Each person is encouraged to ask questions for understanding, or make suggestions for improvement. There is a lot of value in this meeting: a team member reflects on the content of her job while preparing the metrics and also gets exposed to others’ work. Common problems can be identified and awareness is raised about the effects of everyone’s work. These meetings also create a forum for discussing issues and offering suggestions for improvement that are focused on the work, not the person. This hour-long meeting can pay huge benefits in creating the underpinnings of a change environment.
The point is to get started: in meetings and individually, even if the steps seem small. With small steps, with little improvements that we recognize, with efforts that we cheer, we begin to change our culture and our work lives. With team members empowered to make changes, with colleagues that take ownership of their processes in an atmosphere of positive change, we will be on the path to becoming valued business partners —no longer a slave to transactions.
5
Cost Management vs.
Cost Accounting
Companies that begin the transition from batch and queue to lean manufacturing always run into problems with accounting systems, with the biggest issue being cost accounting. As teams of employees tear out old processes, move equipment, cut waste and continue to do this over time, determining the cost of any one product becomes difficult. In fact, it becomes more frustrating with each improvement. The average accountant may end up feeling like Oscar Wilde’s man who knows the cost of everything but the value of nothing. And he’s right.
Instead of cost accounting, the lean accountant’s focus should be on cost management, which includes a different kind of cost accounting. We have learned that it is far less important to know the cost of making an individual product than it is to manage the costs of the business as a whole. In short, traditional cost accounting is narrow-minded.
Managers and accountants accustomed to the old system may balk at this, but ask why they need to know the cost of making an individual product or service and you will most likely get some combination of three answers: to determine the selling price, to reduce costs and to value inventory. The fact is, however, that except for government cost-plus contracts or where a monopoly exists, the market determines the selling price —not the accountant. Regarding cost reduction, any business should be concentrating on reducing costs for the entire enterprise, not for individual products. And there are alternate methods for inventory valuation in a lean environment.
In the end, every enterprise is trying to profitably use its resources to provide customers with products or services that are competitive in terms of cost, quality and delivery. In his book Kaizen, Masaaki Imai describes it this way:
“The ultimate goal of a company is to make profits. Assuming this is self-evident, the next ‘superordinate’ goals of the company should be such cross-functional goals as quality, cost, and scheduling (quantity and delivery). Without achieving these goals, the company will be left behind by the competition because of inferior quality, will find its profits eroded by higher costs, and will be unable to deliver the products in time for the customer. If these cross-functional goals are realized, profits will follow. Therefore, we should regard all the other management functions as existing to serve the three superordinate goals of QCS (Quality, Cost, and Scheduling).”
The formula for determining the cost of a product was once simple. When standard cost accounting was established, the typical manufacturer’s cost of production was approximately 30 percent material content, 60 percent touch labor, and 10 percent overhead. In that environment, the practice of allocating overhead as a function of touch labor was legitimate and did not create significant distortions in determining product costs. Today the typical manufacturer probably has a cost structure that is more like 60 percent material content, 10 percent touch labor and 30 percent overhead. This shift from higher direct cost to higher indirect cost is principally the result of automation and its corresponding larger capital equipment component. Consequently, using traditional allocation methods leads to potentially significant distortion in calculating product cost.
In a lean environment, a second noticeable change will be the drop in inventory levels. As a company becomes more comfortable with just-in-time methods of doing business, all types of inventory — including work-in-process, raw materials and finished goods —will decrease as annual stock turns increase to 15 or 20 or more turns per year. This gives accountants the opportunity to reassess the process of valuing inventory for GAAP purposes.
Leaders who practice cost management will also find their attention turning to issues like product design. In most organizations, there is an appalling lack of valid information flowing between people in marketing, product design and process engineering. The results are products designed without customer input and that do not consider manufacturing’s needs or limitations. This means that many new products are put into production with designs that are hard to make, creating production inefficiencies and failing to achieve desired profit levels.
To fully explore the implications of cost accounting versus cost management —which requires moving from a micro to a macro level of oversight —we need to break the subject down into three components: cost planning, cost control and cost accounting.
Cost Planning
The concept of cost planning focuses on how to design products and processes that will yield the lowest costs while meeting customer requirements. Most studies on the subject of cost planning reveal that somewhere between 80 and 95 percent of the life-cycle cost of a product is committed during the design process. That means that only 5-20 percent of the total cost is susceptible to future cost reduction efforts without redesigning the product.
