【正文】 der unique firm or industry influences. Maness and Zietlow discuss industry influences in a short paragraph that includes the observation that. “An industry a pany is located in may have more influence on that pany’s fortunes than overall GNP” (2021. 507). In fact. a careful review of this 627page textbook finds only sporadic information on actual firm levels of WCM dimensions. virtually nothing on industry factors except for some boxed items with titles such as. “Should a Retailer Offer an InHouse Credit Card” (128) and nothing on WCM stability over time. This research will attempt to fill this void by investigating patterns related to working capital measures within industries and illustrate differences between industries across time. An extensive survey of library and Inter resources provided very few recent reports about working capital management. The most relevant set of articles was Weisel and Bradley’s (2021) article on cash flow management and one of inventory control as a result of effective supply chain management by Hadley (2021). Research Method The CFO Rankings The first annual CFO Working Capital Survey. a joint project with REL Consultancy Group. was published in the June 1997 issue of CFO (Mintz and Lezere 1997). REL is a London. Englandbased management consulting firm specializing in working capital issues for its global list of clients. The original survey reports several working capital benchmarks for public panies using data for 1996. Each pany is ranked against its peers and also against the entire field of panies. REL continues to update the original information on an annual basis. REL uses the “cash flow from operations” value located on firm cash flow statements to estimate cash conversion efficiency (CCE). This value indicates how well a pany transforms revenues into cash flow. A “days of working capital” (DWC) value is based on the dollar amount in each of the aggregate. equallyweighted receivables. inventory. and payables accounts. The “days of working capital” (DNC) represents the time period between purchase of inventory on acccount from vendor until the sale to the customer. the collection of the receivables. and payment receipt. Thus. it reflects the pany’s ability to finance its core operations with vendor credit. A detailed 3 investigation of WCM is possible because CFO also provides firm and industry values for days sales outstanding (A/R). inventory turnover. and days payables outstanding (A/P). Research Findings Average and Annual Working Capital Management Performance Working capital management ponent definitions and average values for the entire 1996 – 2021 period . Across the nearly firms in the survey. cash flow from operations. defined as cash flow from operations divided by sales and referred to as “cash conversion efficiency” (CCE). averages percent. Incorporating a 95 percent confidence interval. CCE ranges from percent to percent. The days working capital (DWC). defined as the sum of receivables and inventories less payables divided by daily sales. averages days and is very similar to the days that sales are outstanding (). because the inventory turnover rate (once every days) is similar to the number of days that payables are outstanding ( days). In all instances. the standard deviation is relatively small. suggesting that these working capital management variables are consistent across CFO reports. Industry Rankings on Overall Working Capital Management Performance CFO magazine provides an overall working capital rankin