The Chief Financial Officer can enable her or his finance department play a more strategic role in company operations by adopting what I call profitability management. In the interest of time I’ve made this a very high-level description that’s intended to be just an introduction to the topic. Profitability management is a cross-functional effort. It integrates finance and sales to achieve an optimal balance of revenue and margin objectives. It’s an analytics-based approach designed achieve higher sales and fatter margins. Why should the CFO drive a profitability management initiative? The main reason is that it will improve the company’s profitability and competitiveness. The bottom line is the bottom line.