Power of Analytics and BI in Commodities

The stock equity, investment, commodity and trading markets are complex, competitive, and have many governments and international regulations and compliance. Customer demands, market movement, and changing dynamics due to pandemics, unanticipated shifts and trends have contributed to managing a business in the commodity industry. Customers are more cultivated than ever, and they demand measurable results to protect their investments and provide timely suggestions and reporting to make correct business decisions. These companies have to manage growing volumes of data and customers and industry and government regulations regarding data privacy that control trade and information disclosure.

The commodities industry has always been significant in the data business. Physical trades that are hedged with financial derivatives create thousands of data points, and these data points represent multiple decisions to be made. All of this data drives complexity in decision-making. Companies need to be best equipped to pull the available data and make the best decisions to gain a competitive advantage. The typical CTRM software system is no longer adequate for companies exposed to commodity market risk. At the same time, the ability to capture the data surrounding each transaction or engagement is still required in CTRM software; that alone is not enough. They need systems that do more.

BaffleSol’s Commodity Management Solution is powered by Microsoft’s Power BI platform, hosted in Azure delivers your power of reports right away. Some examples are:

• Contract analysis (purchase, sales, futures, forex)
• Sales analysis (revenue, costs and margin)
• Volume growth by segments, business network, geographies
• Position and Risk Management
• Mark-to-Market value
• Back Office Performance
• Cash Flow Forecast

When a nicely configured solution is used, it provides numerous benefits and allows the business to:

• integrate with other business management tools like SharePoint, Office 365, and other non-Microsoft products like Hadoop, Google Analytics, SAP, Salesforce, and MailChimp
• have data security. Power BI ensures data is safe, offering fine controls on accessibility both internally and externally
• perform root cause analysis, identify trends and forecast results
• have a flexible reporting to produce standard, new and ad-hoc reports, and track key performance indicators (KPIs)
• provide self-serve reports and dashboards for teams, divisions, and global locations across a large number of users
• manage critical government compliance to protect confidential and private data
• identify trends to determine where the market is going and where the trades are happening, anticipate market share, reach customers, understand profits against volumes, identify credit risks, and manage payment consolidations

Microsoft Power BI is infused with machine learning capabilities. Hence, it can spot patterns in data and use those patterns to run “what if” scenarios, helping users generate forecasts and prepare themselves to meet future demand. It can address the challenges of a complex business and, at the same time, provide simple, comprehensive data integration and reporting tools to ensure that the business can identify issues before they become problems.

With the perfect team that can provide digital commodity management solutions driven by cloud, machine learning and analytics and help you evaluate, plan, and configure Microsoft Power BI for your commodities business, contact us for more information or queries.