Automation, AI and the Modern Manufacturing CFO

“How do you do more without actually doing more? Well, leverage that technology.” – Kevin Golden

The manufacturing CFO’s job has changed. It’s no longer just closing the books and reporting historical numbers. In a recent Moore on Manufacturing episode, James Moore’s Mike Sibley and Kevin Golden sat down to talk about what’s driving that shift, and how automation and artificial intelligence are changing the finance function along the way.

The conversation covers a lot of ground: forecasting, capital allocation, risk management, and the practical difference between automation and AI. Below you’ll find the full video, a resource list, and the complete cleaned transcript of the discussion.

Resources

• James Moore Manufacturing Industry Page
• Moore on Manufacturing Series Page
• Watch on YouTube: Automation, AI and the Modern Manufacturing CFO

Full Transcript

[00:02] Mike Sibley: I’m partner and leader of the manufacturing team here at James Moore Company. I’m joined by my partner Kevin Golden, also a member of our manufacturing team. Today we’re going to be talking about the role of the manufacturing CFO and how that has been rapidly evolving over the years. Not too long ago, a CFO’s job was reporting historical results and helping with the financials to make sure they’re accurate.

[00:30] Mike Sibley: But today, leaders are expected to help drive strategic decisions using automation and artificial intelligence, decide what capital investments make sense, support business growth, and they’re involved in risk management. So the CFO’s role has changed pretty significantly, and we’re going to talk about that today. We’re also going to discuss how technology is really changing the finance function.

[00:54] Mike Sibley: I mentioned AI and automation, and sometimes we talk about AI and don’t talk about automation. We’ll talk about what that difference is as part of this. We’re going to get into this and really see how this has changed, and I’m excited. I think this is a fun topic.

[01:10] Mike Sibley: So Kevin, let’s jump in.

[01:12] Kevin Golden: Yeah, let’s do it.

[01:14] Mike Sibley: Let’s start big picture, Kevin. I think, as I kind of mentioned, the scorekeeper, they’re dealing with the financial results, they’re reporting the results. Sometimes I even say you have CFOs who are financial CFOs, accounting CFOs, and there’s finance CFOs and strategic CFOs. What we’re kind of seeing is all of those coming together. It’s not just finding financing and working capital issues and talking about banks. It’s not about making sure our financials are in accordance with GAAP.

[01:48] Mike Sibley: Now we’ve got a whole lot going on in our business. There’s a lot of risk, and now they’re driving operational decisions using data, because putting all that together is complicated, and often our operational people don’t see the big picture.

[02:14] Mike Sibley: They may not even see the big picture on the financials. They’re not seeing the working capital, they’re not seeing the banking relationships, they’re not seeing the net income or the EBITDA results, they’re not seeing the five year forecast. To some degree maybe they should, but that’s a bit of a different topic.

[02:33] Mike Sibley: So the CFO has got the full picture, and with that they’ve got to drive and understand where things are going so they can help direct that decision making. The CFO may be the only person in the organization who actually sees the full picture.

[02:57] Kevin Golden: Right. I think what’s demanded today has changed a lot. It’s not just, “Tell me what does this mean from a financial impact,” or “What does that mean on a report or a KPI.” What does that mean to me as an operational manager? What does that mean I actually do? It’s great to say margin is up, but what does that mean? Translate that for me. We talk about this a lot on our podcast and with clients, helping them make that connection.

[03:28] Kevin Golden: They’re asking their CFO now, “What does that mean we should be doing differently day to day than what we have been?” Because it’s day to day, it’s also needing to be a lot quicker too. Not a month in, not a quarter in, maybe days in or weeks in, knowing these decisions, because it’s going to affect what they’re doing the very next day, the very next week.

[03:55] Kevin Golden: So today they’re not just saying, “Give me the financial data.” They’re saying, “Tell me what it means and what I should be doing differently, or what we’re doing well, so we know how to pivot from there on a day to day basis.” That’s some of the pressure that’s taken away from the traditional financial sense of a CFO.

