Klar, wir haben alle von der klassischen Kostenrechnung gelernt, dass das Verursacherprinzip gilt. Aber werden die Probleme dadurch wirklich schneller angegangen? Ist der Einkauf jetzt wirklich bemüht, so schnell wie möglich bessere Qualität einzufordern?

Vielmehr beginnt doch jetzt das alte „Finger-Zeig-Spiel“. Es werden enorme Ressourcen eingesetzt, um nachzuweisen, dass nicht die Abteilung Einkauf „schuld“ ist, sondern die Qualitätsprüfung, die haben das Teil immerhin frei gegeben. So geht es dann hin und her und am Ende des Tages hat die Firma als ganzes verloren, weil egal welche Kostenstelle es am Ende trägt, es zahlt die Firma als ganzes. Zusätzlich sind während des Zeitraums der Schuldzuweisungen jeden Tag schlechte Teile verbaut bzw. weiterhin aussortiert worden.

Meiner Ansicht nach hat das gegenseitige Schuld und vor allem Kosten zuschieben keinen Mehrwert. Es bindet nur Ressourcen und hindert uns daran gemeinsam an einer Lösung für Probleme zu arbeiten.

Wie es auch anders gehen kann, werde ich am Mittwoch beschreiben.

Many managers with responsibility for a budget know this problem. You had a problem in your deportment, which caused a huge loss and you department isn’t even responsible for this problem.

Use genchi genbutsu to search for the cause

Let’s take production as an example:
Your assembly-cell isn’t able to reach the calculated quantities. In the spirit of genchi genbutsu you go down to shopfloor in search of the reason. There you will find that almost every fifth component of a supplier is defect and you have to throw them away.

You know from conversations with your colleagues in purchasing, that he has just found a new supplier in china for this component, which is much cheaper than the previous one.

Until now you went down to see the problem yourself and tried to identify a root cause.

If in doubt, it’s always the others fault

But now the ludicrous happens in many companies. You as head of assembly order your engineers to calculate the lost pieces so you can subsequently write the resulting costs to the cost center of purchasing. Why? Because he made the decision to buy from this new supplier and so he has to feel the consequences. If he’s a good purchaser he will be able to let the supplier pay for this anyway.

And best of all, the figures for your department are back to green!

You don’t have to worry about this problem anymore, since you can allocate your costs to other departments. It’s not your problem if you can’t reach your quotas set for the day and if you have to work overtime, purchasing will have to pay for that too.

The problem with the cost-by-cause principle

Sure, we’ve all learned from traditional cost accounting that the polluter pays principle applies in any case. But are problems tackled faster by this principle? Will purchasing really go after their supplier to get better quality as soon as possible?

Rather the old game of „how is responsible for what“ starts. Enormous amounts of resources are used to demonstrate that purchasing is not „guilty“, either way it’s been the quality control who at least released those parts for production. And so it goes back and forth and at the end of the day the company as a whole has lost, because no matter what cost center carries the cost at the end, it’s the company’s money anyway. In addition, every day bad parts have been installed or at least sorted out during the period of recriminations.

In my view, this mutual accusing and above all pushing costs on others has no added value to anything.
It only ties up resources and prevents us from working on a solution to problems together.

On Wednesday I will describe how there can be a better way.