A vital role of lean accounting is to reduce the workload required for the routine accounting, control, and measurement system. This gives accountants more time to work on needle moving strategic activities that move the needle.
A vital role of lean accounting is to reduce the workload required for the routine accounting, control, and measurement system. This gives accountants more time to work on needle moving strategic activities that move the needle.
Many organizations find early in their lean journey that their accounting approach does not mesh well with lean thinking. While lean can help a company become far more effective and efficient by reducing waste, we should be able to account for those improvements. However, common accounting practices often fail to adequately measure lean improvements. An alternative, lean accounting approach is…
A common misconception is that the kaizen event ends with the actual event. Many find it a surprise that there are post-event activities following a kaizen event that is necessary to ensure the kaizen event’s success. In fact, the two to three weeks following the event week are designated for post-event activities meant to serve that exact purpose.
Facilitating a successful kaizen event requires a sound plan and reasonable expectations. That way we can keep our team on task and be ready to recognize and address challenges as they arise. To assist in these efforts, the following is a recommended schedule for ensuring kaizen event week success.
Just like any event, adequate preparation is a key factor in kaizen event success. Always be sure to allocate sufficient time to prepare for your kaizen event. That said, it’s best to plan kaizen preparation in addition to your actual kaizen event. Our first tool in this effort is a kaizen timeline...
Kaizen events are team efforts requiring participants to perform certain roles. Thus, a key part of kaizen event planning is assigning roles for the kaizen event. In this article we introduce a a few common key kaizen event roles and requirements necessary to ensure a successful kaizen event.
Kaizen events can be used to swiftly improve almost any process that can be observed, measured and changed. Because teams in kaizen events are cross-functional and focused, it is much easier to make changes quickly and optimally at minimal costs to the company.
Kaizen is a lean continuous improvement tool, that literally means to change for the better. Kaizen empowers you to deconstruct processes and develop and implement better versions of those processes. However, before we can effectively apply kaizen, we must firmly understand the "3 gens" or the "3 actuals".
Most of our time should be spent doing value added work. However, if you take a look at the total lead time through value stream you will discover that “Muda” or waste steals a lot of our time. Another thing that a lot of companies do is to try and reduce the overall lead time by making the value add process more efficient. In reality there’s more value in reducing the waste in the process first before worrying about improving the value added steps.
