Life @ Blue Ocean
Mastering Business Excellence · Finance
Mastering Working Capital Management shows finance, operations and procurement teams how to release cash from receivables, inventory and payables.
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Cash gets trapped in the operating cycle by decisions no single function owns: sales agrees to longer terms, operations builds safety stock, procurement pays early to keep a supplier happy, and the invoice goes out a week late. Each choice looks reasonable on its own.
Together they lengthen the cash conversion cycle and send the company to its bank for cash it already has. Shortening that cycle requires a shared method across finance, commercial, supply chain and procurement for measuring, benchmarking and managing every component of working capital.
Because the levers sit in several departments, the program suits a cross-functional cohort rather than finance alone. It runs as 31 hours of self-paced online learning on the Blue Ocean learning platform, on web and mobile, with the administrator dashboard reporting enrollment, progress and completion to the sponsoring CFO or treasurer.
Participants compute their cash conversion cycle, benchmark it against industry norms and work the credit policy, collections, inventory and payables levers with the templates; completing the modules, knowledge checks and practice assessments earns a digital, verifiable MBE credential.
The ideal cohort mirrors the cash conversion cycle itself. Treasury professionals and controllers own the measurement and the funding of the gap. Credit control and billing teams own receivables and collections. Supply chain professionals and operations managers hold the inventory lever and the supplier relationships behind payables.
Business leaders and divisional heads sign the commercial terms that set DSO in the first place. Enrolling all of them together, with the CFO or finance leader as sponsor, is what turns 17 modules of method into an improvement plan each function can execute on its own numbers.
The 17 modules follow the cycle from measurement to funding to leadership. Modules one to four set fundamentals, the cash conversion cycle, industry context and the strategic role of cash. Modules five to seven cover receivables, from credit policy to billing, collections and analytics.
Modules eight and nine turn to inventory and payables, and module ten to short-term financing. Modules eleven to thirteen cover forecasting, liquidity and risk, and treasury technology. Modules fourteen to seventeen cover cross-functional alignment, diagnosis, a 90-day action plan and professional practice.
Because receivables usually involve the most functions and offer the most direct lever. Module five sets the policy: customer credit assessment, terms, discounts and the balance between growth and risk. Module six fixes the process, from billing accuracy through a disciplined dunning system to automation of invoice-to-cash. Module seven adds the measurement: the receivables metric set, the aging report and dashboards that turn numbers into collection actions.
Module nine treats payables as a lever with a limit. Participants look at DPO and what trade credit really requires in return, then at early-payment discounts, dynamic discounting and supply chain finance as alternatives to simply stretching terms. The module closes with supplier segmentation and relationship risk, so the payables program a team designs protects critical suppliers while releasing cash from the rest.
Yes. Module three is built around industry context, comparing working capital across three industry archetypes and asset-light versus asset-heavy models, and showing how to benchmark within a sector rather than against an irrelevant average. A services company will spend less time on the inventory module and more on receivables, billing and short-term funding, which is where its cash cycle is decided.
Module ten explains why a working capital gap arises even in healthy businesses, lays out the internal and external sources that can fund it, and shows how to choose and compare instruments on their true terms. Taken with module four on cash, enterprise value and the role of free cash flow, it gives treasury and finance staff a complete view from operating decisions to funding decision.
That is the recommended design, because the terms sales negotiates and the payment behavior procurement sets are two of the three components of the cash conversion cycle. Non-finance managers can follow the worked calculation in module two, and the self-paced format on the Blue Ocean learning platform lets each function spend longer on the modules closest to its own lever while the administrator dashboard tracks the whole group.
Each person who completes the 17 modules, the knowledge checks and the practice assessments is issued a digital, verifiable MBE credential for Mastering Working Capital Management by Blue Ocean Corporation under the Mastering Business Excellence series. The organization keeps the enrollment and completion record on the administrator dashboard for capability planning and for the sponsor's own reporting.
Use the Register Now button on this page. It opens Mastering Working Capital Management on the Blue Ocean Academy website, where individual learners can enroll directly.
Your organization licenses seats for a cohort or a whole team. Participants study the self-paced modules on the Blue Ocean learning platform, on web or mobile, and your administrator follows enrollment, progress and completion on a dashboard.
Yes. A pilot cohort in one department is a practical first step. Use the corporate license form, and a program advisor will map the relevant courses and license options to your teams.
Ask about a corporate license for a cross-functional cash cohort, or start with a pilot cohort in finance and credit control.
Register Now opens this course on the Blue Ocean Academy website in a new tab.
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