The Hackett Group's 2025 Working Capital Survey found $1.7 trillion of excess working capital across the top 1,000 US public nonfinancial companies, roughly 11% of their combined revenue. Very little of that cash is trapped by strategy. Most of it is trapped by settings, thousands of small numbers nobody has looked at in years.
The same survey put days inventory outstanding at 68.9 days, the highest reading in a decade. The buffers built for the disruption years simply stayed.
Where the cash actually sits
Numbers that size invite grand explanations. Resilience, geopolitics, the cost of uncertainty. They are real, and they are not the answer. Ask where, specifically, the excess lives and you end up looking at settings like these:
- Safety stock levels set during an ERP implementation, by a consultant who has since moved on, for demand that has changed shape.
- Reorder points tuned for a supplier lead time that improved two years ago, still buying as if it had not.
- Payment terms defaulted from a template, so one supplier is paid in 30 days while a peer negotiates 60 for the same commodity.
- Customer credit limits inherited from a tier set when the customer was a different size and risk.
Each was a decision once. The decider moved on, the context moved on, and the number stayed. None is material on its own, which is exactly why none gets revisited. Together they are the $1.7 trillion.
Why initiatives keep losing
The standard response is a working capital initiative. A quarter of task-force attention, a consulting deck, a one-time harvest, then a slow relapse.
It fails for two reasons. The parameters outnumber the initiative; no task force revisits fifty thousand settings. And the parameters outlast it; whatever gets fixed in the second quarter starts drifting in the third, because demand, lead times and rates keep moving.
A one-time optimisation of a continuously drifting system is a photograph of a river.
Make each parameter an owned decision
Treat every material setting like any other recurring decision. Check it continuously against current data, the safety stock against observed demand, the payment terms against the negotiated benchmark, the credit limit against the customer's current profile. Route the exceptions worth money, a ranked few hundred rather than fifty thousand alerts, to the person entitled to change the number, with the cash impact and evidence attached. Track each accepted change for the cash it actually released.
Run that way, working capital stops being an annual campaign. The trillion comes back the way it left, parameter by parameter, this time on purpose.
Where to start
Pick your fifty largest safety stocks and ask when each was last checked against current demand and lead times. The answer is usually the business case by itself. The Prophesee Finance Suite runs that check continuously, across every parameter in the estate. Find your trapped cash.