Cash in the Chain — Supply-Chain Finance at Maison Velluti

A four-round, advanced supply-chain-finance simulation set inside Maison Velluti S.p.A., a Florence fashion-luxury house (EUR 540M revenue, 16% EBITDA, 220 suppliers, 70% Italian SMEs). The CFO demands EUR 30M of working capital freed within two quarters and has floated stretching DPO from 75 to 120 days — the cheapest cash lever and the fastest way to collapse the fragile Tuscan artisanal tier that protects 'Made in Italy' provenance. Conceria San Frediano, supplying 22% of certified leather and one of only two chrome-free, animal-welfare-certified tanneries, is six weeks from default. Two luxury clients (EUR 190M of contracts) have tightened sustainability and traceability codes the small workshops cannot self-fund (~EUR 200k upgrades each). Playing the Supply-Chain Finance Lead, you (1) diagnose the cash-and-resilience bind and refuse the blunt DPO stretch; (2) choose among supply-chain-finance instruments — reverse factoring / approved-payables finance (frees buyer cash AND pays suppliers early at the buyer's credit rating), dynamic discounting (spends cash for margin), classic factoring, or a sustainability-linked programme — and set the financing terms by supplier tier; (3) decide which suppliers to keep, develop or exit, design platform onboarding that actually reaches the EUR 200k artisanal workshops, rescue San Frediano, and finance certification through sustainability-linked rates rather than merely mandating compliance; and (4) integrate and stress-test the programme against the CFO's EUR 30M target, the client audit, and the San Frediano clock, then defend it to the board. The math rewards the positive-sum reverse-factoring + sustainability-linked + fragile-tier-inclusion play and punishes the five classic errors — blunt DPO stretch, the wrong instrument for the goal, an SCF programme that excludes the fragile tier, mandating sustainability without financing it, and treating critical suppliers as replaceable. Final KPIs track Cash Freed (€M vs the EUR 30M target), Supplier Resilience, Sustainability Readiness and effective DPO, all in EUR.