Hackett Survey

Companies Slow Payments to Suppliers in 2019 As Cash & Debt Continue to Rise - Seite 3

Focus on Modeling & Forecasting – Build the ability to do scenario modeling, integrated business planning, cash flow forecasting, risk assessments, and more to improve decision-making ability. Identify potential disruptors and refresh contingency plans as necessary.

Consider Customers & Suppliers – Monitor the financial health of customers and suppliers, and make accommodations where necessary, particularly in cases where losing a supplier might disrupt the company’s supply chain. Work with customers to provide incentives for payment. And optimize payment terms for suppliers, ensuring the right terms are being offered for each category of suppliers. Consider segmenting suppliers by risk and criticality to determine what approach to take, where to apply leverage, and where temporary support may be required.

Accelerate Technology Adoption and Digital Transformation – Digital transformation, including smart automation, robotic process automation, analytics, and more can significantly improve efficiency and effectiveness, significantly reducing transactional work, standardizing and streamlining processes, and providing more insight.

Revisit Service Delivery Models. Organizations need to increase flexibility, resilience and agility to understand and manage risks across the supply chain and their impact on cash flow. Diversification, where possible, will help mitigate the risk of further shocks to the end-to-end supply chain. Companies need to look at corporate and functional strategies, internal processes and organizational design to protect cash and build for the “next normal”.

The Hackett Group Working Capital Survey and Scorecard calculates working capital performance based on the latest publicly available annual financial statements of the 1,000 largest non-financial companies with headquarters in United States, sourced from FactSet/FactSet Fundamentals. The survey takes an industry-based approach to ranking companies according to the four key working capital metrics Days Sales Outstanding (DSO), Days Inventory Outstanding (DIO), Days Payables Outstanding (DPO) and Cash Conversion Cycle (CCC). For each industry the companies are ranked according to overall CCC days. Companies are classified according to the FactSet industry classification system, using data sourced from FactSet. For purposes of the survey and presenting the results we have grouped certain industries together. Historical comparisons within the survey are made on a like for like basis.