[04:15] Kevin Golden: Now they’re saying, “Dig deep and go with me into operations.” A lot of times that CFO, maybe the controller by their side, are the only people who are going to really see that whole picture, to be able to make that bridge between operations and finance.

[04:39] Mike Sibley: Yeah, and when you look at it, it’s gone from reporting to forecasting. And not just forecasting: how are you forecasting, what are you forecasting, what kind of risk is in your forecast, what kind of upside is in your forecast, what does that mean for planning out automation or people or capex, and what if we grow beyond that? Are we prepared? Can we handle it? A lot of companies think, “I want to grow, I want to grow, I want to grow.” Growth can hurt you if you’re not prepared for it.

[05:01] Mike Sibley: It can damage client relationships or customer relationships. You can have massive turnover. You can stress people out. So you’ve got to be prepared for that. That’s where the forecasting tool says, let’s use this to plan where our business is going and evaluate opportunities.

[05:23] Mike Sibley: I was working with a client today, and we were talking about the purpose of having a good bill of materials and tracking against it, understanding what’s driving margin changes or costing. We kind of threw out this saying: well, we know we have to price it because the market drives it. Okay, that’s fine, but does that mean every opportunity that comes across is a good one?

[05:43] Mike Sibley: You may be at market pricing, but if your margins are terrible, you’ve got to evaluate that opportunity, evaluate that customer relationship, and ask where this is going. Should you be replacing it with better business? It’s not just a simple “let’s keep growing, let’s keep growing.”

[06:03] Mike Sibley: We’ve got to look at those things. The other piece is looking at risks. A lot of smaller businesses, when I say small business, I’m talking five million to a hundred million, that’s a big range, they’re not evaluating risk and doing risk analysis. That’s part of this process, looking at things and saying, where is our risk, how do we mitigate our risk, what can hurt our business. A lot of times that comes out of the CFO role.

[06:39] Kevin Golden: Yeah, so going back to the crux of our conversation, what else has changed? We talked about what they’re expected to do, but also a lot of their pressures. Some of those have been the same, they fluctuate some, like we saw during COVID or during the recent tariffs and things like that over the last several years.

[06:56] Kevin Golden: Labor is always an issue, probably always will be to an extent. Margins being compressed with supply chain volatility and increases in materials, and on top of that, what you’ve seen more recently is the dramatic increase in technology. That’s meant, for a lot of them, rethinking. The pressure is how can you do what you’ve been doing, but more.

[07:31] Kevin Golden: We’ve turned from analytical thinkers, which a lot of our financial people, ourselves included as accountants, are traditionally, to critical thinkers, and in this case proactive critical thinkers on a day by day basis. Letting technology, letting other ways of streamlining handle your analytical thinking, verifying it, and then turning that into a critical thought, and more importantly, what do we do now with that? That increase in demand for real time information, those are the pressures they’re facing today.

[08:02] Kevin Golden: “I need more out of you than what I’ve had the last thirty years out of a CFO. I need that plus more.” If you’re not leveraging technology, if you don’t have the right workforce or the right people doing the right things, having that ability to leverage, it’s hard to keep up with that.

[08:23] Kevin Golden: So how do you do more without actually doing more? Well, leverage. Those are some of the traditional pressures we’ve seen, but also some newer pressures, especially with needing more out of you and your role and your suggestions than what we’ve historically seen when you think of the word CFO.

[08:42] Mike Sibley: Yeah, and we’ll dive into automation and AI as a helper, but I want to key in for a second on the real time information you mentioned, and getting that information. Traditionally, a lot of small businesses are used to an environment where, at the end of the month, maybe two, three, four weeks, maybe longer, you get your financial results.

[09:05] Mike Sibley: But I can look and see I have cash, so I’m okay. As long as I get cash, I’m okay. That’s okay when you’re small, that’s okay when you have a real hands on owner or CEO who has a grasp over everything. The larger you get, the harder that becomes. And when I say large, I’m not talking fifty million, a hundred million. You get to ten million, fifteen million, twenty, and it gets harder and harder.

