This is no time to be caught short of cash, or long on inventory, or both: not when interest ratesthat the world’s advanced economies will grow just 1.4% next year. Not when it’s harder than ever to predict and balance supply and demand, which were whipsawed by the pandemic and have not yet regained equilibrium.
Middle market companies have much to gain by making this transformation. We’ve seen companies improve working capital by 20–30% and increase EBITDA substantially in just a few months. One private-equity-owned manufacturer of vitamins and nutritional supplements, for example, saw a 10% gain in EBITDA largely by making its overseas sales and distribution more connected with manufacturing operations in the United States. That helped drive down production and shipping costs.
Every company has some kind of process for aligning supply and demand. In smaller companies, it’s often very informal: Sales comes in with a forecast, the CFO discounts it, production adds some back as a cushion, and every quarter people adjust things. Many have a more sophisticated process, but it tends to be rigid and unresponsive to weak signals from the market, which leads to fire drills in production, if business is unexpectedly good, and fire sales, if things fall short.
Forecasts need to be recast, too, so they model how predicted levels of production and sales will affect all three views of the enterprise: income statement, cash flow, and balance sheet. The team also needs an enterprise-wide view of liquidity needs, biggest threats to liquidity, and biggest sources of cash — that is, which products or lines of business consume or churn out the most cash. Those reveal what levers you can pull.
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