The State of Lean and the Challenge of Lean Accounting – Speaker: Jim Womack, LEI (LE0601)
Ultra-Lean Accounting – Richard Schonberger (LE0602)
Creative Work Life – Norman Bodek (LE0603)

      Many Summit attendees commented, "This was the best and most inspiring presentation I've seen by Jim Womack." Norman Bodek was, well, Norman Bodek! If you've not heard him before, you will laugh and you will be challenged to respect those around you and bring out their creative potential. And Richard Schoenberger shared his years of insight and claims "we are in the 2nd generation of Lean Accounting."

The State of Lean and the Challenge of Lean Accounting - Jim Womack
      Join the Lean Accounting Summit in welcoming the Opening Keynote with Jim Womack discussing the challenges that lie before us as we work to develop the understanding and actions needed to transform our businesses to a lean enterprise. Jim will address the keys to success and the underlying problems that prevent us from achieving these objectives. He will advocate what actions we need to take to transform our companies and our accounting systems to fundamentally move in the right – or lean - direction.

Ultra-Lean Accounting - Richard J. Schonberger
      Ultra-lean accounting bears allegiance to the economy-of-control principle: The best control requires the fewest controls—and controllers. It is guided by a common belief in the lean-accounting community: Process improvement drives cost reduction. Finally, it bows deeply to the customer and the customer’s golden goals: ever better quality, quicker response, greater flexibility, and higher value.
      Under high-energy process improvement, powered by lean/TQ, costs fall of their own accord. Cost-management practices, such as the following, become seen as cost-consuming, non-value-adding excess: monthly cost reporting, standard costs, cost variances, monetary goal-setting, and cost as a carrot-and-stick motivator. In the ultra-lean alternative, an enlightened, process-improving work force provides its own motivation by visual, public plotting of non-monetary trends, which praise achievement and scold laxity. Plans and goals, set forth low in the organization, revolve, not around cost, but around process data targeting the golden goals and specific to causes. The many components of visual management accomplish directly and simply what cost-denominated devices do indirectly.
      Ultra-lean accounting does not cast off the gamut of cost-based practices. A worthy practice is placing cost labels on bins for parts and tools, raising cost sensitivity of a work force trained as budget-watchers. Activity-based costing, a lean-accounting mainstay, is valued under ultra-lean—but only for infrequent competitive decision-making.

Creative Work Life - Norman Bodek
      Frederick Taylor once said that "It is management's job to do the planning and the thinking and the worker does the work." For the early parts of the 20th century with the vast immigrant work force this theory might have applied. In this age of Global Competition we no longer can allow the inherent creative talent of our people to lie untapped. The eighth waste is the "underutilization of the worker's creative potential. The average Japanese company saves $4,000 per year per employee from their creative ideas. How does Toyota and the other Japanese companies open this vast unused potential?