[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":4},["ShallowReactive",2],{"article-body-1-7-trillion-in-the-wrong-place":3},"\n[The Hackett Group's 2025 Working Capital Survey](https://www.thehackettgroup.com/2025-working-capital-survey-payables-rebound-receivables-inventory-lag/)\nfound $1.7 trillion of excess working capital across the top 1,000\nUS public nonfinancial companies, roughly 11% of their combined\nrevenue. Very little of that cash is trapped by strategy. Most of\nit is trapped by settings, thousands of small numbers nobody has\nlooked at in years.\n\nThe same survey put days inventory outstanding at 68.9 days, the\nhighest reading in a decade. The buffers built for the disruption\nyears simply stayed.\n\n## Where the cash actually sits\n\nNumbers that size invite grand explanations. Resilience,\ngeopolitics, the cost of uncertainty. They are real, and they are\nnot the answer. Ask where, specifically, the excess lives and you\nend up looking at settings like these:\n\n- Safety stock levels set during an ERP implementation, by a\n  consultant who has since moved on, for demand that has changed\n  shape.\n- Reorder points tuned for a supplier lead time that improved two\n  years ago, still buying as if it had not.\n- Payment terms defaulted from a template, so one supplier is paid\n  in 30 days while a peer negotiates 60 for the same commodity.\n- Customer credit limits inherited from a tier set when the\n  customer was a different size and risk.\n\nEach was a decision once. The decider moved on,\nthe context moved on, and the number stayed. None is material on\nits own, which is exactly why none gets revisited. Together they\nare the $1.7 trillion.\n\n## Why initiatives keep losing\n\nThe standard response is a working capital initiative. A quarter of\ntask-force attention, a consulting deck, a one-time harvest, then a\nslow relapse.\n\nIt fails for two reasons. The parameters outnumber the initiative;\nno task force revisits fifty thousand settings. And the parameters\noutlast it; whatever gets fixed in the second quarter starts\ndrifting in the third, because demand, lead times and rates keep\nmoving.\n\nA one-time optimisation of a continuously drifting system is a\nphotograph of a river.\n\n## Make each parameter an owned decision\n\nTreat every material setting like any other recurring decision.\nCheck it continuously against current data, the safety stock\nagainst observed demand, the payment terms against the negotiated\nbenchmark, the credit limit against the customer's current\nprofile. Route the exceptions worth money, a ranked few hundred\nrather than fifty thousand alerts, to the person entitled to\nchange the number, with the cash impact and evidence attached.\nTrack each accepted change for the cash it actually released.\n\nRun that way, working capital stops being an annual campaign. The\ntrillion comes back the way it left, parameter by parameter, this\ntime on purpose.\n\n## Where to start\n\nPick your fifty largest safety stocks and ask when each was last\nchecked against current demand and lead times. The answer is\nusually the business case by itself.\n[The Prophesee Finance Suite](/solutions/finance/operations) runs\nthat check continuously, across every parameter in the estate.\n[Find your trapped cash](/contact).\n",1786984935415]