[09:24] Mike Sibley: So how do we get real time information? I’m building out now with a client a five year forecast that starts more myopically, month by month, and we’re connecting their data systems into this forecast.

[09:45] Mike Sibley: We can open up this forecast and it’s going to update in real time with what’s going on, and it’s going to populate into their five year forecast. So they’re always going to be able to look and say, here’s how we’re trending, here’s where we look, are we meeting our five year goals, are we on pace, do we have holes, what do we need to be focusing on now. We’re taking data that’s in different places and connecting it into a spreadsheet that will give them dashboards and give them the information they need faster.

[10:05] Mike Sibley: That’s what companies need to do, and that’s one of the biggest problems with manufacturers. They’ve got data everywhere. They could have a CRM, an ERP, or a non ERP. They may have QuickBooks and then an Excel inventory management system.

[10:28] Mike Sibley: I talked to another client where their production manager has his own data set that he’s using to make his own decisions. Now, I don’t know if they’re the right decisions or not, we’re still vetting that piece.

[10:44] Kevin Golden: But if they’re not the right decisions, he’s doing the best he can with the data he has. Nobody’s overlooking it. It’s not connected to the rest of the company to say, are we making the right decisions? You may have some real time information, but what are you doing with it, and are you making the right decisions if the broader leadership team isn’t using the same metrics to measure upon.

[11:10] Kevin Golden: That’s where visibility, timeliness, and everyone being on the same page becomes really important. If you think about it historically, manufacturers and business owners in general did project out, but only when it was absolutely needed.

[11:32] Kevin Golden: “Okay, I’ve got to go to the bank and sell a vision, a future that I need money for. I’m trying to grow, let me get that for you. I want to show where I’m heading, and I’m going to sell my company, show you how much you could make in the future if you run this based on everything I’ve built to date.” Sell them on that future. Well, now you’re living it.

[11:57] Kevin Golden: That is no longer just for when you need it. It’s day by day, week by week, quarter by quarter, in order to even grow and meet your goals. It used to be, if you were able to leverage some of those tools, you were kind of ahead of the game. Some of the things we’re going to talk about, if you’re not doing it, you’re doing it just to keep up, because your competitors and others are using it.

[12:40] Kevin Golden: The idea of forecasting and getting ahead of “where are we heading, where are we going” is not foreign. The fact that we need to look at that in real time, every day, and that far out, is what’s a little more foreign and probably troublesome to most CFOs or controllers.

[12:40] Mike Sibley: All right, let’s talk about AI for a second, and automation, because sometimes there’s a thought process that they’re the same, and they can be, but there are two different components.

[13:11] Mike Sibley: When we start talking about automation, there’s automation out on the plant floor. Can we automate how we produce something? Can we build a piece of machinery that will do repetitive work for us? That’s one part of automation. Another part of automation in the CFO realm is getting data, having to summarize and produce something: a dashboard, a forecast, a reporting mechanism.

[13:35] Mike Sibley: Now, AI can be involved in that, we’ll talk about that. AI can be set up to be workflows, but there’s also automation through formulas, Python code, macros, things that can be repeated over and over again, and it’s not subject to an AI system interpreting and coming up with different results. For example, Kevin, you and I could put the same prompt into ChatGPT right now, and I bet we’d get a little different answer.

[14:03] Kevin Golden: That’s one of the problems with AI. You can get a little bit different answer. You have to really work on them, you have to structure it. But when you use code, macros, or things like Python, that’s going to give you the same exact result over and over again.

[14:20] Mike Sibley: So we want to use that power whenever we can. Now, the great thing is we can use AI to help build those things, and I do that a lot when we build out some of this. We’re using AI to help build these dashboards, we’re using AI to help build the code, so we’re not allowing those differences to happen.

[14:46] Mike Sibley: The other side of AI, and anybody who talks to me about AI, I’ve built out a framework for how companies should think about adopting it, that’s a different topic, but is workflows. AI is getting to the point where it can process data as long as your structures are set up right, and it’ll put an output for you.

