Lean Accounting: The strategic role of finance in creating value for companies

Many global supply chains in the process industries are neither equipped nor orchestrated to respond effectively to the new VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity) world and need to understand what it means to organise supply chain management that can address these challenges effectively. 

What agility factors are necessary to manage future VUCA dynamics? What aspects of current operational and organisational lean initiatives are producing tangible results in terms of cost and efficiency? How can supply chain organisations ensure reliable supply in an era of increasing virtualisation of supply networks and growing exposure to global risk? Who can supply chain managers turn to in order to answer these questions? 

Lean Supply Chain Planning by Josef Packowski addresses these questions, guiding companies in undertaking the paradigm shift from traditional planning. 

The permacrisis period, which began after the pandemic, has heavily challenged the model of designing supply chains in low labour cost countries. Many companies and organisations have discovered, often at their own expense, the fragility of supply chains and how process control can be a key factor in the future survival of the company and its business models. These pages offer a perspective on customer value creation at the extended value stream level and propose the lean, robust, and flexible processes of the lean system as effective countermeasures to the 'I do it where it costs less' paradigm. In an integrated approach, the focus should indeed be the entire process and its performance, not a single step (in this case, production or procurement in low labour cost countries). Innovative and visionary companies are building new supply chains, and through reshoring and value chain redesign tools, the new scenarios are shifting towards a more glocal than global world, towards what business schools now refer to as ‘regionalised globalisation.’ Once again, lean process efficiency methodologies seem to drive the transition beyond outdated models: a journey through new scenarios linking demand and production, making the former increasingly visible upstream and the latter remarkably flexible.

Editing this book was therefore the natural consequence of a need for training as well as efficiency, to provide a methodological framework for the problem and its countermeasures.