Logistics & distribution
Northfield Logistics
23% reduction in order-to-cash cycle
Northfield's finance team could tell us the order-to-cash cycle had crept from 31 to 47 days over two years, but not why. We didn't start with a workshop — we pulled the actual transaction timestamps for 400 orders and laid them end to end.
The finding was almost embarrassingly simple: a manual credit-check step, introduced during a compliance scare eighteen months earlier, had never been assigned an owner. It sat in a shared inbox with a median wait of six days. Nobody was measured on it, so nobody watched it.
We didn't recommend new software. We assigned the step to a named role, put a two-day SLA against it, and gave finance a weekly exception report instead of a monthly one. The cycle dropped to 36 days within one quarter and to 32 within two.
“They didn't sell us a system. They found the six days nobody owned.”
COO, Northfield Logistics