[15:03] Mike Sibley: Now, with AI, you have to review it as if somebody prepared it for you. It’s prone to error, it can miss things. I see it all the time. It gets, I don’t know, eighty percent right, but sometimes even more, but it doesn’t get it all the way right. So you’ve got to work on that. That’s where AI can be helpful.

[15:27] Mike Sibley: You take those two things and you’re able to build your dashboards, you’re able to get data and pull it in, you’re able to do these things faster. The goal here is to leverage technology, because one of the biggest things I see right now, Kevin and I have this conversation with manufacturers every single day, leadership is busy, and then you start getting into, “What are you busy doing,” and you find things they shouldn’t even be doing.

[15:56] Mike Sibley: Work expands to fill the time available. We need to push work down to people, and people need to leverage technology and AI. There are more capabilities to do that than you might even imagine, but as a business owner, no one’s taking the time to step back. That’s where the CFO comes in and helps lead these discussions.

[16:28] Kevin Golden: When you talk about delegation for a second, when you tell somebody, “What are you doing,” do you delegate tasks, or rethink what delegation means? Traditionally it was, “I don’t prepare the day to day entries that go into the financial statements, but I review those.” But even the reviewing of those can now be delegated.

[16:45] Kevin Golden: So rethinking what a traditional CFO may have done in the past, and aggressively challenging that, to ask yourself one question: is this the highest and best use of my ability? I loved an article I read a few months ago, online, because we work with a lot of medical manufacturers.

[17:05] Kevin Golden: I read one about somebody designing a drug, I think it was against cancer. They were using AI, and it used to take a long time to run these trials, they could do maybe a couple hundred trials to get results they’re testing on an ongoing cure for cancer. Well, they used AI to run those same trials, and it was completing thousands of trials.

[17:30] Kevin Golden: What that was doing was ruling out all the low hanging fruit, the trials that are definitely not going to work, to get down to the maybe ten percent that are potentially viable. That’s what the researcher needed to spend their time analyzing: is this something viable, can it work, let’s go through the next phase. Not the thousands upon thousands of failures. AI just sped all that up.

[17:59] Kevin Golden: It’s the same thing, maybe not exactly if you’re not in medical manufacturing, but the same idea: get rid of all the stuff that just distracts you and weighs down your time, to really focus on the key things you should be doing. Challenging what was important once, and aggressively pursuing that with a mixture of automation, technology, AI, and other people in your organization, will help you focus on what you should really be focused on: strategic, critical thinking areas that help pave the future, or meet your goals.

[18:29] Mike Sibley: It’s funny, I was talking to a client today about building documentation around what key people do, and they said, if you’re sitting there performing a task, you can ask AI, “How can we automate this task,” and it’ll brainstorm it. The other thing is, with most AI systems, you can hit the microphone button, and as you’re working, dictate what you’re doing, and it’ll turn it into a process map for you.

[19:00] Mike Sibley: You don’t even have to talk in coherent sentences. It’s going to do it, and then you fix up whatever it missed. You take something that might take you hours, and turn it into minutes, while you’re actually performing the task.

[19:23] Mike Sibley: That’s one of the things I think about when we start talking about workflows. We do a lot of fractional CFO work, and when we’re talking to people, I ask them, “Have you talked to your people about the mundane tasks that are just really repetitive, or what are the bottlenecks that get in their way?” Often the answer is, “No, we just haven’t had time.”

[19:54] Mike Sibley: I say, let’s see if we can build in a little bit of time and chip away. You don’t have to transform the company overnight. Chip away at these things, start building in this leverage and this capacity, and then you can spend that time on the higher level thinking. That’s what you’re seeing with the strategic CFO, they’re having these conversations. As fractional CFOs, we’re pushing these conversations so we can get the right information in front of the leadership group as quickly as possible, and help them understand what this means for the business.

