Got stuck during an interview - Working capital reduction

You can easily approach this question by looking at the different elements of working capital:

Working Capital (WC) = Current Assets - Current Liabilities

Current Assets = Inventories + Accounts Receivables

Current Liabilities = Accounts Payables (short term debt)

1. To get an understanding of the levels of working capital that are required to run a business in the given industry, benchmark with competition
2. Prioritize an area to optimize WC to reach targeted level - i.e. inventories
3. To improve inventory levels, do an ABC analysis and try to identify slow movers (i.e. by apply stock level formulas like stock/average turnover) - you should reduce stock products, which bind lots of capital and sell slowly = if not much room to optimize inventories, look into accounts receivables (here you can try to make customers pay fasterby sending out reminders, hiring debt collectors or instead get faster liquidity by selling your claims to factoring firms)

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