At that point Sarah was director, EMEA treasury, at Hewlett-Packard and she had just picked up an award from EuroFinance for Treasury Excellence for her work at HP around the supply chain. Sarah first became interested in the supply chain chairing the Corporate Reference Council at treasury standards organisation, TWIST. Although Hewlett-Packard had consolidated and standardised most of its general finance processes in Shared Service Centres, Sarah recognised that there were substantial improvements that could still be made in terms of "end-to-end optimisation" within accounts payable and accounts receivable processes.

 

More importantly perhaps she recognised early on that optimising the financial supply chain was not just about digitising invoices and remittance advices. Companies also needed to look at supply chain financing in a different way, she said. Typically buyers wanted to extend Days Payables Outstanding (DPO) so it had a positive impact on their balance sheet, but Sarah also highlighted the impact on the P&L if suppliers were forced to raise prices to finance the cost of capital. "I don't believe that many organisations have connected the dots internally nor realised the tremendous value that is waiting to be unlocked within their global supply chains," she told financial-i back in 2006.

 

Traditional trade finance and forfaiting were typical forms of financing provided by banks but they did not really address the financing gap that Sarah was talking about in the supply chain and as she pointed out banks had sold financing products without really understanding the "corporate drivers and objectives".

 

Recognising that she could have more of an impact in a wider industry role helping multiple corporations, Sarah left HP to become CEO of SCF Capital in London, which provided supply chain financial services. There she spearheaded efforts to help companies constrained by their suppliers' or distributors' inability to meet demand or buy more product due to a lack of access to affordable working capital.

 

She left SCF Capital in 2009 to work at payments and invoice automation provider, Bottomline Technologies, where Sarah played an integral role in helping shape its vision around order-to-pay automation and the associated downstream and upstream benefits for the end-to-end financial supply chain.

 

Sarah was often interviewed by financial-i and contributed articles for supply chain handbooks we published. Back in 2006 she told me her long-term vision was the creation of a marketplace for accounts receivable where potential financiers would bid on future cash flows - an "E-bay for receivables financing".

 

Thankfully during her lifetime such an exchange in the form of The Receivables Exchange in New Orleans, came to fruition, and other visions she held in terms of the broader adoption of industry standards are only now beginning to emerge, for example, with the work being done around ISO 20022 XML standards.

 

And although there still may be companies out there that don't realise the tremendous value waiting to be unlocked in their supply chains, those that do have been helped by the tireless efforts and visionary thinking of people like Sarah.

 

Sarah passed away unexpectedly in January.