Data-Driven Strategies for Manufacturing Success
Financial leaders in manufacturing are now strategic partners enabling business success through data-driven insights.
By utilizing innovative digital technologies, they see all functional areas of their organizations to make smarter, quicker financial decisions that help drive performance and increase profits in the face of economic uncertainty, supply chain disruptions, and other ongoing challenges.
Today, financial performance—far more than growth or efficiency—is the most significant factor in short- and long-term IT investments, with the cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) helping lay a foundation for modern financial management. Discover more insights like this in a new IDC report about the evolution of financial leaders in manufacturing.
The top priority for financial leaders in manufacturing is financial planning and analysis, according to IDC. FP&A gives a comprehensive view of financial performance by streamlining processes and providing data at the granular level. The advanced reporting, budgeting and planning, and consolidation capabilities of FP&A enable financial leaders to leverage their technical and fiduciary expertise into business partnerships with a strategic and operational focus.
Michigan manufacturer Flow-Rite designs, engineers, manufactures, and tests fluid control devices for lead acid batteries, recreational fishing boats, and laboratory use. Flow-Rite has 130 employees and ships nationally and internationally. They used to manually report and budget in Excel spreadsheets, a labor-intensive, error-prone process.
Flow-Rite implemented FP&A and connected it to their ERP system, giving them baseline reports and budget sheets. Today, their finance team can drill down into the details and do self-analyses and data investigation. FP&A gave them time, visibility, and independence, enabling them to manage their process more effectively.
As financial leaders take on new areas of responsibility, like procurement or risk, they need to optimize core financials. When financial management solutions are simple to use and powerful to run, they can help financial leaders automate accounts payable, coordinate capital appropriation processes with long-term planning, and quickly get the right data for period-end closing.
For finance and accounting groups in manufacturing, the top barriers to digital transformation are limited access to data, minimal visibility into operational performance, and the inability to collaborate across departments. Easy-to-use, AI-powered, low-code/no-code data automation tools can enable teams to:
Financial leaders in manufacturing identify business intelligence (BI) and data analytics as two of the most impactful technologies over the next five years. Modern BI solutions display complex data sets in intuitive and interactive dashboards, giving cross-functional finance teams simple ways to:
In an evolving regulatory environment, compliance continues to be a top concern for finance and accounting groups, especially for manufacturers wanting to expand into new markets or regions. With AI/ML content management and business process automation, teams gain the power to:
Enterprises can enable agility and resilience with a two tier ERP strategy that empowers a global, distributed workforce and helps financial leaders:
Manufacturing CFOs need dynamic business solutions—that’s why half of those still using on premises ERP plan to migrate to the cloud within the next year or two. Cloud ERP provides a foundation for financial leaders to:
