you do “y” in lean accounting and I have used his evaluator as a great tool to support this. The thing that I always thought was somewhat missing in that equation was how y could affect x. I think anyone who has implemented lean has reached points where the accounting system was holding the culture back from making change. In addition, I think the accounting system could become the driver for change much earlier in an organizational change then Maskell proposes. I actually think that to some degree, Accounting for Lean could drive your lean conversion.

My mental model for these two system (lean accounting and lean manufacturing) is that of race cars with rubber bands tied between them. Lean manufacturing is going to get ahead for periods of time and the accounting systems will eventually hold them back. The manufacturing naturally (but stubornly) pulls the accounting system forward. Then the accounting system can actually get ahead and set the right metrics and goals for the organization that will pull the manufacturing processes forward.

If you can get your CFO and your COO to understand that they are in this type of race, then you win. They should be trying to race ahead of each other at all times while also realizing that they have to pull the other group with them whenever they get ahead. It is a little more subtle then this in reality as portions of accounting will be ahead while other portions will be behind. Fundamentally, this is what we are trying to get to.

I share your overall concerns about reluctance to offer up “prerequisites” to people who are not aligned with the goals of the program. You are getting into core issues of the psychology of organizational change. The technical issues raised (as you point out) often obscure the underlying needs and concerns of the people raising them.