Profitability by Selling Below the Average Unit Cost: Lean Cost Accounting and a Real Application

摘要

Recent years, manufacturers are increasingly interested with lean thinking for several reasons, such as reduce costs, raise profits, cash flow and stock price, improve productivity, enhance flexibility and create better value for their customers. “Lean” philosophy, derived from Toyota Production Systems, was focused on minimizing seven wastes from the system. These are overproduction, unnecessary transportation, inventory, motion, defects, over-processing, and waiting. This philosophy is being implemented day by day with increasing number of firms. Manufacturers and academicians have developed new lean approaches as an implementation of “lean thinking”, such as lean production, lean management, lean cost accounting, etc. In this paper, lean cost accounting methods, value stream costing, calculating the profitability of an order using value stream costing, lean approach to decision making according to profitability of an order, and a Box Score to show strategic decision will be studied and discussed. Also how to profit by selling below unit cost will be showed with an application that had applied to a medium-sized hand tool manufacturer lean firm in Turkey. To the author’s knowledge, this will be the first accounting study which uses the lean philosophy - “lean cost accounting".