You might remember Jim Baran, the Owner of Value Stream Leadership, a leading recruiting firm that specializes in Lean talent, from my two LeanBlog Podcast episodes with him:
- Episode #16: (1/14/07)
- Episode #27: (6/18/07)
His firm has three jobs currently posted on my free message board, check them out:
- Needed: LEAN PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT – ACTIVITY BASED COST PROGRAM LEADER
- Needed: LEAN PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT – CONCURRENT ENGINEERING PROGRAM MANAGER
- CALLING ALL TOYOTA WAY TRANSFORMATION CHAMPIONS!!!
Do you know someone with a strong background with the Toyota Product Development System? If so, check out the links or contact Jim through his website.
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About LeanBlog.org: Mark Graban is a consultant, author, and speaker in the “lean healthcare” methodology, focused on improving quality and patient safety, improving access, reducing costs, and fully engaging healthcare professionals. He is also the Chief Improvement Officer for KaiNexus.
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Hmmm…Activity based costing as part of lean product development? That sure sounds like a mismatch to me.
Activity based costing to me represents an excuse for not understanding the work people do. I think the school of lean product development would suggest that the way you keep track of people’s time is first to understand the work they are doing, and next to apply a PDCA-based check process to make sure we are staying on track.
ABC has a history of creating a lot of inaccurate data, which is not very respectful to a person because it forces them to bucket their time into a pre-determined set of categories which may not accurately reflect their contribution. Also, I’ve never seen an ABC category called “thinking about improvements to the system”, which we all would say is very important…
I usually equate ABC with the “reengineering” movement of the early 90′s. As Jim Womack likes to point out, that era was largely a disaster!
Sorry for the banter….but seeing that term sends a shiver down my spine!
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My experiences with Jim are much different. He’s never placed me in a position, but we talked a lot during my last job search years back and he’s kept in touch and truly seems interested in my career, not just pushing me into a placement. That’s my experience.
I share his info on the blog because I’ve had a good relationship with him, not because of any paid endorsement or paid placement on the site, for what it’s worth. I know that wasn’t your issue, but thought I’d point that out.
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I deleted the anonymous comment that appeared above… it was an anonymous “slam” that doesn’t add any value to the discussion here about Lean.
If you’re offended by me deleting that, there’s nothing I can do about that. Yes, I’ll choose to support a person I trust and have had a positive professional relationship with over an anonymous person I may or may not know.
This isn’t a “freedom of speech” issue as this blog is my personal, private property and I’m not the government infringing on anybody’s rights.
Mark
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To Anonymous – Activity Based Costing, mismatch in lean product development.
As the author of the position announcement – perhaps I over generalized the relationship of ABC in the LPD process. Point taken and appreciated.
While there is a relationship of “Activity” cost to a program – when set-based concurrent engineering is put in place, “Target” cost is probably a more appropriate role distinction.
As I understand, Japanese thinking (Toyota and other’s) feel that the key to making a profit is to know the cost of each product component and/or process within the development cycle and how that cost compares to the required target cost.
The point should be to marry “Target” AND “ABC” cost practices to set-based concurrent engineering methods (measuring and tracking steps in evaluating alternative design concepts, the +/- relation to a set of requirements, and identifying those ideas in the design space that have the highest potential. The Target Cost would support those findings.
I have revised the positon post to better reflect the role as it relates to its partnership with set-based concurrent engineering.
Jim Baran – Value Stream Leadership
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There has been some activity in the past few years using ABC as a kind of bridge between Standard Cost Accounting and full-blown Lean Accounting. Some of the people I’ve listened to tell me it gives the financial people an opportunity to understand how methods other than those they are used to can still comply with GAAP, SARB-OX, etc. and give the people managing the operation better numbers to work with.
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