Ep. 199: Anthony Nitsos, CMA - Riding the Tidal Wave of Data Automation

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Full Episode Transcript:
Adam:



I'm Adam Larson and welcome back to Count Me In, the podcast by
and for management accountants. Today's guest comes to us from
the forefront of the data automation revolution. Anthony Nitsos,
a proud CMA, a consulting CFO, and the founder of SAS gurus
shares the unique story of how he transitioned from pursuing a
career in medicine to how he discovered the power and beauty of
accounting. From explaining how accounting forms the spinal
column of any manufacturing business to practical advice for
writing the coming tidal wave of financial automation, Anthony's
insight and expertise is important listening for management
accountants everywhere. Enjoy the show.


Adam:



Anthony, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. We're
really excited to have you on and today we're gonna be focusing
in on automation and what that means for the management
accountant. But to start off, I wanted you to kind of tell us a
little bit about your story.


Anthony:



So thank you, Adam for that. And I really appreciate being on
your program today. You know, I've had an association with the
IMA for a long time, which we uncovered in our kind of a
preliminary, so that'll be part of the story. But I actually
started off in medicine of all things. I was accepted into an
accelerated program at the university of Michigan at the age of
18, but several years into it, I realized I really did not want
to be a doctor. So it was one of those kind of all right, well
you're most of the way to a doctor and you've kind of got a
bachelor's degree to show up for, but what are you gonna do with
your life now if you've decided not to go in medicine. So I think
by, you know, stint to the fact that they both started with am, I
went into manufacturing right after medicine.


Anthony:



I don't know if it was anything more than that, just like, okay,
I need a job. I need to, you know, make money. But the strange
thing is, is what they had me do was really, you know, kind of
the beginnings of process reengineering analysis and trying to
figure out why in this particular case, you know, logistics were
breaking down material, wasn't ending up where it went. So I got
kind of a baptism in fire. What it showed me was that
corporations are very similar to bodies. You know, they even, you
know, means the same thing. So this training that I got in
medicine actually translated pretty well into manufacturing. And
so there, I, you know, from there I took off. After that, I did a
stint where I was doing a lot of ERP implementations. If folks
recall back around the year, 1997, everybody started panicking
that their code would blow up when the year 2000 showed up.


Anthony:



So there was this huge, you know, Y2K, doomsday disasters, et
cetera, et cetera. And at that time I was picking up accounting
skills. It was one of those things where it was pretty clear that
the impact of manufacturing was absolutely a financial one in
that, you know, when you got right down to it, you're making
decisions on the shop floor that impact profitability. So it was
kind of a natural progression for me to just kind of move over
into more of an accounting type of world. And ERP really brought
that together, cuz that's where you really unify back then still
in today, you know, the operations of the company with finance.
And so that's where the accounting management accounting piece
came into it. And it was right around 1996 where I actually got
my first certification in accounting and it was the CMA.


Anthony:



And I remember that being really useful to me and still to this
day, I'm not gonna say it really stopped being useful because
whereas the CPA exam and I've taken that, and you know, I've also
passed that and I'm also a CPA, but I became a CPA later. I was a
CMA first because CMA was very broad based. And from my training,
you can't look at one part of a body anymore than you can look at
one part of a corporation it's an integrated systemic whole. And
so how those pieces work together and how they work most
efficiently together, the principles are very similar between
medicine and, you know, process reengineering. They really are,
you know, you go after the root cause the idea of medicine is not
to treat symptoms. I know there's a big debate about that, but
really what we are trained to do is find the root cause and fix
it.


Anthony:



And manufacturing is no different and neither is IT. So moving
from the physical body to the physical manufacturing now to a
more, you know, electronic realm, bringing ERP and all the
systems and how they touch everybody together and unifying that
ultimately in a framework, which was based in accounting in my
mind, because in my mind, the accounting pieces, like the spinal
column of the body, you really build everything off of that. All
of your reporting, all of your metrics comes off of that. And so
focusing the attention to get to the numbers most accurately,
most efficiently really became kind of the focus of my next
position, which was a controller for a Japanese company. It was a
company that was a manufacturing company that had been purchased
by, was an English company that had been purchased by the
Japanese, excuse me and the president at the time really wanted
to have his own money guy rather than have somebody from Japan
come in and do the numbers.


Anthony:



And so he quickly moved to hire a new controller and that was me.
And so at that point we knew we were going to scale the company
10 times within the next three years. And so my experience in
accounting, the fact that I also spoke Japanese, cuz I had
actually studied there, helped out, I understood the cultural
kind of the, you know, became kind of like the cultural liaison
with the Japanese people when they showed up and then going over
there. But that was kind of a side issue. The big issue was they
gave me opportunity in a Greenfield implementation to design the
entire data collection, information, reporting, financial
reporting and whatnot for what was going to be a $50 million
company that I had inherited at 5 million using Peachtree. So
here I am, freshly minted CMA got his first controller job,
applying all these skills and saying, okay, we now get to design
a data collection piece for all the production data, all the
manufacturing data, all the material data, all the labor, blah,
blah, blah, in a way where we really kept the cost down.


Anthony:



So this was my first and in some ways, best experience scaling a
company because I was actually given that power. I was given the
authority to basically design the system. And so we had at the
time when we started that 5 million, there was myself, a
full-time accountant and kind of a half-time payroll person
running, you know, the entire back office. When we reached 50
million, I had the same three people, only the payroll person was
now full-time. And so we were able to, by applying Japanese
manufacturing principles and techniques of totally total quality
management, plus Six Sigma black belt process, reengineering
analysis, plus my training in ERP systems and what could be done.
And at that point, the state of automation was you drove
everything off of barcode scanners. And so once everything was
set up easily, so each person had their own badge, their own
employee badge.


Anthony:



That was what they used to swipe in and out of the clocks and
also what they were used to swipe in and out of jobs. And we made
it easy for them to do that. We had readers everywhere and the
jobs themselves had their own codes. And so all you had to do is
just match the two up in a system and boom outfalls the data. So
it was the principle of a sin...