Effects of Lean Management on Company Value

Master's Thesis from the year 2009 in the subject Business economics - Controlling, grade: Sehr gut, University of Applied Sciences Vorarlberg (Fachhochschule Vorarlberg GmbH), language: English, abstract: Nowadays there are a lot of discussions about creating company value. Because of the financial crisis and caused by that the economic crisis a lot of partially old models are being discussed again. The thesis should investigate whether it is possible to generate company value through lean management. There are a lot of tools to measure company value but in this thesis the operating cash flow will be used as other methods have too many levers to influence the result (e.g. WACC). In the subsequent part the different practical tools of lean management will be described to create a basic understanding of the methodology. The practical part of the thesis deals with qualitative interviews with specialists, consultants and researchers to get a variety of answers. The specialists are people who are doing lean management in their company on a daily basis but have only experience in their company. Consultants sell the methodology and could tend to promote lean management in this thesis and the researchers work on a scientific basis and are necessary to prove or adjust the results achieved. Lean management has a lot of influences on company value. A decrease in stocks, space, failures and the throughput time can be achieved. Furthermore an increase in productivity and even an increase of turnover are possible. Certainly the results depend on the industry, size and culture of the company. That is the reason why there are no calculations about the effects of company value. As it is that difficult to calculate these effects, the master thesis deals with the ability of increasing turnover and on the cost side of decreasing costs. Costs of the employed capital are not considered as they
are not related to the operating cash flow.