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