We are in the eleventh year of the economic expansion (the longest in U.S. history) following the “Great Recession” of 2008 and 2009. During the economic downturn the economy experienced outsized losses in the housing, manufacturing and jobs. Yet, the recovery and expansion has been restrained, although it has picked-up steam over the past two years. While unemployment rates are very low, strong wage gains remains elusive. Inflation has only recently reached the Federal Reserve's target after being well below it for several years and the Fed has been backing away from its very accommodative policy. Mr. Strauss will look at the performance of the overall macro economy with specific attention paid to key economic sectors and indicators for the U.S. economy over the next several years.

One of the major roles that manufacturing accountants play is to identify cost savings activities and present those to the COO, VP of Manufacturing or the plant manager.

Often times these ideas are met with skepticism "What does the bean counter know about manufacturing?"

Yet the people most familiar with the costs and the cost structures are the manufacturing accountants.

This session will cover hot topics related to FASB standards, proposals and projects, including recently issued guidance and implementation challenges facing many companies today. Additionally, this session will provide insights into the SEC's most recent areas of focus, including comment letter and enforcement trends.

Fraud Prevention is a challenge for small businesses. Learn how one CFO addresses these challenges and built a system of internal controls after a fraud occurred.

Listen to a discussion regarding digital transformation and how the transformation was executed; From Excel to cloud, to robotic process automation.

The expectations of Corporate Finance professionals have skyrocketed in recent years. While technical competence remains important, it now simply represents the price of admission. More important factors that enable or limit success include becoming a trusted business partner, a focus on acquiring and developing talent, an expanded perspective, personal effectiveness, the ability to communicate and deliver insights and the agility to pivot based on never ending changes in the business environment. Based on a 40 year career, this former CFO and current advisor, shares his perspective of critical success factors in Corporate Finance.

How finance leadership and their teams can benefit from a new set of skills and digital talent to advance digital transformation of their accounting and finance functions.

With today's geo-polictical and geo-economic challenges, supply chain agility and efficiencies are becoming more important to conducting successful business. Supply chain efficiency is no longer just about capture the lowest cost per unit, it has expanded into broader terms around total landed costs, flexibility and speed. In this session learn how to define efficiency and different levers to pull to drive supply chain efficiencies in the future.

This session will cover various options on how to design KPIs for your organization and understand the unintended consequences of various KPIs.

We are living in unprecedented times in terms of consumer demands and the velocity of change that technology is driving. Now more than ever, finance leaders have to embrace and help drive significant change to ensure our organizations remain relevant. I will share my playbooks for driving transformational change and developing effective relationships with key business partners to achieve desired strategies.