An important presentation at last week’s ACT Working Capital Conference was given by Accenture on their work for a large UK company who aimed to release £300 million cash from their working capital which would come from all parts of the supply chain by ‘transforming’ all the internal processes and policies in inventory, payables and receivables.

The services

Accenture built a “Tower’ of services and processes and analytics for:

• Inventory
  • E.g. projected overstocks
• Receivables
  • Intelligent collection support e.g. invoices likely to be late, on the due date and very late
• Payables
  • E.g. invoices to be paid early or urgent.

Lessons learnt included need for integration with the ERPs, as is the need for co-design of the analytics, and, the most important, was the need to just get started, i.e. not wait until all systems finished – this included using Accenture’s cloud services initially.

Linking with corporate treasury

The breadth of Accenture’s services and support was shown by how they plan to link their Cash Performance Control Tower with treasury, see figure below:

Source & Copyright©2019 – Accenture

The solution improves visibility, optimise cash and enhance liquidity by:

• Improving cash position management
• Cash flow forecasting accuracy improving by some 20% to an accuracy of 70-90%
• Working capital being released by the Cash Inventory Optimizer, the Working Capital Control Tower and the Smart Trade Finance processes and functionality.

Accenture believes that their Cash Performance Control solution fits within a traditional Payment Factory operation which links to an In-House Bank, as shown below:

• Payment Factory
  • Bank communications
  • Reporting & Advanced Analytics
    • Payment and Collections Factory
    • Cash Management
    • Bank account management
    • Cash Performance Control (Accenture)
      • Working Capital
      • Trade Finance
• In-house bank
  • Debt & Investment Management
  • Global Netting
  • FX Hedging & Internal Hedging
  • Liquidity Management.

---

CTMfile take: We are now seeing more and more integration of systems across many silos as these total working capital solutions become linked directly with payment factory and in-house bank solutions.