Sometimes a great opportunity comes along and you need to move fast, but you cannot move without ensuring the opportunity meets all your business objectives. You have a dilemma. You need to take the time to ensure the trade fits, but you cannot take too long or you risk missing out. What do you do?

Say you are a crude oil trader navigating volatile energy markets. While attending a conference, you learn that a cargo of oil has just become available due to a cancelled commitment. The shipment is scheduled for delivery in two months. The price is attractive under current market conditions and the seller is eager to close the deal quickly to reduce his risk.

How do you decide whether to take the deal?

The problem with traditional commodity trading and risk management is that the information you need to make informed decisions often resides in different, disconnected systems. This data is often incompatible, and many reports run at scheduled times each day. Determining whether or not to take the deal requires contacting your team, running reports and analyzing data.

1. You email your team about the opportunity.

2. Once they read the email, you have a follow-up call discussing what you need from them to evaluate the deal.

• You ask the Credit team to ensure you have credit available for the purchase. You do.
• You ask the Market Risk team to evaluate the purchase to ensure it won’t breach risk thresholds.

3. Now you wait. You must wait because the Risk team needs to evaluate exposure and they need to run the end-of-day report to assess exposure.

4. The next day, with the end-of-day report in hand, the Market Risk team has analysts run various scenarios to ensure the purchase complies with risk policies under various possible situations.

5. Finally, the Risk team signs off on the deal and you are free to find the seller – but a day has passed.

6. You lose the deal because the seller found another buyer while you were evaluating the deal.

Digital Commodity Management ties all the systems in your supply chain together, eliminating data collection delays and expediting decision making. So, what happens with Digital CM?

1. When you learn about the opportunity, you open Eka’s mobile platform to see if you need the cargo.

2. Still using Eka’s platform, you check credit limits and exposure for the delivery period to ensure you won’t breach any limits if you make the purchase.

3. Using Eka’s advanced analytics, you can also analyze sales opportunities for the cargo, so you know the most profitable options for selling the product.

4. At this point, only 30 minutes have passed, and you can have your team simulate the trade to refine shipping and other secondary costs.

5. In minutes, you view the team’s reports on Eka’s mobile platform and confirm that the deal is a profitable one.

6. You clinch the deal an hour after learning about it, and a full day before your slower competitors.

The true value of digital commodity management lies in how quickly you can make decisions. Because all your systems are connected, and on cloud, you can access all the data in your supply chain anytime and anywhere. You don’t have to call someone and have them run a report; you just run it. You don’t have to manually aggregate data; it’s all on one platform. When you need an answer, you simply access Eka’s platform and run the analysis. It’s quick, simple, and enables you to make better, fact-based decisions faster.

Watch this short webinar to learn more about real-time alerts and analytics on the go.

For more info get in touch with us at info@ekaplus.com