Learning to be Lean

(Lean Enterprise Institute, 26 January 2012)

In Brief: According to the author, employees must properly learn lean principles for successful adoption. Companies often encourage a complacent mindset of being expected to know answers rather than being expected to learn.

Our View: We believe that applying lean concepts to finance processes can offer significant operating cost efficiencies and productivity gains. Over the past year, shared service center leaders have been under constant pressure to “do more, with less.” Improvements in both process and technology enable leading companies to drive transaction processing costs down by more than 10% year-over-year. CFOs and Business Units continue to ask for, and expect to see, this level of cost improvement from their shared services organizations.