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 “Making the Numbers Count, Second Edition: 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 10 years.
Like lean itself, this book teaches how 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.
Making the Numbers Count, Second Edition: The Accountant as Change Agent on the World-Class Team …
· Introduces world class methods required for innovative, proactive management accounting
· Presents techniques to simplify accounting systems so that they serve production, marketing and engineering
· Details such methods as value stream costing, VAM, performance measurement, concurrent engineering, target costing, value engineering and life cycle costing
About the author
Brian H. Maskell, president of BMA Inc., has more than 30 years experience in manufacturing and distribution industry. He has held a variety of management positions from the shop-floor of an electronics company to manager of European inventories for the Xerox Corporation to vice president of product development and customer service of the Unitronix Corporation. Over the past 15 years, Maskell's consulting practice has taken him to many manufacturing and distribution companies in the United States, England, Mexico, Australia, South Africa, Europe and the Far East. He has assisted these companies in the implementation of advanced manufacturing techniques including lean and agile manufacturing, logistics and supply chain management, lean accounting, value-stream costing/management, new performance measurement, process re-engineering, enterprise information systems, and total quality management. Brian Maskell is also the author of “Practical Lean Accounting” (2003), “The Lean Business Management System” (2007), “Performance Measurement for World Class Manufacturing” (1991), and “Life’s Little Lean Accounting Instruction Book” (2006). He has an engineering degree from the