Little has changed in companies' working capital management over the past year—which means that companies have a huge opportunity for improvement. This is the key take-away from this year's “2014 U.S. Working Capital Survey” from REL, a division of The Hackett Group.

In this year's iteration of the annual study, REL and CFO Magazine analyzed the 2013 financial statements of the 1,000 largest public companies that have U.S.-based headquarters and are not in the financial services sector (the “REL 1000”). They separated the companies into industry groupings, then organized them into quartiles within each industry in terms of days inventory on hand (DIO), days sales outstanding (DSO), and days payables outstanding (DPO). For every company outside the top quartile in one of these metrics, REL and CFO calculated how much additional cash the organization would have available if it improved efficiency enough in its inventory, accounts receivable, or accounts payable processes to bring the associated metric in line with the level achieved by the top quartile of businesses in its industry.

This analysis revealed that the total opportunity for improving working capital among the 1,000 companies in the study is $1.020 trillion—which separates into a total accounts receivable (A/R) opportunity of $331 billion, a total accounts payable (A/P) opportunity of $266 billion, and a total inventory opportunity of $423 billion.