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Supply Chain Visibility in Agriculture

visibility
Archives, Global Logistics, Global Trade Daily, Software

Supply Chain Visibility in Agriculture

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Agriculture companies are facing a major challenge of supply chain visibility as of recently when crops treated with pesticides have been sold as organic products. Because of a lack of traceability, farmers are not getting their worth and retailers are losing their credibility too.

Supply chain visibility has been a buzzword for several years and it is not hard to imagine why. With the advent of globalization and the internet in the 90s, the world became a lot more connected and consequently, supply chains became intricately networked and complex.

As companies grappled with this complexity, the need for better visibility was felt acutely. It has been more than two decades since globalization and the internet has now become mainstream, but it is harder than ever to maintain visibility over supply chains.

A survey of 623 supply chain professionals by GEOIDS indicated that visibility is still one of the top 3 priorities, while only 6% of them confessed having complete visibility over their supply chain. It is obvious that maintaining supply chain visibility is a very complex challenge facing agriculture companies today.

One way to look at this issue is through the “people, process, and technology” lens. Often, teams managing different points of the supply chain operate in siloes. To be fair, a lot of agriculture companies do understand this and have put in place processes that enable better collaboration between teams. But unfortunately, supply chains have a habit of being impacted by unexpected events – what if an important supplier collapsed? Or perhaps there was a political change or unexpected weather patterns squeezed supply? The truth is no one can anticipate these events. Even the best teams and the most well-designed processes will find it hard to adapt when the “unexpected” happens within a supply chain.

The challenge then lies with technology – specifically due to the fragmented nature of the technology being used. Teams in agriculture companies often use multiple software solutions to manage different activities of their supply chain, such as contract management, logistics, hedging & risk management, automation & task scheduling, etc. While this software does make it easy to carry out specific tasks, often they do not talk to each other. So someone has to manually collect information from these systems, put it in a spreadsheet, and apply specific algorithms to analyze data to get some visibility – which often takes days and weeks. This severely affects the company’s ability to respond rapidly to changes in the marketplace.

In today’s connected world, it is very important for agriculture companies to have a platform that can connect multiple systems to gather and analyze data, using algorithms specific to commodity supply chains. Such a platform would reliably support collaboration between teams and help supply chain executives adapt to unexpected events, providing a distinct advantage to agriculture firms.

Eka Software Solutions is a global leader in providing digital commodity management solutions, driven by cloud, blockchain, machine learning, and analytics.

To talk to Eka experts please write to info@eka1.com

agribusiness
Archives, Global Trade Daily, Software

Early Adoption of Agile CTRM Critical for Any Agribusiness Planning Growth in 2021

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While productivity is the long-term propeller of economic growth, technology-enabled innovation is the major driver of productivity growth. Yet, we have seen modest growth productivity even as digital technologies boom. This is perhaps a function of resistance in transitioning towards new technology or being unable to find the right fit for business needs.

Considering the agribusiness, engaged in trading huge volumes of different commodities across continents, technologies like CTRM emerge as the most suited innovation to boost productivity. But how can organizations adopt this technology effectively?

In an industry replete with market-specific risks and challenges, a CTRM solution can provide effective solutions to enhance the efficiency of business processes and manage external uncertainties easily.

For instance, if you are a large agribusiness based in Toronto, exporting agriculture products to difficult-to-reach and risky markets like Libya, Syria, and Yemen, trading commodities can be challenging, especially when it involves high volumes and transactions, with a significant degree of volatility. It’s even more daunting to handle a range of commodities across grains, oilseeds, by-products, and specialty crops that service both feed and food markets, procured in one-half of the world and traded in another.

With an expanding footprint of operations in almost every continent in the world, the scale of operations can be an uphill task and even become unmanageable for organizations. So far, the agribusiness in Toronto deployed ERP systems that would break down tackling the burgeoning load of the growing business. Legacy ERP systems unequipped with the market and commodity-specific functionalities are responsible for loss in productivity. At the end of every month, the agribusiness would spend 5 to 8 days to close accounting books. A sizeable portion of work carried out manually on spreadsheets because their ERP system didn’t fully support features specific to trading in North American markets.

