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vel, return on investment, profit margin and inventory level. Our results demonstrate the significance of payment delays: Increases/decreases in the upstream/downstream payment delays favor the system’s operations by decreasing operational costs. Moreover increases in the working capital employed in the system decrease the total operational cost, increase the total financial cost and lower the return on working capital investment. 1. Introduction Financial supply chain management and working capital management are increasingly recognized as important means to increase profitability in a supply chain. The physical product flow has long been addressed by researchers and practitioners. However, now panies have identified the financial side of the supply chain as a promising area for improvements. Prominent examples of panies that have integrated, to some extent, financial and physical flows include Intel, GE and Deutz. Intel advocates the necessity of a transparent view of supply chain information, which covers both the flow of physical goods and the ultimate financial settlement (Intel Corporation, 2020). Along the same lines, GE saved 12% of their total accounts payable by using an electronic invoice system (Hausman, 2020). This new tool improved GE’s ability to forecast cash flow requirements and to perform financial flow and information flow tasks at the same time. This trend is confirmed in Europe as well, where Deutz, a German motor manufacturer, optimized their inventory levels, accounts payables, accounts receivables and payment delays in order to overe high working capital levels and high operating costs, (Bernhard, 2020). However, the interdependency of financial flows and operational flows is rarely recognized and decisions are often made based on other criteria. Operations managers decide from an operational point of view concerning inventory, service levels or capacity needs to drive financial performance in terms of profit, working capital requirements and return on investment (Fig. 1). At the same time, financial managers make partially arbitrary decisions concerning ranges of desired financial performance and thereby inevitably e to constraint operational performance. The tradeoff between operational decisions and