Working capital transformation for a Saudi industrial services business

A multinational industrial and infrastructure services business in Saudi Arabia was running a working capital crisis behind strong revenue. Roughly €50M in annual revenue across industrial, infrastructure, government, and contractor clients, but overdue receivables had accumulated to around a tenth of that, draining cash flow and operational flexibility. The presenting problem looked like weak collections. The real problem was structural: a commercial culture that rewarded revenue generation aggressively while treating cash realization and customer quality as secondary. The business was winning contracts that booked revenue but never converted cleanly to cash.

Xelyr was engaged to redesign the relationship between sales, customer qualification, operational governance, and cash realization — not to run harder collections, but to rebuild the commercial governance model that produced the receivables problem in the first place. The mandate covered customer segmentation, commercial control mechanisms, the authority and positioning of the collections function, incentive realignment, and differentiated collection strategy across a customer base spanning local contractors, industrial operators, government, and semi-government entities, each with distinct payment behavior and risk.

Collections was repositioned from a downstream finance function into an integrated commercial risk discipline embedded at the point of customer selection. A segmentation framework scored customers on payment reliability, dispute likelihood, profitability, and collection risk — not just revenue potential — and fed directly into bidding and commercial approval. Commercial control mechanisms (payment checkpoints, blocked progression on overdue accounts, structured escalation) gave the business the discipline to slow or disengage from customers whose payment behavior created unacceptable exposure. Incentives were realigned so commercial performance was measured on collection quality and customer profitability, not topline alone. Collection strategy was differentiated by customer type: tighter discipline and earlier escalation for contractors, procedural rigor for government, structured stakeholder coordination for semi-government.

Overdue receivables exposure was reduced by more than half. Collection discipline, customer qualification quality, and management visibility over working capital risk all improved materially. More durably, the organization stopped treating collections as a downstream accounting process and began managing cash realization as a commercial and operational governance discipline. The core lesson held: collection problems are created long before invoices come due, in customer selection, incentive design, and commercial accountability.