The Multi-Objective Model of Working Capital Optimization

Abstract

In recent years, the topic of supply chain finance has gained a lot of attention from academia, but still, there are a lot of unexplored areas. For example, the literature demonstrates a clear gap of adequate application of numerous supply chain finance solutions for collaborative working capital management (Gelsomino et al., 2019). This issue becomes more and more important, specifically in terms of globalization and growing competition between supply chains when liquidity and profitability improvement is of paramount relevance. Companies focusing on their individual supply chain issues and taking their own interests into account rather than understanding the whole supply chain and collaborating with their partners are missing fruitful areas for improvements (Wuttke et al., 2016). The authors address this gap by developing a model for collaborative working capital management through supply chain finance adoption for the case of the three-stage supply chain. At the same time, the process of working capital optimization is received as a multi-objective problem. The results obtained indicate that the model of working capital optimization with concurrent use of multiple supply chain finance solutions is able to provide an optimal solution for all the cases considered in the research. It allows to decrease the total financial costs on working capital and supply chain finance solutions making individual ones not worse and at the same time achieve greater liquidity.