[20:42] Kevin Golden: I think, when we hear about AI, automation, technology, there’s a lot of different options out there, from really fancy, expensive items to the day to day tools everyone’s using. When we say making an investment, yes, that could be dollars, but it doesn’t have to be a lot of dollars. It’s also time, carving out the time to actually explore that technology, that AI. It doesn’t have to be a huge financial burden. It can be, but it doesn’t have to be.

[21:14] Kevin Golden: Taking that time to figure out, what are those problems? A lot of people have a lot of data, a lot of options for technology. Where should I invest that time? Go figure out, what’s the biggest problem, where do we want to be, why aren’t we there yet, and what’s standing in our way. If you don’t know that as a CFO, that’s okay, I guarantee someone working on your floor knows that, someone in operations knows that. Go talk with them, set up those meetings, get their thoughts.

[21:34] Kevin Golden: Start building out, where should we start, what problem should we start with first. And then, being the CFO that you are, quantify it. If we were able to do this, what does that lead to? Eventually it’ll come back down to a financial measure, some way to quantify it. If we do all this, it leads to x amount of more margin, or a percentage down to the bottom line, what does that mean?

[22:32] Kevin Golden: There’s no better way to get people, especially ownership and the C-suite, to do something than telling them here’s how it’s going to save you money, save you time, or increase your throughput, when you give them real data, as opposed to, “This sounds like it would save us some time.” Push it to get down to a quantifiable result.

[22:51] Kevin Golden: Then when you do it, actually measure against that result, because people talk about ROI, and how do I know I’m really getting what I want out of this technology, this new process, or AI. Define that ahead of time, carve that path, what this should look like, and when it doesn’t, question why, and go back and do it again. You can’t transform overnight, it’s chipping away, but you’ll be surprised, the more you make the time and chip away at that, next thing you know you look up and you’ve made some pretty good progress.

[23:16] Mike Sibley: I’m glad you brought this up the way you did, because there’s a great tool to manage this: an A3. An A3 is a big piece of paper, I’ve known about it for a long time, never really used it until recently, where one of my clients, the CEO, came in with a long history in lean and Toyota style production environments in terms of methodology, and brought this A3 thinking. There are books on it, but it’s pretty much: here’s our business case, here’s our current situation, here’s our statistics, here’s our problems.

[24:04] Mike Sibley: And then it moves into here’s our solutions, and it measures the impact and the outcome. You can keep going back to that and use it as project management. It’s a great tool, and a great tool to teach your people how to problem solve, so they’re not just going off randomly. It focuses you on the problems and issues, and connects it to the solutions and potential solutions, because you may have solutions that don’t pan out, and it allows you to keep recalibrating.

[24:45] Mike Sibley: I suggest people look into it, happy to talk to anybody about that. I think that’s one of the things that often happens, smaller companies, as they’re trying to grow, can’t really look holistically at a problem or process, because it takes time and everybody’s busy. But if you take that time to step back, really find it out and think through it, you can often come up with better answers.

[25:12] Mike Sibley: One of the things I’ve seen way too many times is they come up with a solution, but it fails, and they revert back to the old way. I like the idea of failing forward. If it’s three steps forward, one step back, that’s okay, you made two steps forward, let’s build off of that. Let’s not focus on the fact that one thing didn’t work, let’s focus on the two things that did, and build off of that.

[25:53] Kevin Golden: Here’s some expectation setting: our CEO says, if you’re not failing at some of your attempts, you’re not trying hard enough, because that tells you you’re not pushing that envelope enough. Guess what, some things are going to fail. But what do we learn from that, as an investment of time and perhaps dollars? What do we learn from that, so we can implement it when we try the next new thing?

[26:11] Kevin Golden: There’s something to be learned every single time, and as long as we’re making progress and chipping away at that, you’re better off today than you were yesterday, and tomorrow than you were today.

[26:37] Kevin Golden: That’s where, jumping back to the strategic CFO, how do we deal with capital allocation as an example. Capital and talent, capital and money. The question is, where are the bottlenecks in the organization, where’s the most strain, where are we having our biggest issues. I’m a big fan of the value stream map, it starts with the sales side of things and finishes off with finance.

