Manufacturers and distributors are entering a period where cash acceleration is no longer tied to receivables teams alone. The real determinants of order-to-cash performance now sit inside plants, yards, and distribution centers—the places where physical flow either advances or delays the moment a company can invoice.
Finance leaders have always viewed DSO (Days Sales Outstanding) as a function of credit policies, collections efficiency, and dispute resolution. But 2026 is shaping up differently. The biggest source of cash leakage is operational: dwell time, missed appointments, incomplete documentation, manual scheduling, inconsistent carrier performance, and data gaps between logistics and finance. These delays extend the lifecycle of every order before AR even touches it.
This shift explains why companies modernizing their O2C (Order to Cash) processes are starting with operations, not accounting. Working capital success now depends on how reliably and predictably the physical flow moves—hour by hour.
McKinsey reinforces this point by noting that improving the sales (order-to-cash) cycle is “one of the fastest ways to unlock cash early in a transformation”. The message is simple: if manufacturers want faster cash, they need faster physical execution.
Cash acceleration now rests on cycle compression—reducing the number of hours between order creation, fulfillment, verification, and invoicing. The challenge is that manufacturers and distributors operate in environments full of variability. Carrier arrivals fluctuate. Docks fall behind. Production schedules shift. Appointments break. When any piece slips, finance loses time, clarity, or accuracy.
The organizations outperforming their peers are the ones treating O2C as an end-to-end operational journey, not a finance workflow. They build unified visibility from order to delivery, enforce standardization across sites, and eliminate the manual steps that introduce delay.
Leading firms are restructuring their cash strategies around real-time operational data. BCG describes this evolution in their recent balance-sheet analysis, noting that top performers now run “net working capital control towers” fed by real-time inputs across the value chain, including logistics and fulfillment.
This aligns with what we see in manufacturing and distribution: the cash story starts long before an invoice is sent.
If you map the O2C cycle inside a manufacturing or distribution business, the yard is often the single largest blind spot. This is where orders stall invisibly:
These delays don’t just cause operational friction; they directly push out cash recognition.
But companies rarely quantify the yard’s impact on O2C. DSO is measured monthly; yard delays happen hourly. That mismatch hides the true cost of operational inefficiency.
Supply Chain Movement points out that organizations lose “billions in liquidity” because they fail to actively monitor and manage the operational stages of order-to-cash, particularly in logistics.
This reinforces what operations leaders already know: the yard has become an unmonitored tax on cash flow.
Modern Yard Management Systems (YMS) and unified scheduling platforms are no longer “nice operational upgrades.” They are cash engines because they remove the uncertainty that delays billing.
Three mechanisms matter most:
Finance teams can only invoice when they have clean evidence of fulfillment.
Gate-in, dock assignment, load start/end, gate-out—these events determine invoice timing.
A YMS provides that data with timestamp precision.
Without it, invoicing is slower, more error-prone, and more likely to trigger disputes.
Most manufacturers operate multiple plants or DCs, each with its own process quirks. Scheduling systems eliminate that chaos, standardizing how appointments are made, changed, and confirmed. This consistency alone can remove days from the O2C cycle.
Operational variability is one of the biggest contributors to weak cash performance. Scheduling is often the last unmanaged frontier of variability.
Disputes around detention, arrival times, late pickups, and documentation are a major drag on DSO.
Unified systems create a single source of truth for all parties.
When the operational record is clean, the financial record is clean.
FreightWaves reinforces the importance of this system-level clarity, noting that logistics operations now require orchestration platforms capable of managing the “minute details across the order-to-cash lifecycle”.
The fewer details left to human interpretation, the faster cash arrives.
AI is now entering the logistics portion of O2C with a different mandate than traditional automation.
Instead of replacing tasks, AI logistics agents coordinate the operational workflow that cash depends on.
They accelerate O2C in four ways:
AI identifies loads likely to miss appointments or extend dwell based on carrier history, lane performance, and scheduling patterns.
By intervening early, AI agents prevent the domino effect that delays invoicing.
Every minute lost waiting for emails, confirmations, and updates adds friction to O2C.
AI agents handle these exchanges instantly—rescheduling, confirming, notifying, and escalating automatically.
This eliminates administrative latency.
AI removes the classic “missing paperwork” problem that slows AR.
Proof-of-service becomes verifiable the moment the load leaves the dock.
Once the system knows a load is complete, and documentation is validated, AI can automatically signal ERP or TMS systems that the order is ready to invoice.
The direction is clear: high performers are redesigning O2C around automation, aiming for more than 70% of transactions to run without manual intervention — a benchmark that reflects how central orchestration and real-time data have become “greater than 70% automation across order-to-cash transactions”.
Those levels are impossible without automating the logistics layer.
This is where Velostics’ architecture aligns perfectly with the direction of the industry: operational AI that makes O2C predictable, timestamped, and ready for instant billing.
Manufacturers and distributors that outperform in O2C over the next 24 months will distinguish themselves in five ways:
The companies that will outperform in order-to-cash over the next 24 months will share a common operating mindset:
1.They treat the yard as financial infrastructure
Cash velocity is shaped at the gate and dock, not in the invoice run. High performers manage the yard with the same rigor they apply to working-capital processes.
2. They unify scheduling across every site and partner
Fragmented appointment management creates fragmented cash flow. Standardized, network-wide scheduling reduces variability, eliminates avoidable delays, and cuts dispute volume.
3. They remove uncertainty from documentation
Missing timestamps and incomplete proof-of-service are silent DSO drivers. Leaders ensure every load leaves the yard with clean, verifiable data — because clean data produces clean cash.
4. They use AI agents to handle exceptions at scale
Human-led exception management slows the cycle. AI agents intervene instantly, reslotting, notifying, and coordinating before delays cascade into cash issues.
5. They redesign O2C around event triggers, not paperwork
Once a load is processed, cash should advance automatically. Event-driven signals — not manual admin — determine when the order becomes invoice-ready.
General Electrics Vernova’s (energy business) disclosure is the clearest illustration of the stakes: a single day of DSO represented ~$90 million of cash impact.
Manufacturers and distributors feel this same pressure at scale.
Order-to-cash used to be handled at the end of the process, after fulfillment, after confirmation, after paperwork. That model is no longer competitive.
In 2026, cash performance depends on operational orchestration: predictable yards, unified scheduling, automated communication, and AI agents that ensure every load flows cleanly from arrival to invoice.
Manufacturers and distributors that modernize this part of their operating system will see measurable gains in DSO, fewer disputes, and structurally stronger free cash flow.
Those that continue relying on manual scheduling, ad-hoc communication, and inconsistent documentation will continue paying a silent cash tax—one hour of dwell at a time.
If you want a clearer picture of where your order-to-cash cycle is slowing down — and how AI-driven yard orchestration can remove days from your cash conversion — Velostics can help.
Book a working session with our team to assess your current process and see how unified scheduling, automation, and AI agents can accelerate flow, reduce disputes, and strengthen free cash flow across your network.