A busy press can still starve the bank account. Extrusion ties cash in metal, waste, and customer credit. Founders who track only tonnes shipped learn that lesson late, usually in the week a billet payment and a slow receivable land together.
The first trap is billet and inventory. You buy metal before you collect cash. Mix shifts, a customer delays, or someone over-buys “to get a rate,” and billet sits. So do profiles waiting for packing, finishing, or dispatch. A useful weekly habit is simply asking how many days of billet and finished goods you are carrying, and what has aged beyond the plan.
The second trap is scrap and yield. Scrap is not only a quality metric. It is working capital that left as swarf and offcuts. Poor die performance, unstable process, or sloppy planning raises the metal you must fund for every saleable tonne. Yield improvement is often the cheapest financing available on the shop floor, and it rarely needs a new slogan — it needs attention.
The third trap is receivables. Distributors and project buyers will ask for credit. OEMs may pay slowly even when they buy steadily. Without credit limits, ageing reviews, and the willingness to pause supply, sales growth becomes an informal loan book. Cash discipline is a commercial habit, not only an accounts habit.
Run a small dashboard that forces honesty: billet, WIP, and finished goods against the next month of expected collections; scrap by major die family; receivable ageing by account with stop-supply rules; and a list of orders accepted below floor price “to fill the press.” Those last ones destroy working capital twice — once in price, once in the chaos they create.
Utilisation vanity is the quiet killer. Soft-priced, slow-paying fill-in work can raise press hours and still shrink cash. Optimise for cash conversion, not only for tonnes.
Profit optimisation and operating cadence are where Vulcan spends time with running plants — making leaks visible in mix, yield, pricing, and receivables before the next billet cycle hurts.