Accounting and finance executives are challenged each day to find ways to improve the value of their companies. In the most successful companies, value enhancement transcends the entire organization, from sales and operations to the accounting and finance department. How well accounting and finance executives address this challenge depends upon the techniques employed.
Until recently, many companies viewed their accounting and finance function as a necessary administrative function whose primary focus was processing transactions and providing information to support the needs of external parties. The focus was not on helping the company achieve its objectives or accumulating day-to-day operational data and improving the flow of information to help managers make better decisions. Today’s challenging and competitive environment demands that accounting and finance organizations operate at a higher level and become a more value-added function.
Whether your accounting and finance organization needs to improve its performance in response to the changing needs of an organization that is implementing Lean business concepts, or whether you would like to use your accounting and finance group to lead the implementation of Lean business concepts throughout your organization, J.H. Cohn’s Lean Accounting Value Improvement Program can help you achieve your objectives.
Benefits of Lean Accounting
Business process improvement isn’t just a strategy for the operations area of a company. J.H. Cohn combines our understanding of how work gets done in an organization with Lean business concepts to enable our clients to achieve a competitive advantage. Typical results include:
- A more responsive accounting and finance group with improved morale, staff utilization, and greater integration with—and support of—the operations of the business.
- More useful, accurate, timely, and consistent management information, resulting in improved decision-making.
- Streamlined business processes into and out of the accounting and finance group resulting in decreased cycle time, which improves cash flow and profitability.
- Elimination of wasted effort and non-value-added activities, which increases capacity and frees staff to focus on more value-creating activities, including business intelligence and analysis.
- More robust financial controls.
- Transformation of the accounting and finance group from a transaction processing center to a value-added partner in the business and the change agents for continuous, incremental improvement throughout the organization.
Our Approach
Using the Lean Accounting toolset, we will help you get to know your customers better so that you can identify value from your customer’s perspective. By capturing the Voice of The Customer, your business will identify the current activities that are important to your customer, as well as identify your customer’s strategic direction.
We will work with you to develop a high-level process map so you will see how value is delivered to your customer—and how it is not. We will define measurements to monitor the progress as process improvements are made and controls are implemented. We will develop a baseline value stream map and collect baseline data so that process efficiency can be monitored.
From the Value Stream Map and baseline data we will analyze ways to eliminate waste and increase value within the processes. Typical examples of waste include overproduction, motion, inventory, transportation, waiting, underutilized people, defects, and over-processing. The analysis of the process will involve techniques such as root cause analysis, Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA), Suppliers Inputs Process Outputs Customers (SIPOCs), and the identification of activities that are value-add, non-value add, and rework.
Once we have identified the non-value add activities, performed root cause analysis, and stratified rework and failures by the severity to the organization, we will develop a plan to eliminate the non-value add activities and the rework, as well as help you implement a culture that sustains lasting improvements.
In today’s better, faster, cheaper world we all have to remain lean, mean, and competitive. We at J.H. Cohn are dedicated to helping you achieve that goal.