Lean Accounting for Lean Manufacturing

Speaker:  Nick Katko

Lean Accounting Expert, Author and Speaker

Website: www.maskell.com

Lean management accounting is the financial and operational measurement system that aligns a lean organization's accounting function with the economics of lean. Lean itself is a people-and-learning-focused strategy — customer value drives revenue growth and eliminating waste drives improved cost management. But before those gains show up on the P&L, a company's management accounting system has to change first: how it measures itself operationally and financially must reflect lean thinking, not traditional cost accounting.

This matters because most management accounting systems were built to serve accounting's need to report on the past, while lean decisions are about the future — understanding the true cause-and-effect relationship between continuous improvement activity and financial results. A successful transformation rests on three things: getting people to think differently about the numbers (not just accept different outcomes), integrating the lean accounting system into daily management, continuous improvement, and strategy deployment rather than treating it as a side project, and ensuring senior leadership, accounting, and operations are all aligned on the same transformation plan.

Getting started is straightforward in concept: build competency through education, then pilot the system on a single value stream or "model line" before rolling it out organization wide. That pilot builds an experienced core team, proves the system works for real analysis and decisions, and produces the standard work needed to scale it. Like any lean transformation, it's continuous — problems get solved with PDCA, adoption struggles get coached through — and the payoff is simple: give people the right numbers, and better decisions follow.

About the Speaker:

Nick serves as the President and owner of BMA (www.maskell.com). With over three decades of expertise, he has utilized his knowledge in lean accounting to aid companies in designing, leading, and coaching them through their lean accounting transformations. Nick's experience spans globally, working with a diversity of companies ranging from family-owned businesses to multinational corporations across various sectors such as manufacturing, healthcare, software, engineering, and services. 

Additionally, Nick has delivered presentations on lean accounting at numerous lean conferences across the United States, Europe, Asia, and Australia.

Nick is the author of “The Lean CFO” (2013 & 2023), which has been translated into Italian, Turkish and Russian. He is co-author of Practicing Lean Accounting (2021), which has been translated into Italian; co-author of “The Lean Business Management System” (2007) and also has written numerous articles on lean accounting for various publications. 

Nick is a Certified Public Accountant, has a BS in Accounting and MBA in Finance, both from the University of Kentucky. Nick lives in Lexington, Kentucky with his wife Deanna and their family.

Nick Katko

Lean Accounting Expert, Author and Speaker

[email protected]

Mobile: 859-608-0683

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickkatko/

Website: www.maskell.com

Skills & Experience – working with companies

Lean Management Accounting

• Creating a lean performance measurement system
• Creating a value stream accounting system
• Creating a capacity measurement system
• Creating an integrated box score analysis and decision making system
• Value stream identification and organization
• Integrating lean accounting with daily lean management
• Integrating lean accounting with continuous improvement systems
• Integrating lean accounting with Hoshin

Lean Accounting Process Improvement (also Office)

• Value stream mapping
• Creating a lean transformation plan
• Creating a daily lean management system
• Creating a continuous improvement system
• Facilitating continuous improvement events