The concept of supply chain involves designing, implementing, and controlling product flows throughout the entire process, identified as a “single” enterprise. The allocation of activities and costs occurs where it is justified from the perspective of optimizing the entire supply chain. Such actions are intended to increase the economic efficiency of individual enterprises and their networks by eliminating barriers, increasing integration and coordination, and maximizing the value added at each stage of the supply chain to the product expected by the customer. Since the beginning of the 1990s, interest in optimizing integrated supply chain management processes has grown. The success of supply chain management is determined by the integration and coordination of the following flows: information, products, and cash. While the term “Supply chain” is well-established in business language, the term “Supply chain finance” (SCF) is increasingly encountered. SCF can be generally defined as: a set of service and technology solutions that connect buyers, suppliers, and financial institutions to improve transparency, reduce financing costs, and increase the availability of cash in the supply chain.
Several developing trends can be observed in the following areas:
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knowledge about SCF,
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synthesis of payments, receivables, and inventory,
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technology,
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globalization.
A key factor limiting the optimization of supply chain finance in the US market is the lack of knowledge about SCF best practices. Furthermore, there is a noted lack of collaborative technologies for process management, limitations from internal IT (information technology) to support the required system, difficulties in estimating potential savings resulting from the implementation of an SCF program, and resistance from partners in the supply chain.
According to research conducted on the US market, only 13% of enterprises actively use SCF techniques to improve Cash Flow and improve access to capital in supply chain financing, and no more than 2/3 of the surveyed organizations are in the phase of researching and identifying these techniques. Value growth is the primary goal of every enterprise. The realization of the aforementioned goal is conditioned by many factors, which are presented in Figure 2.
The growth of enterprise value is determined by the level of self-financing and the growth and profit of the enterprise, while maintaining financial liquidity. In the modern market economy, it is essential for an enterprise to strive to increase the liquidity of financial resources. Increasing the movement of money, through a wider and stronger stream, allows for increased efficiency of financial management. Thanks to this, on one hand, the costs of using equity and debt capital are reduced, and on the other, the ability to invest in specific areas of the company’s business activity is increased. The determinants of liquidity are: the ability to manage financial resources, inventory (materials, work-in-progress, finished goods, merchandise), and receivables, as well as the sources of the enterprise’s financial supply.
The source of generated capital, which is a determinant of, among other things, the level of self-financing of business activity from internal sources, and consequently the growth of total assets owned and increasingly higher financial results achieved by the enterprise, is working capital, also known as net current assets. Its value directly determines the broadly understood development of the enterprise, namely:
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direct development – through self-financing of total assets in the enterprise,
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indirect development – through the repayment of long-term debt.
It should be emphasized, following M. Krajewski, that an increase in the amount of working capital should be assessed positively if we are dealing with an increase in liquid current assets that can be converted into cash in a short time. Otherwise, the enterprise experiences financial over-liquidity, associated with the gradual freezing of financial resources in current assets, and in particular in inventory and receivables. Based on research conducted among global trading enterprises, Global Business Intelligence (