The cash a large industrial manufacturer was holding on the water
A large industrial manufacturer was financing a buffer it could not fully justify, held against ocean lanes it could not see clearly. Within eight weeks, Holocene identified €2.4M of working capital that could be safely released, proven against what actually arrived. The cost of carrying that capital was approximately €270,000 a year.
The situation
A large industrial manufacturer was carrying more inventory than it wanted to, and it knew it. Not because anyone was careless, but because the alternative felt worse.
Goods moved to its European plants on long ocean lanes. The arrival dates in the ERP were the dates the purchase order had promised, not the dates the goods would actually land. Suppliers and forwarders sent the real picture continuously, across thousands of emails: revised departure dates, partial shipments, consolidations, a vessel delay buried in a forwarder's reply. That picture was scattered, contradictory, and impossible to trust at a glance.
So the team did the only safe thing. It held a buffer against the uncertainty, extra cover on the lanes it could not see clearly. That buffer is working capital, financed every quarter. At today's cost of capital it had quietly become one of the more expensive things the company owned. The cost was real, but invisible, because it never appeared as a line item. It looked like prudent operations.
For the CFO, the problem was that cash was tied up in goods on the water and in the buffer held because of them, and no one could say how much of that buffer was necessary versus how much was insurance against bad data. For the Head of Supply Chain, the team spent its days reconstructing arrival reality by hand and defending safety stock it could not fully justify with numbers.
What changed
Holocene did not ask the manufacturer to change its systems, onboard its suppliers, or adopt a portal. Epoch read the emails the company was already receiving.
From that existing flow of supplier and forwarder messages, Epoch reconstructed real, line-level arrival dates, reconciling the contradictions, matching confirmations across part numbers and naming differences, and surfacing one trustworthy date per line that the team could plan against. Complexity in, clarity out.
The measure of success was set in the CFO's terms: how much buffer could be safely removed once arrival dates could be trusted, proven against what actually landed rather than against a model. Every finding traced back to a real signal in a real email, so the Head of Supply Chain could show, line by line, why a date was what it was, which is what makes it possible to safely reduce cover a team has defended for years.
The result
Within eight weeks of usage, Holocene identified €2.4M of working capital that could be safely released, quantified against what actually arrived rather than forecast.
The carrying cost of that capital was approximately €270,000 a year. That is the recurring cost of holding a buffer the data could not justify, money spent every year to finance uncertainty.
The figure was not a projection. It was measured against arrival reality over the period. The manufacturer did not act on a forecast of savings. It saw the amount confirmed on its own data before committing to anything wider.
Why it generalizes
This was one manufacturer, but nothing about it was unusual. Any manufacturer running long inbound ocean lanes, whose real arrival information lives in supplier and forwarder email, and whose ERP shows the purchase-order promise rather than shipment reality, is holding the same kind of buffer for the same reason. The cash is on the water, and in the cover held because of it. Once the arrival date can be trusted, the buffer can safely shrink, and the working capital it was holding comes back.
Holocene proves the amount on your own data, on one lane, before you commit to anything wider.
See what your inbound is holding
A six-week pilot on one of your lanes returns your real number, proven against what actually landed.
