Solutions & Use Cases

Why Finance Teams Can Be the Heroes of Manufacturers and How Automation Helps Them Do It

Kognitos

Key Takeaways

Finance teams can be the heroes of manufacturers, this post argues, because amid 2022’s talent shortages and wage pressures, CFOs’ traditional levers (raising compensation, hiking prices, or slow analytics investments) all carry damaging side-effects. It positions automation as a faster alternative that lets finance teams offset these pressures. Because Kognitos is designed for business users, F&A professionals can automate repetitive, gap-filling work themselves in hours or days using conversational English, for example, instructing it to process a customer’s invoices through an ERP like Epicor. This reduces cost, improves the accuracy of forecasting and analytics, and avoids the high total cost of ownership and IT-heavy “Center of Excellence” overhead of older tools. The post cites deployment in under a day with ROI exceeding 200%. The takeaway: by automating manual work quickly, manufacturing finance teams can boost productivity, aid retention, and become strategic heroes. Learn more about the Kognitos platform and AI automation in manufacturing.

“Manufacturers face the challenge of retaining top talent and attracting new workers while minimizing disruption in their organization. Using technology to drive efficiency and innovation is vital”- 2022 Marcum National Manufacturing Survey [ii]

The Problems with Old Solutions:

The problems facing manufacturing finance teams are well documented. Adding to the challenge, many of the traditional responses CFOs are considering can have unpalatable consequences and side-effects. [iii]

Increasing budgets for compensation can effectively create a “compensation arms race” at the same time when risks of “Wage spirals” are rising.

“Over the next two-year period, 77% of survey respondents plan to increase average wages by 5% or more, and of that 77%, a quarter are looking to increase average wage by more than 10%. So at least a quarter of your competitors are looking to increase wages by 10% or more in the next two years”[iv]

Investing in new data analytics capabilities is important, but by itself often slow to implement. Raising prices unfortunately can reduce competitive positioning and risk losing market share. So if many of the traditional options can have negative side-effects, what should finance teams do? What if instead, finance teams had a tool to help offset some of these side-effects, and do so quickly?

The Opportunity for Finance Teams to Be Heroes:

Kognitos is designed for business users, giving finance teams the power to automate processes in hours or days, by themselves. This drastically reduces cost and helps make analytics and forecasting processes far more efficient and accurate. With Kognitos, CFOs may not need to resort as much to some of the tough options above.

In the past, automation tools were either too simple to drive meaningful productivity, or required too high of a TCO, pricing out many business processes. If an automation tool requires a vast team of IT staff or “Center of Excellence” to manage and maintain it, it’s ability to be widely adopted will be constrained.

Instead, in manufacturing, automation should be moved to the functional role itself. Finance professionals in manufacturing spend a significant amount of time performing manual processes that are repetitive, or have to fill the gaps between applications that do not integrate properly. As a result, these hardworking professionals often become disillusioned with their work as they are not able to focus on the work that distinguishes them: problem solving and helping deploy the company’s capital for long-term growth.

But this changes when F&A professionals are empowered with the ability to automate away repetitive work, and focus on higher level, human centric work. With Kognitos, F&A departments can automate through regular conversational English. Finance professionals simply tell Kognitos what they wish to have automated such as “I want you to take all invoices received from Customer X, and process them through Epicor for payment.”. Kognitos then builds an actionable automation plan, and after approval executes this plan. This can be done in less than a day, while delivering ROI in excess of 200%. Numerous use cases for automation in manufacturing finance teams exist (see more examples here: https://v.fastcdn.co/u/f8b11a40/62179020-0-Process-Automation-i.pdf) and can be deployed rapidly.

“Increasing productivity was the most popular business priority for the coming year, with 60% ranking it among their top three priorities.”[v]

If manufacturing CFOs need better forecasting, more efficient operations, and high levels of retention to make it through the current crisis, finance teams can be the heroes. By automating manual, repetitive work quickly, and seeing ROI immediately, finance professionals can provide their leadership with the knowledge they need to make critical decisions and help make their company more competitive by eliminating cost, all while making their own jobs more enjoyable.

