Bill Waddell in a blog post over at Evolving Excellence yesterday wrote a paragraph I'd like to highlight:

American companies, particularly GM where the ROI concept was elevated to an art form long ago, do not put market share or cash flow at the top of the list. They measure themselves by Profits and ROI. With inventory as an asset and full absorption accounting allowing them to take overhead costs away from the profit calculation and park them on the balance sheet in the inventory account, an opposite set of management practices makes sense. Instead of eliminating the waste of setup time and defects, the numbers are better (at least in the short term) when you simply amortize them over big batches of production and move the cost out of the profit calculation.

The above paragraph brings up the advantage throughput accounting has over traditional cost accounting by putting the spotlight on the deficiencies of the alternative which encourages local optimizations all over the place while failing to foster investments that would yield a much better payback.