[27:07] Kevin Golden: You can make some arguments on the start and finish, that’s okay, but that’s a value stream map that crosses over usually several departments. If we fix something in one place, what does that do upstream or downstream? We have to have the bigger picture in play. That’s often where the CFO comes in, or an operations manager, somebody who can see the big picture, but really going through and doing that risk analysis.

[27:43] Kevin Golden: Where are our bottlenecks, where are we running into problems, are we creating problems downstream because of what’s happening from sales? Is everything good, and then it hits the manufacturing floor and all falls apart?

[27:58] Mike Sibley: You’ve got to look and see what the issues are. One thing I’ve seen a lot lately is running out of inventory, so production stops. If that’s a big issue, why are we running out of inventory? We work backwards from there, and all too often it comes down to not having a proper bill of materials, not having a good sales pipeline, not understanding the seasonality of the business. There are a lot of different reasons that play into it, and if we start connecting those dots, we can solve those problems and get the product out the door. That’s just one simple example.

[28:50] Kevin Golden: I know we’ve listed a couple of general examples, but Mike, do you have any other examples of where taking that time paid off? Because what I’ve seen, like you said, is people saying, “I’m a CFO, this sounds great, guys, but I don’t have time because I’m doing X, Y, or Z.” We’ve actually seen situations where people have taken that time and thought, “Of course I can’t afford to not pay attention to these things,” until it’s too late, or the financial impact is so big it’s glaring in your face.

[29:07] Kevin Golden: It’s almost like you can’t afford to not focus on some of these items, because of what it’s restricting them from doing. Do you have any other examples of what you’ve seen and how that’s played out?

[29:25] Mike Sibley: We’re good for the next sixteen to twenty four hours, I can give you a lot of examples. One place I always start when we begin working with a client is looking at organizational, operational, and financial. We look at what are the one or two biggest items in each area that will really start moving things.

[29:52] Mike Sibley: On the finance side, we spend a lot of time on financials. One of the things we really focus on is getting accurate financials and cutting down as much time as we can. We’ve worked with a couple of clients who went from three to four week close times down to under five days. One of them we’ve got down to three days. Part of that’s the team we have, but we worked on really getting that down.

[30:09] Mike Sibley: My biggest goal for the financial team, the accounting team, is that we want them proactive, not reactive. We want them helping get data, helping the business transform, helping the other leaders. But if they’re spending two or three weeks closing the books, getting data into the system, that leaves very little time before they’re back into the closing process again.

[30:39] Mike Sibley: If you can get that down to three to five days, the team can be focused for the entire month, not only on the day to day, but on helping the rest of the leaders. We focus on streamlining all of that, so we get financial results quickly and can make time to help elsewhere.

[30:59] Mike Sibley: The other side is, we’ve had plenty of situations with operational leaders. We’re working with one now where the operational leader is doing way too much, he needs to be managing production, so we’ve looked at those tasks and said, these things can move down. It’s not that we’re going out and hiring a bunch of people, we’re taking the time to look at things, leveraging down work, and instituting automation on reporting and other things.

[31:30] Mike Sibley: For example, going back to the bill of materials, we’re making those work functionally so we can understand our costing, instead of spending time trying to manage our way through the system figuring out why our margins are off on a job. It’s really just taking those projects and saying, this is where we’re having problems, let’s take some simple steps to improve this.

[32:19] Kevin Golden: I like what you said about doing too much, because this doesn’t have to be an economic change in the industry. Maybe you’ve grown from five to ten million, ten to twenty, twenty to fifty, whatever it may be. Along the way, what you’re doing is fundamentally going to change. What you had to do at five million, because you’re a smaller company and don’t have the capacity to pay somebody to do some of these things, you may be able to afford now at twenty million.

[32:38] Kevin Golden: But CFOs, CEOs, COOs are still hanging on to responsibilities like they’re operating a five million dollar company, when they’re four times larger now.