Figure 5.1 shows when life-cycle costs are committed to by the business. Figure 5.2 demonstrates the conflict that exists between when costs are committed versus when they occur and are recognized by the accounting system. It is easy to lose sight of the life cycle cost implications of design decisions without a conscious effort because the accounting systems do not report them until incurred. It is in the cost planning stage that this conscious effort is made.
Historically, Wiremold had long product development cycle times. Like many manufacturing companies, product development was often measured in years. In the early 1990s they adopted the product development process know as Quality Function Deployment, or QFD, which can be described as getting the voice of the customer into the product development process. Using QFD, Wiremold sought to introduce products to the market that satisfy real customer needs. Through an organized methodology of identifying customer needs and evaluating each of them on product design, more effort is expended in the product definition stage of the process in order to reduce the amount of redesign —otherwise known as waste — that generally occurs at the back end of most processes. Figure 5.3 demonstrates this principal. Using QFD, Wiremold has been able to significantly reduce the development cycle time and increase the number of new products that customers actually want. Shortly after QFD was introduced, the concept of Target Costing was integrated into the equation.
Traditionally, product development has involved engineers working in separate cubicles, rarely discussing their ideas with other departments, and then simply tossing the design over the wall to the next department when finished. Marketing would describe the product required, product engineers designed it and then manufacturing tried to make it. Only when the product was ready to launch was the cost calculated. If the cost was too high, the product was either redesigned or the company settled for a lower profit. Or the product was abandoned. However, there is a better way.
Target Costing is defined by Michihaur Sakurai, professor of accounting at Tokyo’s Senshu University, as: “A cost-planning tool used for controlling design specifications and production techniques. Therefore, it is oriented much more towards management and engineering than towards accounting. A successful implementation of target costing requires t
he use of value engineering and other cost engineering tools.”
At its core, Target Costing simply recognizes the economic fact that we have long since passed from an environment where Cost + Profit = Selling Price. Now, Selling Price – Cost = Profit. For most companies, selling prices are set by the market and profit is determined by how cost effective we can be. Target Costing forces this recognition by requiring that the selling price be determined at the beginning of the product development process and a desired profit, which is set by management, is subtracted in order to determine a cost target. By making this cost target one of the elements of the product specification, products can be designed to meet both external (customer) and internal (profit) needs. But the only way this can be achieved is to have a cross-functional product development team, involving associates from engineering, marketing, manufacturing and accounting. Not every member needs to be involved at every step in the process, but all need to have input.
As indicated by Mr. Sakurai, the development process must include both product and process development. The concurrent design of both product and process, sometimes called Design for Manufacturability, is the most effective way to reduce the amount of life cycle cost that is committed during the product design phase.
Cost Control
In a traditional manufacturing environment, an attempt is made at cost control using standard cost and variance analysis. Many companies have armies of cost accountants poring over variance reports after month end, trying to determine the reason for variances. The problem is that, except for those companies that exercise lot identification —as in the pharmaceutical industry —it is virtually impossible to trace an unfavorable variance to its root cause. If a manufacturing order is closed out during the first week of a month, and unfavorable labor variances are reported after the end of the month, how do you know what conditions existed at the time the variance was created? Do you know what day the product was made, what shift, by which operators using which machines? The likelihood of any real remedial action being identified by variance analysis is virtually zero.
The role of cost control in a lean environment is to reduce cost by eliminating waste. When information is presented to management that contains a significant level of allocated cost, not much corrective action can be taken to reduce costs other than getting it reallocated to someone else. Therefore, it is important to think in terms of presenting information that minimizes and segregates allocated costs. Allocating overhead to an individual machine is not informative. Understanding why one product line requires twice as much purchasing effort is actionable. One effective way of doing this is to move away from looking at profitability by individual product. Instead, look at profitability by groups or families of products. At this higher level, a better proportion of cost can be assigned versus allocated. This higher level of assigned costs increases accountability and the likelihood that real costs can be eliminated. (See Chapter 6 for more detail.)
In order to control costs, people need information that is timely and relevant, such as the performance measurements discussed in Chapter 3. Using those techniques will yield effective cost control because information will be timelier and more specific than a variance analysis could ever be.
Cost Accounting
Traditional cost accounting is dependant on establishing a standard cost for every product and every component that a company makes. This standard cost is comprised of material, direct labor and allocated overhead. The material portion is derived from a Bill of Material, which contains a quantity for each element used to make the product. It is, in effect, a recipe. Each element is then valued using a standard unit price. One would think that this would be straightforward and yield clear results. However, different companies use different methods of calculating this.
