Product Description

An extremely accessible delineation of the changes required for accounting, control, and measurement methods in lean organizations, this book challenges readers to take a fresh look at their accounting systems. It clarifies methods for innovative, proactive management accounting and presents techniques for simplifying accounting systems so that they serve production, marketing, and engineering sectors with equal efficiency. Updated to include current principles, practices, and tools of Lean Accounting, the second edition uses the same polemical style that made the first edition so popular. It covers ABC, VAM, performance measurement, concurrent engineering, target costing, value engineering, and life cycle costing.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1164319 in Books
• Published on: 2009-05-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 243 pages

From the Back Cover

The first edition of Brian Maskell’s now classic work proved that when given the chance, accountants would prefer not to serve out their working days as number crunching automatons. With its energetic tone and common sense approach, the book inspired numbers people at all levels to become true allies in their companies’ lean revolutions. It encouraged new directions for both management and financial accounting, and helped provide impetus for the lean accounting movement that continues to find adherents in companies small and large today.

With the second edition of Making the Numbers Count: The Accountant as Change Agent on the World-Class Team, Maskell once again shows that the accountant’s first responsibility during a lean implementation is not to simply read the conventional bottom-line profit-and-loss results, but measure and reflect the processes that influence the bottom line. Once released from the chains of the ledger, the accountant is then free to establish performance measures that make a difference, empower others throughout the company to create customer value, eliminate waste, improve processes, and participate in a truly lean organization that is flexible and responsive enough to function optimally in turbulent and unpredictable times.

In these pages, Maskell provides the rationale, approaches, and tools needed to embrace a companywide allegiance to lean principles and practices. The book is updated throughout to reflect recent advances. Notably, it eliminates activity-based costing and management (ABC/M) in favor of the much more expedient value-stream accounting methods that have been tried and tested in diverse companies over the last ten years.

Like lean itself, this book will teach you to throw out what’s wasteful and improve upon that which has value. In this way, it turns accountants who once merely followed into powerful leading change agents.

About the Author
Brian Maskell Associates, Inc., Cherry Hill, New Jersey

Customer Reviews

A little disappointed
Brian Maskell is certainly one of a half dozen leading lights in Lean Accounting, so I looked forward with great anticipation to this book. But, I was a little disappointed. The book is written primarily for accountants with little or no knowledge of Lean. So, if you are a reasonably experienced Lean practitioner you will find much repetition of old concepts that are better explained elsewhere. If you are familiar with Brian's book Practical Lean Accounting you will already be familiar with concepts like value stream accounting and the box score. A good thing is that ABC accounting has been dropped. Brian wrote a really good article with Robin Cooper in MIT Sloan Management Review. You may well get more out of that article than out of this book. Perhaps try The Lean Toolbox (4th edition)?The Lean Toolbox: The Essential Guide to Lean Transformation