[32:59] Kevin Golden: As you meet these milestones in your company’s history, which are great, momentous occasions, they’re due to be celebrated, but they’re also to be questioned. How I’ve done stuff to get me here is not how I’m going to do stuff to get me to the next stage. It doesn’t mean it’s completely different, doesn’t mean we’re overhauling everything, but there are tweaks that need to be made. A lot of times that’s going back and challenging: what have I done to get me here, what does my day to day look like? Now it’s going to start looking a lot different, pivoting to focus on the areas where you make the biggest impact, and getting help, whether from additional people or technology, to support you in getting there.

[33:52] Mike Sibley: As we wrap up, a few things I’m thinking about: if you’re a CFO listening to this, or a company that thinks, “I could use a fractional CFO like a Mike or Kevin,” some things to think about, what can you do now. Look organizationally at your team. Are you organizationally set up right? Do you have the right reporting mechanism? Who in your leadership, however you define that, is where the bottleneck or problems are? Can you help that person, can you use data to help that person? Can your finance team optimize so they can be out helping decide where these issues are, helping build KPIs, helping understand where bottlenecks or issues are?

[34:25] Mike Sibley: Look organizationally, then look foundationally and fundamentally at who’s doing what. I’ll say again, work expands to fill the time available. If somebody doesn’t have enough work, they’ll make their work last longer because they want to be valuable. Push and stretch them, and look at those mundane, repeatable activities. How do we automate some of those things? You can automate without buying big, sophisticated systems. Nothing I’ve talked about here necessarily costs money. Now, you may need a new ERP system or a new CRM, but at the outset, figure out what process you can fix.

[35:10] Mike Sibley: Use AI to help build the right spreadsheets, and then see where you’re at and build consistency. Just today, I had a CEO and a sales leader tell me they use two different processes to get a work order in. Why? There’s no reason. Use a consistent process, and document what that process is. Build that consistency, and build metrics that matter. You don’t need a hundred of them.

[35:36] Mike Sibley: Build the key ones, use this with your management team, use this to teach leaders. As you go through it, maybe you built a metric and you look at it two or three years from now and ask, why am I still doing this, how am I using this? If it’s not beneficial, build a different one that is. Constantly challenge your thinking as you go along, as you grow and change, so will how you operate and what metrics matter. Which ones are more important to look at now versus before, or you solved one problem and now you’ve got the next one. Constantly think about how we can change it and make it better, and whether it’s still beneficial today.

[36:27] Kevin Golden: The last thing I’ll say, for that strategic CFO, or somebody looking to hire a strategic CFO, think of the time investment and activities that improve visibility, decision making, profitability, and ultimately long term competitiveness. If you focus on those things, you’ll find the right answers.

[36:47] Mike Sibley: With that, Kevin, as always, a lot of fun having these conversations. For everybody listening, thank you very much. Reach out, let us know, give us any comments if there are any topics you’d like to hear us address in the future.

[37:10] Kevin Golden: That’s great. Otherwise, I hope everybody enjoyed this session, and have a great day.

[37:15] Narrator: To learn more about James Moore Company’s manufacturing services, go to jmco.com, and don’t forget to subscribe to our Moore on Manufacturing series to receive updates when new videos and podcasts are released. If you’d like to be a guest, or if there’s a topic you’d like to see covered on a future episode, contact us on our website. You can also follow us on social media for more news as manufacturing continues to change.

Watch, Subscribe, and Stay Ahead

If this conversation raised questions about where your own finance function stands, from close times to forecasting to how AI fits into your reporting, the full episode walks through practical examples you can apply right away. Subscribe to Moore on Manufacturing to catch future conversations with the James Moore manufacturing team.

 

All content provided in this article is for informational purposes only. Matters discussed in this article are subject to change. For up-to-date information on this subject please contact a James Moore professional. James Moore will not be held responsible for any claim, loss, damage or inconvenience caused as a result of any information within these pages or any information accessed through this site.