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Finace and Accounting processes in a company belong to a whole class of non-value adding activities, if you really think about it. They are needed by the regulatory authorities, shareholders and other stakeholders that have business with the company but for the life of me could not think of one way in which it adds value to me, the end customer.
How Ford Motor Company does its Finance and Accounting function has very little to do with the value it is adding to the Ford car I am thinking of buying!
What they found was interesting. They unearthed lots of unnecessary processes and wasted human effort in all of their financial forecasting and regular accounting functions.
The surprising result of all of this is the elimination of a lot of unncessary reports.
As anyone who has watched the movie OfficeSpace and/or worked in a middle management or lower position in any company, we all know the reports we need to fill out periodically that we were convinced wasn’t going to be useful to anybody within the company.
Time wasted in useless reports so satirized in OfficeSpace that people have designed coversheets for Initech T.P.S Report as a joke! IniTech is the fictitious company that features in the movie.
But seems like wasted human efforts and unnecessary reports are a reality in the world of Finance and Accounting and companies have found a lean approach to eliminating them!
But if you have not seen OfficeSpace yet, do not miss it! It’s widely available on DVD!
There’s no business like show business, but there are several businesses like accounting. – David Letterman
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