Production Planning and Financial Performance in the automotive industry, is there an opportunity to align?

In the automotive industry, production planners adhere to the promised release dates, which are calculated based on the components’ availability and the client delivery lead times. Recently, integration efforts led to considering the inbound and outbound constraints to build a holistic production plan. However, these integration approaches need to consider the financial performance of the supply chain. This paper demonstrates how respecting release dates considering the invoicing lead times, which is the time elapsed between the release of the manufacturing order from the factory until invoicing the order, could significantly improve the invoice rate, directly contributing to the cash flow performance. We present our work on a real industrial use case from a car manufacturing site in Spain. Our results show that the number of manufacturing orders risked late invoicing is reduced by 76%.