Lean Six Sigma Black Belt

Lean Six Sigma Black Belt

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I am thinking about the Lean Six Sigma black belt qualification.  On the face of it, this seems highly relevant to a qualified accountant who wants to provide business improvement services.  However, I would be interested in hearing whether anyone who has done this has found it worthwhile.

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By Alonicus
04th Sep 2012 11:22

Lean Six Sigma provides a very useful set of tools, and I've noticed that people with an accounting background usually find the statistical methodology quite a natural fit to their existing skill-sets.  Whether you need to go as far as black belt probably depends on how extensively you intend to use it.  Are you already a green belt, and have clients expressed a preference for working with (and paying for !) a black belt ?

 I've been deeply involved in a number of Lean Six Sigma projects, although I've by no means scaled the dizzy heights of becoming a black belt myself. My experience has been that each project was a full-time experience lasting between three and six months. 

I must admit I would be somewhat wary of any training organisation which offers a Black Belt qualification without that kind of previous experience and commitment.  It's worth looking at the details of the course they are offering to ensure it is in enough depth and includes enough practical experience to mean you come out of it a true black belt rather than just someone with a piece of paper saying you are.

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By Mark Greenhouse
13th Sep 2012 23:36

Lean Management for Accountants

Are the Lean Six Sigma skills relevant to an accountant? Particularly one ready to offer Business Improvement Services, in a word YES.

There are two main benefits that we see;

 

Lean techniques can be applied to the accounting practices and reporting, thereby improving your own/department efficiency & performance.Understanding Lean techniques enables you to be involved with and drive true improvements in a business. Improvements that drive better customer experiences, lower costs and support employee engagement.

 

In my experience Accounting professionals can miss the improvements that a Lean person will see. I’ve had several projects either initially rejected or assessed as having little benefit as they didn’t cut costs, they didn’t massively improve margins at the start.

What they did though was improve throughput, some by as much as 40%.

 

One note as well, we've applied Lean to sectors from low volume/bespoke manufacturing companies, through to legal services, call centres, distribution and office/service environments. It doesn't start and end with high volume manufacturing companies.

 

Some of the tools and techniques, such as Visual Management and “daily shouts” will expose you as to what is important to operational teams and how they are measuring success. Implemented to its full effect Lean will have teams producing their own forecast outputs and setting their own short term (daily/weekly goals) and monitoring their own performance to them.

This often means that reporting moves from being historic to being forward looking.

Other lean techniques will enable you to get involved in reducing or redeploying costs to ensure Customer Value is achieved.

 

Nonetheless I wouldn’t recommend jumping into a Lean Six Sigma course just yet.

Have a look for “Lean Accounting” sources on the web it is much more relevant for you than a Lean Six Sigma course which often will fail to translate work into accounting reporting you’d recognise.

There are several books out there on this subject as well.

You’ll learn which metrics are really important to performance and which aren’t. For instance do you measure Dock to Dock time?

 

How can I say that a qualified accountant would find Lean Management of value? two reasons;

 

My co-director, Neil Harvey at www.levantar.co.uk is a qualified accountant, who ran his own business for 20 years using Lean management principles.We've developed a business game simulation to demonstrate how Lean management and Accounting practices work together, or don't. This was picked up by Cambridge University Press and is used in the Business Studies course they sell to Universities across the world.  

 

I’m sure Neil would be happy to give you advice and too anyone else who reads this. You can find our contact details on our Lean Management Accounting page or you can find my details on linkedin.

 

regards,

Mark  [email protected]

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By zarathustra
14th Sep 2012 09:30

I have my doubts

Whilst I accept that Mark Greenhouse knows far more about this subject than I do, one of the points made by an earlier poster would worry me.

That is the amount of time involved in setting up the project. No practicing accountant could allocate essentially working for one client full time for a period of months. I dont think many of the clients of firms on here would be willing or able to pay £500 - £1000 per day for several months either.

To my mind the skills are more suitable for a consultant who works with one client at a time.

I have read a few basic books on the subject, purely because I am interested in different business ideas, but I am not sure how I would put the full monte into practice. Are not Lean and Six Sigma different concepts anyway?

As I say, not an expert, and I am just posting this in the interest of debate really.

 

 

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By Mark Greenhouse
14th Sep 2012 15:03

Lean accounting - improvement for professionals

Zarathrusta,

You’re right if your main income is to be made providing services to a range of companies then yes some of the projects we undertake, are long in length, others are very quick but you often can’t focus on other things.

Yes Lean and Six Sigma are different concepts. That is why I made my recommendation about Lean Accounting.

 

Often Lean is thought as making work go faster and Six Sigma related to quality. How do you make work faster without resolving quality issues? Six Sigma does give you a range of statistical techniques to use but you have to have sufficiently sized work of the same type to make this work. Often this volume of data isn’t available and if it is, it is more related to operational issues.

 

I would really recommend that if you are an accounting professional who is interested in business improvement then consider Lean Accounting as your first port of call. It will make use of your accounting skills and experience and expose you to the world of improvement.

 

A forum like this or our webpage really doesn’t do it justice.

How would it be if you could get financial reports out from your clients weekly by 12pm Monday?What if you could teach them how their operational performance metrics relate to financial ones? and they could take decisons in the knowledge of financai leffect, rather than seeing the consequences some time later.

Taking this route you can begin to understand how applying lean accounting philosophy to accounting and finance reporting can identify areas for improvement and your clients may be willing to pay more for such a service. Note - this is how Lean Accounting fits with performance data, we not considering that Lean could improve accounting function speed just yet.

 

Learn about Lean Accounting and you’ll learn

how to bring in target costing,why improvement often doesn’t show on the bottom line ( it is there just hidden)how to measure capacity improvement.

    

Don’t forget you ask questions about Lean Accounting by contacting us at Levantar – it's taken us a while to get our heads around it fully and it's free to have a chat.

There is always an alternative route if you want your clients/companies to look at what Lean might achieve, call in someone to look around. There are often imaginative ways of billing this (add it to the bill for any consulting work you undertake), fixed price for a report, with money back guarantees etc. 

Often later work of this nature can be funded, especially in the SME market.

 

Regards,

Mark

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