这是即将发表在美国《美国财务职业者》（《American Financial Professionals》）专业杂志上的一篇关于公司现金管理和供应链效率的文章，约作改动后放在这里供大家参考。

Managing a centralized treasury function in a global business can be a massive headache.  With complex supply chains and processes stretching far beyond national borders, multinational corporations are struggling to integrate their supply chain financing and cash management in an efficient manner.  They must operate efficiently in a multi-currency environment, manage exchange rate risks, decide optimum financing strategies across different interest rate regimes, and optimize internal transfer pricing to minimize their overall tax burden.   

For most multinational companies (MNCs) operating in China, that headache can quickly become a migraine.  The challenges are broad in scope for MNCs with Chinese operations:  supply chains that source parts and components from local suppliers and from numerous other countries, run their final assembly operations in China (and India to some degree), and sell their products worldwide.  Compared with supply chains largely confined in one or small number of geographical locations in the US or Europe, the challenges are unique.  First, the infrastructure.  Even though China’s highway system has been much improved over the years and in fact, in terms of total mileage, it is the second in the world, the logistic service infrastructure has been falling behind in terms of speed, efficiency, flexibility and coverage. Secondly, most local suppliers do not have the sophistication to manage their own supply chains well, which makes them vulnerable to material shortages, bad planning, equipment breakdown or other emergencies and finally, except in Yangtze River and Pearle River Delta areas, supply chains generally are not concentrated in a manageable area.  According to a study, for example, China’s automobile industry has an average of 5 hours travel distance for parts and components to reach their final assembly plant (in the US, this number is in general below 2 hours).   These challenges of running an efficient supply chain, which is the foundation for efficient treasury management, may also be true in most part of Asia, especially in Vietman and India.   Therefore, financing the supply chain is quite a major strategic issue and would require our treasury and cash management professionals look beyond financial factors such as tax, interest rate, exchange rate, etc.  they should also keep a close watch on the many drivers of the supply chain efficiency, – such as vendor-managed inventory (VMI), Days of Sales-outstanding DOS, Order to Remittance (OTR) etc. which would be normally ignored under traditional cash management practices. 

The experience of a firm operating in China, and the difficulty in treasury management, is very much dependent on size.  For the most part, small to-medium sized operations in China (those that employ fewer than 500 people and have an annual turnover of less than $100 million)aren’t as in need of pain relievers as the larger MNCs. .  They take a simple approach to cash management, using basic internal transfer pricing and payment term schemes to get extra cash, if any, back to headquarters.  And with more and more of these smaller companies having access to local bank facilities, many are finding their financing needs can be met locally.  As a result, the treasury function for these companies consists of basic cash planning and WIP financing, both of which are tightly integrated with operations.

The experience of the largest MNCs in China, such as Honeywell, GE, and Siemens, who have extremely sophisticated treasury and cash management operations, is vastly different and evermore challenging.  Their level of sophistication has been growing in line with the complexity of their supply chain operations.  Within this bifurcation, it is only these large companies and a handful of medium-sized players that have meaningful treasury management functions.  Even so, most either outsource their cash/treasury management to banks wholesale or manage only some aspects of the operation (e.g., Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable[CM2] ). 

Is there a better way to operate treasury management functions for these large organizations?  Regardless of whether the function is run internally or outsourced, efficient treasury management is impossible without an efficient supply chain operation. Too often, leaders of financial organizations pay close attention to efficiency and execution in every part of a business -- except their own.  But what is increasingly obvious in countries where management of any sort can be difficult, is that treasury functions should not be immune from fundamental tests of efficiency?

Indeed, corporate treasury functions ought to be closely integrated and run with the same rigor, or more, than the rest of the business.  Improving cash turnover, for example, cannot be achieved without reducing the cycle time across the entire supply chain, increasing on-time delivery performance, shrinking inventory, and the like. 

A good example of this problem was recently seen inside the China division of a major global telecommunications equipment and service supplier long suffered from long Days Of Sales-outstanding[CM3]  – on average, as long as 180 days representing €250 million.  With that kind of performance, there was not much room for the treasury professionals to maneuver: most of the operating cash was tied up in the supply chain, and treasury’s main concern was to work with banks to minimize interest payments.  Management was aware of the problem and had been pushing the finance team hard to resolve it.  For some time, however, finance did not realize it was not a departmental issue, but one involving virtually the entire company.  Lacking ownership and an effective approach, the finance team could address only relatively trivial causes, such as a slow and error-laden invoicing process. 

Then, in 2006, the company launched a process improvement program, Achieve Process Excellence (APE), aiming at bringing cross-functional teams together to tackle end-to-end process issues.  APE adopted a mixture of Lean and Six Sigma components, but condensed the DMAIC problem-solving procedure into a much shorter timeframe.  The cash management team sponsored a project to reduce DOS and involved people from sales, manufacturing, supplier management, delivery, and engineering services.  After first wave of project activities, the team was able to reduce the DOS by 21% and unlock up to 15% cash.  The head of cash management declared victory: “Now we are managing our cash!”

As this example shows, recognizing that a company’s cash position hinges more on supply chain efficiency than on sophisticated cash management is a critical first step.  While it still makes sense for treasury officials to pay attention to risk management techniques such as hedging, complicated swaps, futures, and so on, we believe the bigger upside lies in working closely with process professionals to implement a continuous improvement program focused on wringing cash out of the supply chain[CM4] .