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

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

commodities
Archives, Global Trade Daily, International Trade

5 Business Issues Facing Agricultural Commodities Companies

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Let’s learn more about 5 frequently asked questions on common issues that affect not only agri-commodities companies but span almost all commodities: managing complex supply chains, over-use of spreadsheets, growing amounts of data, analytics, and mobility.

1) Is there a better way to solve critical business problems than relying on multiple systems and spreadsheets?

Most commodities companies have multiple software systems in place to manage commodity trading, risk, procurement, and supply chains. This could be due to an accumulation of systems from mergers and acquisitions, especially in agriculture as many of the large ags traders are looking to gain more control over their supply chains by expanding their global footprint.

They may also have a separate solution for each product, department, or geographic region. However, when data is kept in multiple siloed systems, companies often turn to spreadsheets to connect the dots. Manually entering data into excel is not timely, accurate, or auditable, and it forces companies to base critical decisions on the hope that an individual didn’t make any errors. Not to mention it can be expensive, like when an employee at Deutsche Bank reportedly sent a hedge fund client $6 billion on accident due to a ‘fat-finger’ mistake.

Luckily the company was able to recover the money, but these types of errors can be easily avoided. Rather than take the risk of costing your company millions, or billions, of dollars, commodities companies should adopt an integrated solution that covers the entire value chain and allows users to focus on data analysis instead of data collection. By aggregating and analyzing data all in one system, users can optimize decision making and gain a competitive advantage.

2) How can we get more analytics and reporting from our existing systems?

Commodities companies need to be able to perform predictive analytics in addition to slicing and dicing their data. In order to make better business decisions in today’s complex and volatile markets, analytics need to be in the hands of business users, not the domain of IT and specialists. Using an advanced analytics tool along with an existing solution, such as CTRM software, ERP, or other transaction systems, allows you to bring together all of your data from different sources, discover new insights, and investigate hidden risks faster.

3) Is there a Business Intelligence tool specific to the commodities markets?

Generic business intelligence (BI) tools typically require too much customization to be useful for commodity-specific issues. It can be very costly, both in dollars and time, to add all the functionality needed to manage commodities to a generic system, and in the end, you will probably still need to use another system to handle certain tasks.

There are solutions built specifically for the commodities markets that agriculture, energy, metals, and manufacturing companies should consider instead of a generic BI tool. This will enable them to get the relevant information they need to solve the most important business issues without having to hunt down the answers from separate departments or solutions.

4) How can we better understand and identify commodity risk and opportunities across the supply chain?

Having visual representations of your business makes it much easier to recognize risks and opportunities. For an agriculture company, having a transparent view from farmer to stockyard to processor to producer, all the way to the end-user, will allow you to make the best decisions for buying, transporting, storing, and selling commodities. For other commodity trading companies, it is critical to be able to view the entire transaction life cycle, from trading, risk management, and processing, to scheduling, logistics, accounting, and settlement. Using sophisticated visualization tools to get an accurate view across an entire deal lifecycle, users can identify commodity risk and exposures as well as gain insights into opportunities to improve efficiencies and profit margins.

5) Are there CTRM systems built for mobile?

As more people are conducting business on the go, traveling to customer or supplier sites, or working from a remote location, it is no longer acceptable to have to wait until you are in the office to access data and make decisions. To get the most value out of a CTRM software solution it needs to have all the functionality of a desktop system built in.

Traders, risk managers, and executives can maximize productivity with the ability to perform key functions anytime, anywhere. With mobile apps, traders can enter deals and hedge effectively, even while out of the office. Risk managers can manage risk across the organization and executives can monitor key performance indicators at any time. The ability to react quickly to new deal information and communicate this information to the relevant people in an organization rapidly, accurately, and conveniently, provides companies with a competitive advantage. Using mobile apps eliminates the need for multiple follow-up emails and telephone communications that can be inaccurate and delay contract settlement.

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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

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.