Visibility has recently conducted a survey of engineer to order manufacturing CFO’s. The focus for the survey was to discover the critical business intelligence metrics and measurements that CFO’s need in order to manage operations. Essentially, we were looking for the ideal makeup of the manufacturing CFO dashboard! Understanding that the goal of Business Intelligence software is to transform raw data into meaningful and useful information, what specifics were they looking for?
The metrics, KPI’s and measurements are listed below, but what our research proved is that across the board, manufacturing company CFO’s need timely and secure access to rich manufacturing, distribution and financial data. They require easy and robust Business Intelligence tools; tools that require no more knowledge than the basic use of Excel. They want simple, highly visual reporting tools. They need the results of their analysis to be easily consumable and shareable. They require collaboration and a solution to ensure that their compliance and regulatory goals are consistently being met.
Of importance to the manufacturing CFO in 2015 is a full service, self-service solution. They need their BI tools to offer not only easy usage of dashboards, but also easy, non-technical creation of these dashboards. There was a general consensus that the CFO’s themselves and their end user consumers of these dashboards would adopt these tools far more easily if they were delivered in a manner that offered true user independence, without reliance on IT.
One comment that was consistent across our audience was “we need to make sure that we get the ERP data into the hands of the people that need it, when they need it and deliver that data via a simple delivery mechanism.”
Having said all that, what does the manufacturing CFO dashboard look like in 2015? Well, it probably looks something like this:
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Order Bookings
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Total Expenses
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Profit Amount and Profit Percentage
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Mini Balance Sheet
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Inventory Turns
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Days Sales Outstanding
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Cash Flow
To learn more about this topic read more about business intelligence here.
