About this Presentation
In The Fastest Way to Get Paid: Pay Fast to Collect Fast, Ravi Gilani challenges a familiar working-capital practice: delaying payments to suppliers in an effort to preserve cash. Ravi follows the consequences of that decision through the broader system, showing how late vendor payments can weaken supplier confidence, increase uncertainty, disrupt material availability, reduce OTIF performance, and ultimately contribute to slower customer collections.
The session connects supplier payment behavior, operational reliability, customer service, receivables, inventory, and cash flow rather than treating them as separate financial issues. Ravi’s accompanying Excel model provides a practical comparison between growing sales and eliminating overdue receivables. In the example, a 30% sales increase improves profit but consumes additional working capital, while eliminating overdue balances improves cash flow without requiring additional sales. The session ultimately encourages organizations to look at the full cash-conversion journey—from paying suppliers reliably to delivering customers reliably and converting the value created into cash in the bank.
What Will You Learn
To help you get the most value from this session, we’ve highlighted a few key points. These takeaways capture the main ideas and practical insights from the presentation, making it easier for you to review, reflect, and apply what you’ve learned.
Ravi Gilani challenges the assumption that delaying supplier payments improves cash flow. The workbook starts with the common reasons companies postpone vendor payments—lack of cash, slow-paying customers, or the desire to retain cash longer—but then traces the negative effects through late supplier deliveries, customer delays, lost urgent orders, higher uncertainty, and increased inventory.
Supplier reliability and customer collections are connected. Ravi shows how late supplier payments can make a company a less-preferred customer, contribute to unreliable material flow, and ultimately hurt OTIF performance. Paying suppliers on time can strengthen delivery reliability, reduce delays to customers, and remove one of the reasons customers may use to justify paying late.
The working-capital example reveals why eliminating overdue receivables can matter more than simply increasing sales. In Ravi’s model, increasing monthly sales by 30% raises profit, but it also requires additional receivables, supplier payables, and inventory. The modeled change produces a cash-flow decrease of 24 units. By contrast, eliminating the overdue gap produces a 15-unit cash-flow improvement without increasing sales. That makes the relationship between growth, working capital, and cash very tangible.
Collections are not just a Finance responsibility. Ravi calls for Finance and Sales to align around all receivables, reconcile both due and overdue balances with customers, and analyze invoice-level collection performance by comparing agreed credit terms with actual payment days over a six-month period.
Instructor(s)
Ravi Gilani
Ravi Gilani is a globally renowned expert in evaporating cash constraints, empowering companies to achieve remarkable improvements in cash flow within weeks. As the pioneer of introducing TOC (Theory of Constraints) to Indian companies in 1998, Ravi holds the distinction of being the only Indian citizen to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award from TOCICO for his outstanding contributions to the industry.
With an industry veteran experience of over 51 years, including 30 years as a consultant and 21 years as a practitioner, Ravi has worked with numerous large and small Indian and transnational organizations across diverse industries such as engineering, automotive, consumer durables, aerospace, metals, cement, insurance, and more. Prior to his consulting career, Ravi gained valuable hands-on expertise during his 21-year tenure in operations within the automobile industry at Tata Motors and Eicher.
Ravi's groundbreaking knowledge in evaporating cash constraint has been shared at TOCICO International conferences since 2006, and his paper on cash constraint and cash buffer has been formally recognized by TOCICO as new knowledge under TOC Body of Knowledge (BOK), placing him alongside the esteemed founders of TOC, Dr. Eli Goldratt, and Eli Schragenheim.
He is the creator of several original concepts, including Cash Velocity, Free Cash Score, and Better than Before, which provide essential parameters to guide corrective actions and enhance decision-making. Many Indian companies have significantly benefited from Ravi's weekly review process based on these concepts.
As an alumnus of IIT Delhi, Ravi consistently challenges conventional assumptions and simplifies complexity while focusing heavily on metrics and review processes in his consulting assignments. He lives by Eli Goldratt's famous quote, "Measurements Drive Behavior," and is known for providing practical solutions with forthrightness and transparency.
Beyond consulting, Ravi shares his vast industry experience as a sought-after keynote speaker and workshop facilitator at international forums and industry bodies. He has been associated with IIT Delhi and SP Jain Business School as a guest faculty and passionately contributes to making Bharat the best place to live and work, fostering optimism in the nation's intrinsic potential. Presently, Ravi focuses on making organizations debt-free through the innovative concepts of Free Cash Score, weekly reviews, and Better Than Before strategies, working towards the goal of contributing to a USD 5 trillion economy.