ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the implications that occur when Lean meets traditional accounting. Finance's new role in Lean should be to calculate the losses occurring every day in the office and on the shop floor and then take a leadership role to eliminate the waste. A work center is an accounting designation given to a functional group of equipment. Cost accounting standards typically are calculated by the equation of: Worked hours/units of service. The key for introducing Lean in a services-based firm is to decrease the overall indirect costs, which are essentially the non-valued costs of the business. When implementing Lean, machine utilization is no longer as important as it was in the good old days of batching. Depending on the cell configuration, some machines will not run all the time or, in mixed model, may not run at all while certain models are produced.
