In Cherry Bekaert's 2025 Middle Market CFO Survey, nearly two-thirds of finance leaders described their day-to-day work as broadly strategic rather than narrowly financial, with 52% reporting direct involvement in company-wide digital transformation, and 46% helping shape the business or operating model.
The role of the chief financial officer (CFO) has expanded well beyond traditional financial stewardship, a fact well documented by now. What is newer and far more consequential is what that expansion — enhanced by artificial intelligence (AI) — has done to the software and systems that support the role.
For industrial manufacturers, that evolution is occurring alongside rising pressure to improve operational visibility, manage supply chain complexity, control costs and invest in automation initiatives that support long-term growth.
The Finance Stack Has Become Strategic Territory
The finance stack has moved from a back-office function to one of the most strategically contested layers of the organization. As finance leaders take on broader responsibilities across planning, capital allocation, procurement, risk and operational decision-making, the systems they rely on have become more valuable, more complex and far more scrutinized by the C-suite, the board and outside investors.
Three expectations now sit squarely with the CFO:
- Decision authority over the enterprise technology stack
- Structural control of data governance and architecture
- Insight delivery that moves the organization from explaining what happened to anticipating what will happen next
That role looks less like a financial steward and more like a finance architect. The job is no longer to manage individual processes or systems, but to design how finance, operations, supply chain, production and technology work together around a single trusted source of data.
Layer on the acceleration of AI, and the bar moves again. AI only performs as advertised when the data underneath it is governed, connected and trusted. That is precisely where most finance functions are weakest, and precisely why the CFO has to step into a different kind of role.
Manufacturing CFO Expectations Are Higher
Industrial manufacturers face increasing pressure to deliver stronger margins, greater supply chain resilience and improved operational performance despite continued economic uncertainty. CFOs are expected to provide visibility into inventory, production costs, margins, working capital and capital investment decisions while helping leadership teams navigate automation initiatives, workforce challenges and evolving customer demand. The modern finance function must support faster decision-making across the entire organization.
The 3 Core Capabilities of the Finance Architect
A finance architect is a CFO who takes responsibility for designing and connecting the core elements of the finance function — people, processes, data and technology — into a cohesive structure that supports accurate data, scalable operations and timely, decision-ready insight.
These capabilities function as a system, and a gap in any one of them shows up in the other two.
Modern CFO as a Finance Architect
1. The Basics: People and Process
Every modern finance function rests on clearly defined processes and a deliberate operating model. That includes standardized accounting and reporting workflows, explicit ownership of every metric and handoff, and governance that upholds the standard when people change roles or systems change vendors.
Two diagnostic questions tend to surface the truth quickly:
- Are core workflows standardized and documented, or do inventory reporting, cost accounting, monthly close and forecasting still rely on spreadsheets, tribal knowledge and manual reconciliation?
- Do the people in finance understand the systems well enough to actually use the AI and analytics tools the organization has already paid for?
When the answer to either question is no, layering new technology on top will not likely solve the problem, just accelerate it.
In Manufacturing, Process Discipline Drives Performance
For manufacturers, even small inefficiencies can create significant financial consequences. Disconnected processes often lead to inventory inaccuracies, production delays, procurement challenges and margin erosion. Modernizing finance and operational processes gives leaders greater confidence in inventory levels, production costs and profitability while reducing manual effort throughout the organization.
2. Base Technology: ERP, Operations and CRM
Once the foundation (people and processes) is in place, the CFO has to take ownership of the technology landscape that sits on top of it: the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, manufacturing execution systems (MES), supply chain and inventory management tools, and the customer relationship management (CRM) tool that captures customer demand, pipeline activity and sales forecasts.
The relevant questions here are not glamorous, but they are decisive:
- Is the ERP fully integrated with manufacturing, inventory and supply chain systems, or are critical production and inventory metrics still being reconciled manually?
- Is the CRM connected to financial and operational systems so that customer demand, order backlog and production capacity translate cleanly into revenue forecasts and cash planning?
Most middle-market finance functions have grown by addition rather than design. New tools have been layered in for accounting, treasury, spend, billing, tax and reporting as needs surfaced, and the resulting environment is rarely as coherent as the individual investments suggested. Standalone platforms can be strong performers in isolation and still leave the organization with an integration burden that consumes the close, distorts reporting and quietly absorbs a meaningful share of the team's capacity each month.
Resolving that condition is less about adding another software or technology platform and more about how the existing ones are wired together. That alignment is an architectural outcome.
The Digital Core: Where Transformation Actually Starts
People, processes and base technology come together to form what can be described as the finance function's digital core. People and processes define how work is performed. Core systems enable and scale that work. Together they produce the reliable, governed data that everything else depends on.
The digital core is the prerequisite for advanced reporting, analytics, automation and AI. Without it, organizations stall at fragmented reporting or one-off improvements. Most finance transformation efforts that fail did not fail because the vision was unclear but because this foundational layer was never finished, and investment moved on before it was. For manufacturers, the digital core also enables visibility across inventory, production, procurement and customer demand.
3. Reporting and Analytics: AI and Insights
The final capability is the one the C-suite tends to ask about first: timely, decision-ready insight. In practice, that requires three things working together:
- Consistent reporting frameworks and published data governance.
- Near-real-time access to the metrics that actually drive the business, from inventory turns and gross margin performance to production throughput and forecast accuracy.
- Disciplined use of analytics and AI to shift from historical reporting to forward-looking guidance.
Finance leaders are no longer expected to answer only what happened. They are expected to explain what is likely to happen next, why it is likely to happen and what the business should do about it.
This is also where AI is most often misunderstood. AI is not a shortcut around a weak digital core. It is a multiplier of whatever sits beneath it. Built on clean, connected, governed data, it scales insight. In manufacturing environments, AI can help improve demand forecasting, identify production bottlenecks, optimize inventory levels, monitor quality trends and support predictive maintenance programs. However, each of these use cases depends on accurate, connected data.
Why Most Finance Transformation Efforts Stall
For middle-market organizations, building the right architecture can be an overwhelming barrage of strategic and operational questions converging.
The common result is technology paralysis: leaders defer the decision rather than risk the wrong one, and the cost of standing still compounds quietly.
The day-to-day evidence is hard to argue with. Our team at Cherry Bekaert still sees finance teams consistently spending the majority of their hours on exporting, formatting and reconciling data across systems rather than producing insights. Years of automation spending have not changed the underlying picture for most teams. The bottleneck has moved from manual entry to manual integration, and the workday still ends with someone stitching the numbers together.
Where modernization stalls, a familiar pattern shows up:
- No clearly defined architecture connecting processes, systems and data, leaving the digital core unfinished
- Overemphasis on selecting or implementing new technology before the foundational gaps are addressed
- Difficulty aligning stakeholders across finance, operations and IT, particularly around who owns each metric and who arbitrates when definitions conflict
- Underinvestment in the people who will operate the modernized function, which limits adoption even when the technology performs
There was a time when modernizing the finance function was treated as a competitive advantage. That window has closed. Standing still has become the real disadvantage, and it shows up where it hurts most: weaker demand forecasts, excess inventory, production inefficiencies, slower decision-making and a reduced ability to scale operations or integrate acquisitions effectively.
How CFOs Can Start Acting Like Architects
Moving forward requires a shift away from a project-based, tool-first mindset toward an architectural sequencing mindset. At Cherry Bekaert, we frame the modern finance function around four gears: people, process, data and technology. Each gear carries its own expertise, and progress in one without alignment of the others tends to seize the system.
Acting as the “Finance Architect,” it may initially make sense to start with the technology; however, a practical starting point looks less like selecting a tool and more like a sequence of architectural decisions:
- Assess current processes, systems and data flows to identify the disconnects and the manual workarounds that mask them
- Prioritize foundational improvements before introducing new tools, beginning with the highest-value operational and financial processes, such as inventory management, production planning or order-to-cash.
- Define how core systems should integrate to support end-to-end workflows, with explicit owners, refresh cadences and quality thresholds for each key metric
- Establish governance around data ownership, reporting standards and system usage, then publish the rules so debates over which version of the number is right come off the table
- Treat decision velocity as a published key performance indicator (KPI) and fund the initiatives that shorten it quarter over quarter
Each step is designed to compound. Meaning, the close process gets faster because the data is cleaner, forecasts get sharper because the close is faster, and production planning, inventory, pricing and investment decisions get bolder because the forecasts can be trusted.
Let's Help You Build a Modern Finance Function
The CFO role will continue to evolve as organizations place greater weight on data-driven decision-making, operational visibility, supply chain agility and technology-enabled growth. The CFOs who lead that evolution will be the ones who stop treating finance modernization as a sequence of projects and start treating it as an architecture they own.
Cherry Bekaert's CFO Advisory Services team works with organizations to assess the current state, identify the gaps that matter most and develop a practical roadmap aligned to business objectives. Contact our team to learn how you can build a more connected, insight-driven finance function, starting with a 60-minute, complimentary Finance Modernization Assessment.
Related Insights
- Article: Establishing the Digital Core in Industrial Manufacturing
- Article: Technology Paralysis: Why Finance Modernization Stalls in Industrial Manufacturing
- Report: Industrial Manufacturing: What Middle Market CFOs Are Prioritizing in 2026
- Article: Building Scalable AI To Meet Growing Workforce Demands
