Essay Assignment: How Lean vs. Traditional Production Might Affect a Management Accountant Trying to Calculate a Company’s Costs. How Would the Information a Management Accountant Would Use to Determine Company Costs

780 Words4 Pages
Mark Avrin / Bus-510 / Module 1 06/30/2013 Essay Assignment: How lean vs. traditional production might affect a management accountant trying to calculate a company’s costs. How would the information a management accountant would use to determine company costs change depending on type of production? Lean management requires many structural changes versus traditional management methods to be successful. After all, Lean is not just a term applied for storing less inventory or for restructuring some departments. Lean is a methodology, a philosophy and a strategy. Lean is a different way of looking at production in today’s economic times and requires a decision making system that supports this. Standard cost accounting presents a problem for lean companies. Orry Fiume, one of the pioneers in Lean, in his article on Lean Accounting and finance states, “…in order to successfully implement Lean, everything the company does has to support it, and whatever doesn't has to be changed. Thus, product development processes, sales terms and marketing programs, human resource policies and procedures, and accounting systems have to be examined in order to insure that they do not contain elements that contradict the Lean strategy” (Fiume, 2002). He goes on to focus on the role of the accountants and accounting systems, stressing that they “tend to be the most significant barrier to successfully implementing Lean” (Fiume). One of these barriers, according to Bruce Baggaley in his discussion paper regarding Lean and Lean Accounting, is that standard cost accounting principles are actually at odds with what Lean is trying to achieve. He states that standard cost accounting’s measurements motivate behaviors that are harmful to lean, “…and it does not provide reliable cost information for decision-making in a lean environment” (Baggaley, 2003). The reason Baggaley states

More about Essay Assignment: How Lean vs. Traditional Production Might Affect a Management Accountant Trying to Calculate a Company’s Costs. How Would the Information a Management Accountant Would Use to Determine Company Costs

Open Document