Accounting has different problem solving schools of thought just like software development does.
If you want to measure the effectiveness of a management decision you want to count the costs and benefits of that decision. The traditional way to do this is with Cost Accounting. In the Lean-Thinking approach, Cost accounting blamed for guiding companies toward inefficiencies.
Instead an approach called: Throughput Accounting, measures end-to-end benefits on a system wide basis.
One difference is that with Cost Accounting inventory is valued as a good thing - an asset. The more inventory you have on the books the more your company is worth (on paper anyway).
Using Throughput accounting, Value is only recorded when a product is actually sold. The piles of out of date parts carried in inventory are seen as a liability. The more incomplete work you've got in the process the lower your value (on paper).
Thoughput accounting seems to me to reflect the real word a bit better. Your company sells a product, you record value. Not before.
But there seems to be a struggle in the accounting community between these two camps. Partly, because they are advising management to take different paths toward success.
It reminds me of the struggle between the Data Processing and the Object Oriented approaches to software development. More on that later.
