Jahn Ballard, Tom Hood, and Doc Hall

There is a movement in accounting that has been working toward the same goals as the lean movement – Integral Operations Finance and Accounting practices and tools are now available to finally make full use of cashflow for operations finance. It’s time for them to come together, and for the abstractions of accounting to be related directly to business processes, using the direct cash statement, cash profiles and cash-to-cash cycle as key organizing tools. If Senior Leaders and/or Owners have the comfort of a complete framework that includes both finance and operations leadership, then they can together use financial and process data as tools for focus on capturing organizational learning as their key asset. This means the tools support process improvement where it’s important, don’t undermine it, and provide a framework for standardizing business processes.

Integral Operations Finance also provides a counterpoint to the mistrust and fear of loss of control that has been an appropriate response in senior leadership to traditional financial statements dominated by the capital market compliance focus; which are operationally inaccurate. “The fin'l statements are not telling the story (of what is actually happening), FASB regulations mess things up for small and private companies.” John Morrow, VP, Business, Industry and Govt. for AICPA - (as well as for operating divisions in public companies). The accounting profession is actually launching the Private Company Initiative of AICPA & FASB as of April, 2007, to directly address this problem.

Five business stories and the tools behind them – IBM from 1955 to 1975, Hil-Rom Hospital Beds circa 1985, Bryn Awl Construction in the late 1980s during a 70% market reduction, the turnaround of the Maryland Assn of CPAs since 1998 and Vinovation, Inc, a wine innovation company working to turn unique patents into a new wine-making paradigm. They know more about wine than anybody else in the world, and are challenged to turn that into a fully functional business.