In years past, the main involvement many CFOs had with their company’s supply chain management was negotiating terms with the most important suppliers. However, supply chain processes no longer run as reliably as they used to. The pandemic has made already present vulnerabilities and constraints blatantly obvious, and many manufacturers would have had to address the gaps in the visibility and flexibility of their supply chains sooner or later, in any case. If they also needed to reinvent their product portfolio to pivot to demand changes, replace key vendors with other trading partners, or stand-up ecommerce resources in order to serve customers better, the urgency of improving their supply chain management greatly increased.
CFOs were challenged to rapidly gain the right visibility across a manufacturing company’s platforms and data sources to accomplish something as essential as ensuring that supply and production can meet demand. They sought and invested in analytical and business insight tools to get a better understanding of their supply chains. They delved into AI to simplify the process of drawing insight from large data volumes, for instance, when they needed to evaluate vendor performance and the business value of individual vendor relationships, or the ROI of a company’s entire vendor ecosystem.
Learn how Sikich helps manufacturing CFOs, CIOs, CEOs, and other stakeholders, review and optimize processes, deploy and modernize technology, plan hardware and software investments, and empower your people to do great work.
In advancing their visibility of the business, many CFOs collaborated more closely with IT, sales, marketing, production, and other business groups than they were used to. Such efforts become more difficult and liable to misjudgments when companies use multiple, disparate data sources, don’t have a standard practice for considering all data that matters, or rely on data of inferior quality.
In those situations, CFOs may have to approach visibility by means of technology modernization, finding ways to connect data sources for consolidated reporting and working with IT and business stakeholders to elevate data quality. As only 32 percent of surveyed executives state that they are completely confident in their company’s data,9 many companies and their CFOs could likely benefit from a well-planned and -executed data cleansing and quality initiative.
When important customer, market, and supplier data reside not just in the ERP and CRM systems, but also in email, ecommerce systems, social media, and a variety of other business tools, it can take deep expertise to create integrations and provide CFOs and other executives with dashboards and reporting mechanisms that make sense of an organization’s data environment. Ideally, technical experts who also understand business needs should perform these integrations and make certain that they align with the data and decision needs of CFOs and others.
While bringing awareness and visibility to their data assets, many manufacturers found that they needed to address the vulnerabilities of their traditional, efficiency-focused supply chain management. For instance, keeping the lowest possible amount of inventory on hand and managing vendors for just-in-time delivery to enable production without tying up funds may no longer be a standard best practice for goods and materials that are subject to fluctuations in availability or which can only be sourced from suppliers in distant locations. Distribution managers and CFOs need better ways to plan inventory, assess metrics like on-time in-full (OTIF), forecast demand, or measure vendor performance. Once again, visibility is critical for CFOs as well as for supply chain and distribution managers, and, at the right level of detail, for warehouse and logistics managers and teams as well.
Often, modern AI and ML tools designed to be usable and intuitive for people in various roles can make a vast difference in expanding the horizons of visibility. When ERP traditionally was the main resource for sales and demand forecasting, it no longer needs to be the one system that enables data intelligence. Today’s AI and ML solutions can access data as it happens, across many systems and sources in the cloud or in companies’ data centers.
Sikich has helped hundreds of manufacturing companies become the most productive and competitive organizations they can be. Working with manufacturing CFOs, CIOs, CEOs, and other stakeholders, we help you review and optimize processes, deploy and modernize technology, plan hardware and software investments, and empower your people to do great work, no matter their location. Sikich is a technology as well as a business consultancy. With a single point of contact as your partner, we provide our technology services to complement and align with consulting offerings like business succession planning, business forensics, transaction advisory services, compliance management, marketing and communications, and others.
We have watched the developments of the ever-expanding CFO role for many years. Sikich consultants understand what matters to CFOs and which complexities they face every day. As the CFO in your manufacturing organization, we work with you to help you make a larger impact and drive the organizational change you want to bring about.
