Marcin Michalak

Report on the Conference of Lean Accounting – an Integral Part of Lean Management

On 24–25 April 2013 the Department of Accounting in the Faculty of Management at the University of Łódź (Poland) organized for the second time the conference regarding Lean Accounting in the context of the principles and methods of this innovative concepts of Lean Management. The main organizers of the second edition of the conference were academics from the Department of Accounting (Faculty of Management, University of Łódź), i.a. Dr. hab. Irena Sobańska, as chair of the conference, and Dr. Ewelina Zarzycka and Marcin Michalak. For several years the issue of lean accounting has been the subject of great interest among management practitioners, specialists and designers of management accounting/controlling systems and the academic accounting community from the city of Lodz. The managers of companies using Lean Management emphasize that the successful implementation of this management concept is not possible without appropriate changes in policies and methods in the system of the accounting which are appropriate to the essence of management philosophy. More and more often, in practice and at an academic level, questions are asked about issues relating to the implementation of new methods in the field of accounting, as well as questions about the benefits that these new methods bring to the effectiveness of organizations operating in a dynamic global environment. The conference, which was organized by the Department of Accounting in the Faculty of Management (University of Łódź), was an opportunity for a comprehensive look at this issue from the perspective of business practitioners and scientists. The conference included such aspects as:  the specifics of accounting systems/controlling systems in companies managed in accordance with the lean approach;  systems for measuring and communicating performance through the system of lean accounting in companies applying lean management;  cooperation and communication accounting/controlling specialists with line/ products, value stream, etc. managers;

Implementing Lean Accounting Principles to Design and Improve Accounting Processes - a Case Study from a Shared Service Centre

Developments changing the economic environment have contributed to the dynamic development and wide use of the Lean Management concept (LM) since the late 1980s. The LM concept is increasingly used not only in particular fields of activity (production, services, trade, administration, and even the public sector), but also in appropriate areas of the value chain, in primary as well as support activities. The Institute of Management Accountants (IMA, 2006) stresses that the LM concept is becoming a prerequisite for firms to survive in the global economy, where the main focus lies on creating customer value that allows for the creation of value for the company owner. In many cases the adoption of a lean management philosophy oriented towards added value maximization and waste elimination leads companies to internal outsourcing, establishing Shared Service Centres (SSC) or external outsourcing in the form of BPO (Business Process Outsourcing). The principles underpinning the lean concept that Womack and Jones (1996) originally defined for primary processes in the value chain (lean manufacturing/production) were eventually extended to also support activities, for example accounting. In the literature and in practice, accounting which is transformed according to the lean concept is generally termed lean accounting, but for analytical purposes the term should be subdivided into two fields that, although distinct, are closely related to each other. These are: 1) accounting for lean (focused on the product of accounting), where the type, scope and usefulness of accounting information are adapted to account for the new information needs of managers at the different levels of a lean enterprise and for changes in its functioning (Kennedy et al., 2010); 2) lean for accounting (focused on the process of accounting), where the lean management tools are used to ensure that the accounting process is efficient and effective, and delivers the expected products.