Cash Is King—How OBM Helped a North American Telecommunications Organization Obtain $76 Million in Receivables

Abstract

Imagine a freshly formed team of people who are new to their jobs, assigned by top leadership to meet very ambitious targets in the mission-critical department that collects aged (past-due) payments from the company's largest accounts … (cue Mission Impossible theme). At a large telecommunications company in North America, the Senior Leadership Team led an effort to increase collections of aged receivables on its top accounts by $50 million from the previous year. Using OBM techniques, they surpassed the $50 million goal, reaching $76 million. The team also lowered the Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) by 8.5 days.

Keywords:

• organizational assessment
• performance assessment
• accounts receivables
• OBM

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author would like to thank Dr. Timothy Ludwig, Dr. Brian Cole, and Kelly Therrien for their feedback on early drafts of this report. A special thanks to CLG for their continuous support, Dr. Judy Johnson for her leadership through the engagement with this client, Annemarie Michaud for her mentorship during the progress reviews with the client executive team, and Cloyd Hyten for his thorough feedback and editing of early drafts of this work.

Notes

The report from the field was based on a contractual relationship between the Continuous Learning Group, Inc. (CLG), a management consulting firm, and a North American telecommunications company. For the purposes of this article, the author will use “author” to signify CLG as the deliverer of services and “the company” as the client organization. Manuel Rodriguez is no longer affiliated with CLG and is now affiliated with FMC Corporation.