m.v.elango79

Profit after Tax, Return on Investment and Free cash flow all three are financial measure of a company. Any business performance are measure based on this performance. All three financial measure are depends on below three Operational Measure
·       Throughput ( Sales – Total Variable cost)
·       Investment or Inventory (I)
·       Operation Expense (OE)( Any monthly expense)
Profit After Tax: Profit – Tax; which is: Sales – (TVC+Tax+OE) 
Cash Flow: Sales – TVC +∆I
Based on the formula of PAT & Cash flow, Increase in throughput can improve both PAT and Cash flow for a company. But this can’t true on all cases. Some projects on through put focus on TVC while some other focus on sales. Another big trigger for cash flow is the delta on Investment. 
Eg. Broker firm cash flow for do new trade is based on settlement on their broker fee to book more trades. So to improve the cash flow their project will be focused on the collection or Billing process to bring the brokerage fee back to Pnl. In this cases project on improve their sales would make not help company sustain in the market.
Same applicable to any small store where profit is depended on the regular cash flow.