Grant Thornton, “As Inflation Soars, CFO Optimism Sinks”, 24 May 2022
Marcum, “2022 Marcum National Manufacturing Survey”, 4 August 2022
Grant Thornton
Marcum
Marcum

How Finance Teams in Manufacturing Can Use Automation to Drive Business Value

Identify the manufacturing finance processes with the highest automation opportunity. Supplier invoice processing, cost allocation, intercompany transactions, production variance analysis, and period-close reconciliation are manufacturing finance processes with high automation potential and direct business impact.
Deploy AI for supplier invoice automation in manufacturing. Manufacturing supplier invoices include direct material, MRO, and services invoices with varying formats and matching complexity. AI automation handles any format, performs 3-way match against PO and receipt, and routes exceptions automatically.
Automate cost accounting and variance analysis. Manufacturing cost accounting requires collecting production data, applying cost allocation rules, and generating variance reports. Configure AI to collect production data from MES and ERP automatically and apply cost allocation rules without manual data entry.
Configure automated period-close support for manufacturing accounting. Manufacturing period-close is accelerated by automating the data-intensive steps: inventory valuation, WIP analysis, and production order settlement. Automated data collection for these steps reduces close cycle time and allows finance to focus on analysis.
Measure cost-per-invoice, close cycle time, and variance analysis completion time. These three metrics measure the business impact of manufacturing finance automation. Track them before and after automation deployment and report to the CFO and operations leadership.

Frequently Asked Questions

Finance teams can serve as strategic heroes for manufacturers by driving efficiency and offsetting the challenges of talent retention, wage inflation, and supply chain disruption. Rather than simply managing costs, empowered finance teams can automate repetitive manual processes to free up capacity for higher-value work like forecasting and capital allocation. According to the 2022 Marcum National Manufacturing Survey, increasing productivity was the top business priority for 60% of manufacturers, and finance automation directly addresses this need. When finance professionals can focus on problem-solving rather than data entry, they become more valuable to their organizations.

Kognitos uses conversational English to let finance professionals automate processes without requiring IT staff or a dedicated center of excellence. A finance user simply tells Kognitos what they want automated, such as instructing it to take all invoices from a specific customer and process them through Epicor for payment. Kognitos then builds an actionable automation plan and, after approval, executes it, often completing setup in less than a day. This approach puts automation in the hands of the functional role itself, rather than requiring engineering resources.

Finance automation using tools like Kognitos can deliver ROI in excess of 200% while significantly reducing manual workload for finance professionals. It improves the efficiency and accuracy of analytics and forecasting processes, giving CFOs better data to make critical decisions. Automation also helps manufacturers become more competitive by eliminating operational costs without triggering the side-effects of wage increases or price hikes. Perhaps most importantly, it makes finance jobs more fulfilling by shifting focus from repetitive tasks to strategic, human-centric work.

Traditional automation tools fell into two camps: either too simple to drive meaningful productivity gains, or too complex and costly with high total cost of ownership that priced out most use cases. Tools that require large IT teams or a dedicated center of excellence to manage are inherently constrained in how widely they can be adopted across an organization. This means many finance professionals were still left performing manual, repetitive work and filling gaps between systems that did not integrate properly. The result was disillusionment among skilled finance staff who could not focus on the strategic work that truly differentiates them.

A practical example is invoice processing: a finance professional can instruct Kognitos using plain English, saying something like "Take all invoices received from Customer X and process them through Epicor for payment." Kognitos interprets that instruction, builds an automation plan, and executes it after the user approves, all within a single business day. This eliminates the need for manual data entry between systems and removes the friction caused by applications that do not natively integrate. The same approach applies to a wide range of F&A use cases including procurement, reporting, and three-way matching.

Manufacturing CFOs should prioritize automation tools that can be deployed and managed by the finance team itself, without requiring a large IT organization or specialized developers. The tool should deliver rapid time-to-value (ideally within hours or days) so that ROI is visible quickly rather than after months of implementation. It should also be flexible enough to handle the variety of processes that finance teams perform, from invoice processing to forecasting. Low total cost of ownership and ease of adoption across the organization are critical so that automation does not become a burden that offsets its own productivity gains.

Kognitos