A multi-commodity Canadian agribusiness trading across continents, and many others like it, requires an advanced technological CTRM platform that can optimize their business processes and eliminate manual redundancies. A truly global and growing agribusiness needs a CTRM solution that can provide access to market-relevant data to make critical business decisions swiftly.

After implementing a CTRM solution, the agribusiness reduced their time to close end-of-month accounting books from 8 days to under 15 minutes.

The company also eliminated nearly 90% of its manual processes that required spreadsheets. It now spends less time extracting data manually, CTRM platform enables the agribusiness to bring all the information together in a few clicks.

Automation of redundant processes allowed the company to feed all the relevant information into the application at once and run multiple scenarios across commodities simultaneously and instantly. It enabled the company’s traders to compare more trade opportunities faster. The CTRM platform gave the traders more time to drill into results and rapidly analyze which trades were most profitable and why, so they make better decisions on future contracts.

Digitizing manual operations through implementing a CTRM solution not only increased efficiency but drove predictability and profitability as well. As the platform connected business units across the value chain, it enabled our Toronto-based trader to increase visibility and enhance the level of agility to respond to changing conditions in a volatile global marketplace.

As an upshot, CTRM aided in increasing the efficiency and reliability in its supply chain by planning and optimizing all aspects of the company’s multimodal logistics network. The platform linked Internal Movement Order (IMO) with Sales Movement Order (SMO), tagging respective sales orders with modes of transport and providing superior visibility into stock movement. Through this enhanced capability, the company was also able to optimize its stock adjustment activities while transloading, a common challenge in bulk transportation where businesses often incur additional terminal costs and delays.

An integral aspect of commodity trading as an agribusiness is vessel management. An integrated CTRM system enables traders, logistics, and finance people to look at the status of shipments in real-time. Planned Container Shipment (PCS) and Planned Bulk Shipment (PBS) solutions configured to the CTRM platform provide complete visibility into the movement of international stock shipments. This includes end-to-end vessel tracking, enhanced collaboration, and workflow management.

Having a deployed a comprehensive CTRM suite of solutions ensured optimal productivity at all stages of business, the agribusiness increased efficiency in PBS executions by 65% and PCS shipments by 50%.

Leveraging these applications of an adaptive CTRM suite, the company no longer manually extracts invoices from the system and emails them to finance for payment. The system sends automated alerts to finance on payments to be made, thereby enabling better internal controls.

Today, the Toronto-based agribusiness benefits from improved workflows and activity management escaping the shadows of an obsolete system. It shall continue to drive substantial gains in productivity and profitability, utilizing CTRM solutions which are quickly becoming indispensable for agribusinesses worldwide.

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Eka Software Solutions is a global leader in providing digital commodity management solutions for the agriculture industry, driven by cloud, blockchain, machine learning, and analytics.

To talk to Eka experts please write to info@eka1.com

global trade
Archives, Global Logistics, Global Shippers 101, Global Trade Daily

Global Trade and Logistics: What is the Need of the Hour?

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Global trade management at any given point of time, be it in the past, present or the future has to deal with the complexities of multiple languages, time zones, currencies, taxes, and modes of transport. There are several laws governing global trade, and these are highly complex and ever-changing. So how do organizations manage complexities and what would help?

Current scenario

Organizations must review and act on a heavy volume of regulatory information, which is often published on paper in varying formats and maintained in spreadsheets in organizations. All the complexity in global trade management drives a lot of risk. While these companies want to make the most profitable trades, they must balance counterparty and credit risk. Visibility into the entire trading value chain provides the key to making smarter, more profitable decisions. Raw materials and commodity businesses need accuracy at several levels.

Flow of Information

Companies need a complete view of budgeted and actual trade-related P&L across contracts, shipments, invoices, and payments. They need to ensure documents are accurate and comply with business agreements and have a clear appraisal of all order edits, shipment changes and related documentation.

Flow of goods

Companies need to track shipment and order related activities, manage all information related to the movement of the physical goods, and implement credit checks of all counterparties during contract negotiations, shipment, and invoicing.

Flow of cash

Good cash flow management is essential to profitable trading. Companies must diligently record the flow of letters of credit from creation to final presentment and record and track loans. They must manage resolution flows among multiple trading partners.

Comprehensive and modern solution

Traditionally, global trading organizations spend most of their time and resources manually screening shipments and updating them. The solution should ensure that the process is automated, enabling organizations to screen their shipments more often, more efficiently, and more accurately, ensuring the actual shipment status is reported to the required parties.

In addition, companies should be able to track and trace shipments from origin to destination and boost operational efficiencies. They are aware of delays and deviations and can overcome shipment delays. By comparing costs and charges, companies can determine the best voyage strategies.

These challenges are difficult to master without a comprehensive solution that is simple but has the capability to manage numerous complex global trade activities and is designed to save time and effort, enabling companies to focus on core work. A modern solution that would streamline the entire lifecycle of the supply chain – automating manual processes would help reduce the cost, time, and risks in quantifiable and auditable ways.

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Eka Software Solutions is a global leader in providing digital commodity and risk management solutions, driven by cloud, blockchain, machine learning and analytics.

To talk to Eka experts on trade and logistics solutions write to us on info@eka1.com or register for a free trial.

blockchain
Archives, Global Logistics, Global Trade Daily

How Does Blockchain Help the Agriculture Industry?

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How does blockchain help the agriculture industry? How can agriculture companies leverage blockchain technology to improve transparency, traceability, and food safety?

Well, the answer lies in the question!

Since blockchain is a distributed ledger, which works as a shared recording of data, primarily it will provide all members on the blockchain, visibility into the information stored, as well as the capability to update the ledger as it happens. This enables transparency and clarity and ensures that every member of the blockchain has the same information, thus removing possibilities of conflict and facilitating transparent transactions.

Traceability and Food Safety

Blockchain provides agricultural companies a way to track every step in the supply chain from farm to retailer. For example- in the case of meat, the retailer has all info at his fingertips including when the animal was slaughtered, when it was shipped, how long it was in transit and the shelf life of the meat.

This detailed level of traceability is very important in case of a food poisoning outbreak. Health professionals can quickly identify the source of contamination and address any issues immediately.

Traceability ensures that retailers know for a fact that the produce receiving pesticides is not classified as organic and sold for a premium.

Transparency & Visibility

Enabling farmers to work directly with retailers and removing various layers in the value chain are some of the direct advantages of using blockchain technology. With visibility, farmers can know which product is missing from retailers and immediately send a replenishment for it. Everything happens like clockwork with the blockchain embedded system.

If the question is how does blockchain help the communication between farmers and retailers; then the answer is that it eliminates several unwanted layers in the communications, and hence the orders are fulfilled faster and with more accuracy. In the act of removing unwanted layers in the value chain, the companies have complete visibility into demand for the farm’s products which in turn triggers faster fulfillment of orders resulting in increased sales for both retailers and farmers. Which is what is the current need of the hour.

Technology of the future

Overall, the current version of blockchain technology is just an inkling of things to come. The possibilities in smart farming, smart index-based agriculture insurance, and other data-driven innovations are set to transform the way agriculture companies get business done.

digital value chain
Archives, Global Logistics, Global Trade Daily

Get More from Your Digital Value Chain

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Business collaboration is all about uniting people, information, applications, and processes across an extended business network of consumers, partners, suppliers, distributors, and farmers, across all industries including agriculture, energy, metals, and mining. The idea is to break out of silos and connect to your partners in sourcing, supply, and procurement. Working as one is the new digital reality.

The challenge

Raw material and commodity businesses (from traders to supply chain to customers) across agriculture, energy, metals, and mining, need to communicate in real-time with their business partners to buy/sell, negotiate, manage supply chain operations and for financial settlements. There is a serious need to get more out of the digital value chain through automated workflows, custom dashboards, real-time chats with all counterparties, system integrations and analytics across the entire value chain, to solve business problems more efficiently.

Solutions that will help build digital value chains

-Partner onboarding: Digitalize and automate partner onboarding and reduce time spent on transactional processes.

-Contract management: Eliminate bottlenecks, improve efficiency and accountability by automating contract management workflows.

-Supply chain collaboration: Bring digitalization into your global value network and collaborate with your partners in the supply chain with superior visibility.

-Integration: A cloud-native solution designed to help you overcome collaboration silos and deliver a singular view of your business.

Connecting production, supply chain, and customers

Business collaboration ultimately means connecting to your network directly and unifying end-to-end processes. You can unify every step of the process by managing trading and risk, financial management, and digital supply chain with powerful enterprise applications that add a digital edge to enable faster decisions.

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Eka Software Solutions is a global leader in providing digital commodity management solutions, driven by cloud, blockchain, machine learning and analytics.

To talk to Eka experts please write to info@eka1.com

grain market
Archives, Global Trade Daily, International Trade

Challenges to Supply Chain in Grain Markets

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There is a growing concern among grain companies on the storage and transportation of huge harvests of grains. Australia, Canada, Ukraine, Russia, the United States, and Argentina are being very competitive in the grains market right now.

Oversupply tends to tighten the margins which reduce grain prices. It is a challenge for grain companies to cost-effectively store and move grains. You must maximize throughput at grain terminals which helps you to stay competitive in the global market. But there could be regional factors that affect the cost of grain production and logistics.

For instance, grain companies in Western Australia have traditionally suffered higher costs of grain production, as they must rely on imports of farm inputs and machinery. Similarly, companies in South Australia are also grappling with high (and often non-transparent) grain supply chain costs, which has prompted the local government to intervene and investigate. In fact, the Australian Export Grain Innovation Center estimates that supply chain costs make up almost 30% of the cost of grain production, storage, and transportation.

These regional factors are not exclusive to Australia. In Western Canada, for instance, bottlenecks in railway networks often delay grain deliveries by several months, and here too, the government has intervened with policy changes. In Ukraine, grain logistics costs are 40% to 50% higher as compared to other major grain-producing countries. Adding to the woes of grain handling companies are unforeseen events that can further choke the supply chain. For example, extended disputes between train drivers and their employers, disrupting supply chains in many countries.

Grain marketing companies have responded to these challenges by consolidating grain receival sites and trying to push more grain through a limited number of larger terminals. This helps them cut costs as they now must support fewer silos. However, costs saved here have not vanished from the supply chain. The cost pressures have merely shifted upstream as grain producers are now forced to transport stock over longer distances to reach those terminals and/or invest in on-farm storage. In fact, on-farm storage has increased steadily over the last few years in regions such as the USA, Australia, and Canada.

Investments in on-farm storage are enabling producers to hold on to their stocks instead of selling at lower prices in an oversupplied environment, thus shifting cost pressures right back down the supply chain towards the grain marketers. Some grain marketers are trying to break out of this vicious cycle by plowing back some of the money saved from consolidating grain terminals. For instance, GrainCorp started an initiative called “Project Regeneration” where they invested AUD 200mn into the grain supply chain to cut transportation costs for producers in the hopes of securing higher grain prices in the long run.

Steps to mitigate challenging times

In summary, it is evident that grain companies are staring at challenging times ahead, with regional factors outside their control expected to create more pressure in an already tough environment of low grain prices. Grain companies need to be ready to tackle these challenges and remove inefficiencies in their supply chains. However, the first step towards removing inefficiencies is to find potential areas of bottlenecks, and for that, one must have real-time visibility over grain supply chains.

Grain companies need to have software solutions that can record the origin of grains, store information about contracts, and track grain shipments – including quality parameters as the grain moves across the supply chain. Software should enable real-time visibility and help grain companies check the health of their supply chain in real-time, adjust/regrade stock levels as needed, optimize equipment paths within grain terminals, and increase efficiency and throughput.

Eka Software Solutions is a global leader in providing digital commodity management solutions for the agriculture industry, driven by cloud, blockchain, machine learning, and analytics.

To talk to Eka experts please write to info@eka1.com

financial
Archives, Banking, Global Trade Daily

Digital Technology for your Financial Reconciliation

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Businesses today have a clear need for a financial reconciliation management system that is fast, streamlined, and audit ready. Volatility and disruptions are the order of the day at the markets and the 2020 pandemic has added to the mix, resulting in a state of confusion.

In most businesses, the financial reconciliation process is a manual and a recurring task – a series of interconnected and complex processes that require the reconciliation process to be managed across general ledgers, sub-ledgers, and bank accounts. Limited resources, siloed data, and error-prone spreadsheets add to the complexity that compromise accuracy, control, and transparency – making the financial close process highly inefficient.

Today businesses need to:

Close faster

Eliminate unnecessary status update meetings to manually review account balances before closing the accounting cycle.

Streamline and centralize the close process

Get rid of error-prone spreadsheets and track reconciliation progress in real-time while identifying bottlenecks in the close process.

Be audit-ready

Achieve an accurate reconciliation that is fast, reduces risks and costs, and ensures regulatory compliance with a clear audit trail.

Improving agility and accuracy of financial processes requires better use of data and automation. There are significant tangible benefits to implementing modern technology that helps increase speed and agility, while ensuring accuracy and freeing up time for strategic and transformation efforts.

It is a known fact in the industry that companies spend too much time reconciling reports that are output by different systems. Furthermore, the reports need to be reconciled across all functions, including accounting, trades, stocks, commissions, and more.

To meet the existing challenge, there is a clear requirement for a solution that collects, blends, and analyzes data from disparate systems automatically. All manual reconciliation activities need to be replaced with a simple and seamless solution that will identify and avoid fraudulent activities as well as eliminate manual/system integration errors in journals.

This is why there are significant and tangible benefits to implementing modern technology that helps increase speed and agility while ensuring accuracy and freeing up time for strategic and transformation efforts.

What needs to be done?

If we are to analyze the problems at the root of it all and suggest a simple and direct solution, that would be automation. By automating repetitive tasks across broker, invoice, and stock reconciliations, users can continuously perform data reconciliation eliminating the risk of manual errors. Businesses need to connect all their disjointed systems and bring data to one place, ensuring that the users have complete access to this data in real-time, on-demand, whenever they need it.

Identify deviations and isolate root causes

Businesses need to streamline and centralize the close process by getting rid of error-prone spreadsheets and track reconciliation progress in real-time while identifying bottlenecks in the close process. They also need to be audit-ready by achieving an accurate reconciliation that is fast, reduces risks and costs, and ensures regulatory compliance with a clear audit trail.

Close faster with automation

As simple as automation sounds, financial reconciliation is inherently complex and layered, and businesses need to close faster by eliminating unnecessary status update meetings to manually review account balances before closing the accounting cycle. This includes:

-Broker reconciliation: Helps match trades from transaction or ledger systems with broker statements as well as identify breaks and differences between systems, modules, and reports. with ease. Replacing manual reconciliation activities reduces end-of-day/month time pressure.

-Invoice and stock reconciliation: The process includes streamlining reconciliations and increasing control by matching payments, adjustments, receipts, contracts, stocks, and commissions. Avoiding errors, monitoring breaks and breaches across entities while automating complex grouping and calculations to reconcile trades, stocks, commissions, across disparate systems

Ensure transparency through a foundation of connected data

It’s common for traders, risk managers, finance specialists, and supply chain managers to spend inordinate amounts of time reconciling reports that are output by different systems. The time they spend manually reconciling reports could be better spent analyzing data to help make better decisions.

Despite having multiple tools and systems, organizations, both large and small across multiple industries, still struggle with a very manual, time-consuming, and tedious process of a day end and a month-end close. An automated solution could save huge amounts of resource power, reduce manual errors, and bring in tremendous process efficiencies.

Way forward

The faster pace in the industry today means that the businesses need to gain a more comprehensive and accurate view of the business. A single source of truth, greater visibility, and control over operations and risks essentially allow the business to gain from improved collaboration, data accuracy, and consistency throughout the organization. How fast can you move to automated and continuous financial reconciliation? In days? minutes? This is the question that needs to be answered.

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Learn how a leading sugar company reduced monthly reconciliation time from 15 days to a few minutes

For more details reach out to an Eka expert by writing to info@eka1.com

global trade
Archives, Global Logistics, Global Trade Daily, Stories

Global Trade and Logistics: Adapting to Constantly Evolving Needs

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Global trade managers have to deal with the complexities of multiple languages, time zones, currencies, taxes, and modes of transport. There are several laws governing global trade, and these are highly complex and ever-changing. So how do organizations manage these complexities and how can you get a competitive edge?

Current scenario

The complexity in global trade management exposes you to a lot of risks. While companies want to make the most profitable trades, it is important to balance counterparty and credit risk. Organizations must review and act on large volumes of regulatory information, which is often published on paper in varying formats and maintained in spreadsheets throughout the organization. Visibility into the entire trading value chain provides the key to making smarter, more profitable decisions. Raw materials and commodity businesses need accuracy int three key areas:

1. Flow of Information

Companies need a complete view of budgeted and actual trade-related P&L across contracts, shipments, invoices, and payments. They need to ensure documents are accurate and comply with business agreements and have a clear appraisal of all order edits, shipment changes, and related documentation.

2. Flow of goods

Companies need to track shipment and order related activities, manage all information related to the movement of the physical goods, and implement credit checks of all counterparties during contract negotiations, shipment, and invoicing.

3. Flow of cash

Good cash flow management is essential to profitable trading. Companies must diligently record the flow of letters of credit from creation to final presentment and record and track loans. They must manage resolution flows among multiple trading partners.

A Comprehensive and Modern Solution

Traditionally, global trading organizations spend most of their time and resources manually screening shipments and updating them. The solution should ensure that the process is automated, enabling organizations to screen their shipments more often, more efficiently, and more accurately, ensuring the actual shipment status is reported to the required parties.

In addition, companies should be able to track and trace shipments from origin to destination and boost operational efficiencies. They are aware of delays and deviations and can overcome shipment delays. By comparing costs and charges, companies can determine the best voyage strategies.

These challenges are difficult to master without a comprehensive solution that is simple but has the capability to manage numerous complex global trade activities and is designed to save time and effort, enabling companies to focus on core work. A modern solution that would streamline the entire lifecycle of the supply chain – automating manual processes would help reduce the cost, time, and risks in quantifiable and auditable ways.

Eka Software Solutions is a global leader in providing digital commodity management solutions driven by Cloud, Blockchain, Machine Learning and Analytics.

CTRM
Archives, Global Trade Daily, Software

5 main benefits of modern CTRM for agriculture industry

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Commodity traders in agriculture companies face these 5 main business challenges:

1. Cash management

2. Risk/hedging effectiveness

3. Operational/supply chain efficiencies

4. Accurate & timely market intelligence

5. Regulatory compliance

Limitations of traditional commodity management:

Using monolithic CTRM systems results in data-siloes with no real-time connection between procurement, logistics, and commodity trading. Manually inputting data into spreadsheets takes a long time and often results in errors due to human mistakes. With spreadsheets, you don’t get real-time insights which inhibit you from making on the spot decisions based on market changes.

Capabilities of modern CTRM:

Modern CTRM aggregates data from systems across the value chain including CTRM, ERP, accounting, and spreadsheets. You can analyze the impact of dynamic market movements quickly, identify areas of opportunity or concern, and plan the next steps accordingly. It uses the latest analytics tools, including AI and machine learning.

How modern CTRM benefits the agriculture industry:

1. Easier cash flow management – Using all available information about payments – both current and historical data – you can analyze payment history and behavior patterns to determine estimated payment dates. You can predict projected cash flow based on payment terms and analyze scenarios based on shipment start, middle, and end dates to evaluate various possibilities.

2. Effective risk management – Analyze real-time data quickly to stay on top of risk drivers. You can set up alerts to take immediate action when risk limits are breached.

3. Improve operational efficiency – With information available across the value chain, tracking of inventory at each location, and maintaining the data becomes easier. You can match available time slots for expected deliveries to vehicle availability and reduce wait times and queues.

4. Gain real-time marketing intelligence – Create notifications to alert you when market shifts occur. Having real-time data like weather forecasts from Accuweather and aWhere or market data from Refinitiv and S&P Platts gives you an edge over the competition.

5. Adhere to compliance – Automation makes it easy to comply with regulations of trade repositories. You can take prompt actions based on user-defined alerts across geographies and asset classes.

This article originally appeared on EKA.com. Republished with permission.