One of the key advantages of cloud-based business tools is that they help businesses automate a lot of the grunt work.

In an age where people want to focus on groundbreaking work and leave the repetitive ones to machines, automation is a prominent driving force making that happen — even in the field of finance management.

“At the end of the day, the first and most important thing people have learned is that, especially for a finance function, they no longer want to be transaction operators,” said Terrance Wampler (pictured), general manager of financial applications development at Workday Inc. “What they want to start doing is pushing that work to more automated tools, to have that be done for them and try to promote themselves to be more like analysts or even advisors to the business or even a partner to the business.”

Wampler spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the recent IBM Think event. They discussed the Workday/IBM partnership and how it’s helping enterprises on their digital transformation journeys. (* Disclosure below.)

A new model for finance leaders

Devising an ingenious solution always requires a deep understanding of the concomitant problem. The problem, in this case, was helping companies structure their digital transformation efforts to suit their current state. To that end, Workday and IBM worked together and came up with the concept of “enterprise finance.”

“What enterprise finance does is it really tries to meet the customer wherever they are. So while all of these customers are looking to accelerate their digital transformation, they come from very different places … and their journey to that transformation is going to be very different,” Wampler added.

From manufacturing to insurance, retail and logistics, Workday and its new financial management philosophy is helping companies to be much more agile and think about being able to dynamically move in quarters or half-year increments.

As the global economy tries to return to the pre-2020 state of things, it looks like sectors including retail, supply chain and manufacturing are carrying on with a full head of steam. While a few hiccups — like the Suez Canal blockage earlier this year — caused some panic in the global economy, there are undoubtedly opportunities waiting on the horizon.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM Think. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for IBM Think. Neither IBM, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE