Across manufacturing organizations, especially complex automotive suppliers, one problem keeps showing up in different forms:
Finance says margins are eroding. Sales says deals were quoted correctly. Operations says execution is under control.
All three can be technically right, and still miss their profitability targets.
This isn’t a people problem. It’s a systems and alignment problem. When Finance, Sales, and Operations operate on disconnected data, timelines, and assumptions, margin loss becomes invisible until it’s irreversible.
That’s where unified profit intelligence changes the equation.
Most companies invest heavily in front-end quoting discipline. Models are built, assumptions are reviewed, margins are approved. On paper, everything looks sound.
The breakdown happens after the deal is won.
From that moment on, profitability becomes fragmented.
No single function owns the full margin story from quote to forecast to execution to outcome. Instead, each team optimizes locally, using different tools, metrics, and definitions of “success.”
This is the heart of misalignment between finance, sales, and operations.
Finance teams are measured on reporting accuracy, controls, and variance analysis. But most profitability insight arrives after the fact, once costs are booked and margins are already compressed.
By the time Finance sees a problem:
Sales teams are rewarded for growth, speed, and win rates. Once a deal closes, margin accountability often fades, especially when downstream changes (engineering, materials, volumes) occur outside Sales’ direct control.
Without feedback loops, Sales never learns:
Operations teams live in execution mode: launch readiness, change management, cost events, premium freight. They feel margin pressure daily but often lack visibility into what margin they’re protecting, or losing.
The result? Tactical decisions made without a shared financial baseline.
ERP systems record what happened. CPQ systems capture how a deal was priced. Spreadsheets attempt to connect the dots.
None were designed to maintain a living margin model across functions.
That’s why most organizations rely on:
According to Gartner, organizations that fail to connect commercial and operational data struggle to operationalize margin accountability across teams, leading to chronic profitability leakage.
Unified profit intelligence is not another report or dashboard.
It’s a shared operating layer that connects:
…into a single, continuously updated margin narrative.
Instead of each function working from its own version of reality, Finance, Sales, and Operations work from the same economic truth, at the program and customer level.
Unified profit intelligence preserves the original quote assumptions and tracks how reality evolves against them: volumes, costs, changes, timing.
Everyone sees:
Finance gains early visibility into margin risk before it hits the P&L, enabling:
Sales teams gain feedback on execution reality, helping them:
Operations teams can prioritize actions based on economic impact, not just urgency, knowing which programs matter most to margin protection.
Campfire is purpose-built to operationalize unified profit intelligence across the lifecycle.
By connecting Finance, Sales, and Operations to the same profitability model, Campfire replaces fragmented reporting with shared accountability.
Learn more about Campfire’s Quote-to-Forecast and Operational Margin Management capabilities.
When Finance, Sales, and Operations operate from unified profit intelligence:
Most importantly, profitability stops being a retrospective discussion and becomes a managed outcome.
If margin leakage is showing up after programs launch, it’s a signal, not a surprise.
Request a 20-minute working session to see how unified profit intelligence can align Finance, Sales, and Operations around the same margin reality.