Accountants are looking to materials handling professionals to make accounting, well, more accountable—and more respectable. The real-time information you collect about inventory, orders and shipments is critical to better cash management.

Even smaller companies in our readership are learning the importance of getting a better handle on numbers like cash-to-cash cycle time, supply chain cost as a percent of sales, number of perfect orders and economic value added. Take a look at Bob Trebilcock's article in this issue. It's all about how smaller companies are starting to adopt warehouse management systems (WMS) and how WMS vendors are reaching out to these users. There's a reason this is happening: Because companies' brains have been suffering from a kind of oxygen deprivation, and you in materials handling represent a vast untapped reservoir of fresh air.

Just a few weeks ago this headline appeared in The Wall Street Journal: "Companies Fall Behind In Cash Management." The writer reported that as big companies outsource goods and services to manufacturers and providers abroad, working capital deteriorates because goods appear on a company's balance sheet as inventory long before they can be sold. This is taking a toll on this nation's bigger corporations that still don't understand how to manage inventory in the face of changing demand.

Accounting is broken. Don't take my word for it. Listen to what consultants Art Van Bodegraven and Kenneth B. Ackerman have to say in their new book, Fundamentals of Supply Chain Management: "Traditional accounting takes approaches to reporting that can obscure, rather than reveal, what operating managers and executives really need to know to strategize and run the business."

Sure, Modern is and will always be about what you do inside the four walls of the plant and distribution center, but you also need to know how what you do contributes to what keeps those four walls standing.

Note to readers: If you're a regular reader of our back-of-the-book "60 Seconds with...," you'll notice we changed its format a bit. It's now called "Modern Thinking," to emphasize the role our readers play in perpetuating materials handling innovation. We welcome all readers to be a future guest columnist. Just call me, I'll interview you, and we'll turn you into our "Modern Thinking" columnist of the month.—T.A.