Cash on Delivery, at Last Supply Chain Finance, SME Automation and the Financing Efficiency of Small Logistics Firms in the United States: A Resilience Perspective with a Business Action and Marketing Plan
Abstract
A delivery, for a small carrier, is only half a transaction; the other half is getting paid. This paper examines how supply chain finance (SCF) and the automation of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can raise the financing efficiency of the United States logistics industry, where 95.5 per cent of motor carriers run ten trucks or fewer. Extending the evidence of Wu, Zhang and Zhang (2024) from Chinese listed SMEs to a sector of private, thinly capitalised firms, it develops a proof-to-cash framework in which automated, data-verified proof of delivery turns a load into a receivable that a financier can price on the credit of the shipper or broker rather than on that of the carrier. Five propositions are examined with public U.S. data and a calibrated Monte Carlo model (10,000 draws) of a representative ten-truck carrier. Converting deliveries into cash costs the baseline carrier a median 4.57 per cent of revenue and takes 18.8 revenue-weighted days. Automation alone lowers the cost to 3.27 per cent, SCF alone to 4.05 per cent, and the two together to 2.60 per cent, cutting the cycle to 7.4 days, releasing about $67,000 of working capital and saving about $43,000 a year. The combination is superadditive in 96 per cent of draws and absorbs a downturn shock with 41 per cent less deterioration. Per-load pricing removes the penalty that fixed fees would impose on owner-operators. The findings are translated into an explicit 36-month business action plan, a go-to-market and marketing strategy, an industry roadmap and a mapping to Sustainable Development Goals 8, 9 and 13.
Keywords: supply chain finance; reverse factoring; SME automation; U.S. logistics industry; trucking; financing efficiency; supply chain resilience; business action plan; B2B marketing; Sustainable Development Goals
JEL classification: G23; G32; L91; M31; O33; Q01
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23000481
