A Better Working Capital Solution for Innovation

It’s no secret that growing companies provide critical products and solutions that drive innovation for the corporations and government entities working on our most mission critical opportunities. What is less understood are the real challenges they face in delivering at the pace required to meet large scale demand and what solving these could do to accelerate growth and progress for all. 

A combination of extraordinary engineering, scientific and domain expertise are often what gets innovators to the verge of scale, with a proven product that everyone wants. Successfully delivering on the demand at that stage then forces them to confront a new set of obstacles where working capital efficiency suddenly becomes essential. Enabling these suppliers to navigate this shift and deliver on their potential is a critical factor in creating and sustaining successful economic innovation ecosystems, especially in the most rapidly evolving industries at the leading edge of growth and progress.  

An Ecosystem for Growth

In an ideal world, enterprises would discover a new, game-changing product or solution and be able to quickly implement it at a meaningful scale. Growing suppliers responsible for these innovations would have the tools and resources to meet scaling demand, allowing enterprise buyers to plan and confidently procure what they need without delay or compromise. Here's what life might look like if this were true:

• Procure at Scale: Corporates are able to plan and execute large projects without worrying about supplier capacity. Freedom to focus on the potential that an innovative growing company’s solution offers and to implement it at the scale needed to make a difference.
• Supply Chain Maneuverability: Suppliers, regardless of size, have the financial tools, including access to working capital and the ability to manage it, to maneuver in the face of unforeseen events and handle large orders efficiently. 
• Payment Timeline Flexibility:  Corporate finance teams retain the option to extend days-payable outstanding (DPO) —delaying vendor payments to manage their own cash flow–without worrying about harming smaller vendors who provide critical inputs.
• Off-Balance Sheet Support: Suppliers are supported using efficient, affordable, scaleable capital provided by third parties, leaving corporate buyers’ balance sheets unencumbered, capital free for core operations and teams unburdened by the need to manage supplier finance programs. 

Challenges that Hinder Innovation

In reality, many factors affecting supplier networks prevent corporations today from reliably sourcing or receiving inputs from growing companies on time and at scale. These include:

• Working Capital Constraints: Suppliers lack access to working capital and purpose-built tools to understand and manage cash flow as they grow, making it difficult to handle rapidly increasing demand.
• Lack of Supply Chain Visibility: Limited insight into supplier challenges makes it difficult for corporations to anticipate and address potential risks such as delays or supply bottlenecks.‍
• Limited Financial Flexibility: Extending DPO can strain suppliers’ working capital, making it difficult for them to plan and survive.‍
• Dual-Sourcing Challenges: Specialized components from single suppliers are difficult to dual-source and make disruptions harder to manage.

Suppliers need better tools to help them navigate working capital challenges and effectively respond to rapidly growing demand. This is where Klear comes in. Klear addresses these challenges through a toolkit that supports suppliers’ cash flow needs and builds their resiliency and working capital management capability without requiring corporations to fund and run a supplier finance program.

Unlocking Innovation with Smarter Solutions

Klear allows small suppliers to easily digitize their order-to-cash process and uses the data and insight to provide efficient working capital to scale their production effectively. Klear provides numerous benefits to both suppliers and and corporate buyers: 

• Cash Flow Management: Klear’s tools support suppliers with working capital to handle large orders efficiently, which allows corporate customers to receive timely delivery and scale up orders at the desired speed.
• Supply Chain Transparency: Access to high-quality data and supplier metrics to support informed decisions.
• Governance: Klear’s processes automatically improve governance, oversight and efficiency in growing companies.
• Financial Flexibility: Klear uses institutional investor capital to pay suppliers early, freeing corporations from the need to fund supplier support programs from their own balance sheets.

Better Supplier Management Made Easy with Klear

Growing suppliers appreciate the well-tailored, easy to access support Klear gives them as they scale, and the speed at which they can begin to access its working capital solutions. Adding Klear to a corporation’s supplier management strategy can be as easy as introducing suppliers to Klear and letting the Klear team do the rest. From there, unprecedented insights and opportunities for informed collaboration and optimization for the corporation and their suppliers are unlocked because of the visibility provided by Klear’s unique, real-time, comprehensive, structured dataset. 

Klear’s working capital-focussed solution supports liquidity, visibility and operational resiliency for corporations and the growing suppliers who play vital roles in their ability to innovate. The result is greater flexibility and ability to maneuver to capture opportunities and respond to challenges and improved ability to manage and mitigate risk which improves pricing and supply chain stability for all parties. 

Contact us at: getklear@klearbusiness.com