Analyzing the Findings from ”The Evolving Role of Financial Leaders in Manufacturing” Report with Epicor’s Mark Jensen

"One of the things that we wanted to do at Epicor was to start to broaden our understanding of manufacturing beyond just production orders or MES systems — really start to further learn more about the finance, the accounting side, because that's so, so important," said Mark Jensen, Director of Product Marketing at Epicor on a recent episode of the Manufacturing the Future podcast. "We surveyed finance and accounting leaders in over 200 companies worldwide ... the people that are in there day in, day out, working with the financial and the accounting aspects of software."

Mark recently visited the podcast to discuss the findings from Epicor's "The Evolving Role of Financial Leaders in Manufacturing" report. As he explains to Kerrie, the report shows how much the role of the CFO is changing and in many ways elevating to new responsibilities. The CFOs surveyed are also looking to new technologies like AI and business intelligence to support growth and profitability. They're also finding a lot of value in the cloud as well.

However, CFOs are facing a number of challenges today, including talent shortages and retention, and how to manage and maximize the value of data. Yet they're turning to technology to address these challenges, like automation that can help improve retention by minimizing manual tasks and robust data management platforms to help extract value from all that data.

In This Episode

What's on the minds of manufacturing CFOs today? Listen to our conversation with Mark Jensen to hear more about the findings from "The Evolving Role of Financial Leaders in Manufacturing" report.

Topics

• How "The Evolving Role of Financial Leaders in Manufacturing" report was created and an overview of its findings.
• How the role of the CFO is changing, evolving, and elevating.
• Four challenges CFOs are facing today, including talent acquisition and data siloing.
• How CFOs are addressing the talent shortage and turnover by relieving burnout through automation.
• Three new technologies that CFOs are leveraging to improve profitability.
• Top takeaways from the report around data management, the value of the cloud, and how not to be held back by market conditions.