Some companies only note the quantities called for by engineering specifications. But others build in an allowable scrap, or yield, factor. Regarding the unit price, some use the current price and some use a forecasted price. The determination of the direct labor portion, as called for in the Routing (the how-to portion of the recipe) is subject to similar variations. Some companies define the amount of labor required as the optimum time. Others use the average time and still others build in safety factors just to avoid future unfavorable variances. We know of one company that used a piecework pay system and its direct labor standards were negotiated with the union since the standards affected workers’ pay. The standards were very lenient. Some companies treat setup time as a direct labor operation, thereby driving bigger batches in order to reduce the reported unit cost, while others treat it as overhead. Overhead is usually allocated on the basis of methods devised decades ago when overhead, or indirect costs, was minimal. Using those same methods today yields inaccurate allocations, at best.
The cumulative effect of these problems with setting standard costs is poor decision making. How many times have we seen companies promote products based on perceived profitability or discontinue products because of perceived lack of profitability? The reality is that most companies do not know their product costs, but think they do. Executives think they know the costs out to the fourth decimal place. We receive computer reports that show very precise costs, catalogue number by catalogue number, and lose sight of the fact that much of the cost has been allocated and contains safety factors. Therefore, it is just an estimate. And because of the significant change in the cost elements over time, the allocation of overhead based on hours has resulted in significant distortions in reported cost.
Even though the traditional standard cost system results in inaccurate cost estimates, this is not the worst of it. Most people cannot understand the Profit and Loss financial statement generated by standard cost practices. It presents sales, standard costs and standard gross margin in a way that implies what the margin would be if standards were achieved, and then proceeds to add or deduct up to six to eight variances that people don’t really understand. The six variances generally used are material price and usage, labor rate and efficiency, and overhead spending and volume. Two other overhead variances —excess capacity and efficiency —are sometimes used also. (See section at the end of this chapter for discussion of the use of capacity variances.)
Even though most people can’t understand a standard cost P & L, they learn very quickly that unfavorable variances are bad and to be avoided. This can cause many types of dysfunctional behavior. For example, purchasing agents may negotiate price reductions and sacrifice quality. This may cause higher scrap rates, but that’s not what purchasing agents are measured on. That’s someone else’s issue.
One of the most significant dysfunctional behaviors that occurs in the attempt to avoid unfavorable overhead volume variances is that factories begin to create labor hours. This happens because people in the factory learn very quickly that hours absorb overhead and so creating hours is good. During the last week of the month, managers start looking to see what parts are on hand and what products can be made, in order to add labor hours to the final tab. But there is no linkage between what the customer wants and what the factory is making. As a result, unneeded inventory is created, occupying space and consuming working capital. This inventory is eventually sold at the end-of-quarter specials organized by marketing or written off as obsolete. In addition, this build up and sell off of unnecessary inventory contributes to the layoff-and-hire syndrome that exists in many businesses.
Many companies that have recognized the inaccuracies created by allocating overhead on the basis of labor or machine hours have turned instead to Activity Based Costing, or ABC. In the ABC model, costs are allocated based on cost drivers, which are defined as activities that give rise to costs. In Purchasing, for example, the driver might be the number of purchase orders issued. The cost of the purchasing activity would be allocated to products based on the number of purchase orders each generated. In this way, each element of overhead would be studied to identify its driver(s) and the cost allocated on that basis.
There are several problems with ABC. First, it is still an allocation method and wants estimates to be expressed in very precise terms. Second, it is expensive to establish and maintain. In an article in favor of ABC in Business Week, Hugh Filman wrote, “Even for big diversified companies, these programs may be too pricey to implement and maintain.”6 Mr. Filman then sites Jeffrey M. Aldridge of accounting firm Grant Thornton as saying a pilot project can cost from $100,000 to $500,000. Although Mr. Filman argues that there is a justifiable payback on this effort, we would dispute that.
6 Business Week, August 7, 2000 page 86j
In many cases, ABC may lead one to believe that the way to reduce costs is to produce in bigger batches. For example, if purchasing overhead is allocated on the basis of the number of purchase orders issued, there is a motivation to buy in bigger lot sizes and reduce the number of purchasing transactions. Or if machine set-up time were allocated on the number of setups done, there is a motivation to reduce the number of setups by making larger batches. This is the opposite of lean manufacturing.
As previously noted, most companies don’t know their product costs, but think they do —out to four decimal places. Most businesses do not have to maintain a data collection system to capture individual product costs on a continuous basis.
Real Numbers Page 8