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Scale More Effectively with Business Process Outsourcing for Your CTRM Platform

Has the velocity and variety of commodities trades your company processes outpaced your ability to document and reconcile settlements? As your business scales, you need to devote more resources.  Even off-the-shelf tools for converting .pdf invoices, delivery reports, and other documents into tabular formats require manual steps that growing companies cannot spare the personnel to perform.  

Learn how Value Creed’s specialized settlement reconciliation services for industry-leading CTRM platforms can enable you to scale more efficiently.

Fast, Accurate Trade Matching and Documentation

Our Application and Industry Expertise Extends Your IT Capabilities

Many growth-stage companies find that Value Creed’s CTRM Settlement Reconciliation solution gives them the additional capacity they need during this hectic period.

4 Value of Business Process Outsourcing for Settlement Reconciliation

Affordability

Allocate resources for expansion, not administration

Expertise

Human understanding combined with robust data analysis

Automation

Eliminate manual overrides and workarounds

Integration

Collate, collect, and store data in formats your apps can use

“Our sophisticated parsing software automates much of the tedious data formatting and extraction required, and our experienced team members develop and apply functionality that conforms and integrate with your applications.”

Value Creed

Services Tailored to Your Goals

 

To make the most efficient use of your budget, Value Creed consults with supervisors and end-users to determine your most pressing settlement and reconciliation needs using this process. This ensures BPO opportunities are identified and aligned with your business goals.  

  • Audit existing manual processes for collecting and calculating data
  • Define the data required for back-office system reporting
  • Analyze bottlenecks and error sources for each users and workflow
  • Prioritize repetitive tasks and align workflows to your business goals
  • Agree on priorities and a business process outsourcing program
  • Compare invoices generated by CTRM systems with those received from vendors
  • Identify and reconcile differences in key attributes like volume, price, freight and broker fees, counterparty, and bill of lading and more

Check Out Our Other Business Process Outsourcing Resources

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Commodity trading and risk management companies are facing greater internal capacity restraints than ever in day-to-day operations. By bringing CTRM expertise on board, business leaders can help avoid seemingly endless issues for business users stuck handling routine or complicated tasks in a never-ending backlog.

Business process outsourcing solves these challenges in a number of key ways.

What Is Business Process Outsourcing (BPO)?

Business process outsourcing utilizes our staff with a deep knowledge of CTRM services to handle complicated, routine, or custom tasks for a client’s business. BPO members know their processes inside and out, enabling them to run vital services and handle crucial processes without disruption.

With decades-worth of experience, BPO staff know the types of issues that arise for a given service, process, or application. It’s this deep well of insights that allows BPO teams to meet the most pressing challenges in CTRM software.

BPO members know their processes inside and out, enabling them to run vital services and handle crucial processes without disruption.

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Client Challenges In Commodity Management Software

Clients typically run into one or more particular issues when running their business. These include three main areas of concern. Now let’s see how BPO meets and overcomes these challenges.

Internal Capacity Restraints

When implementing new processes, in-house teams need additional support to meet goals beyond their current capacity.

Post-Upgrade Communications

BPO facilitates better communication between front, middle, and back office staff during migration from an existing screen to a new server.

Burdensome Routine Tasks

Delegating your routine work to a BPO team allows your in-house talent to handle the most vital CTRM tasks

Case Study: Business Process Outsourcing For Oil & Gas

For one regional petroleum storage and wholesaling company, invoice matching had become a critical yet burdensome task. Each PDF invoice needed to be checked before that information was relayed to the customer.

Value Creed’s BPO services not only handled this task for their back office, but also scheduled shipments and tracked them across the pipeline, recording inspection fees and other related data along the way. 

Through BPO, Value Creed takes the burden off the back office by becoming the back office. To see how we did it in more detail, get our free case study below.

Explore Our Client Case Studies

See How BPO Made The Difference For this Petroleum Company

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How Deep CTRM Experience Makes The BPO Difference

Invoice matching is just one of the tasks that requires deep CTRM experience to complete successfully. It’s not just an accounting task—a detailed understanding of the business process allows for accurate payment matching.

Business process outsourcing also relies on cooperation. A mutual understanding between the client and the BPO team allows for seamless collaboration. With this trust established, our team becomes an extended arm of your business.

With mutual trust and understanding established, our BPO team becomes an extended arm of your business.

Leverage CTRM Business Process Outsourcing
for Common, Yet Critical Tasks

CTRM Settlement Reconciliation

To operate at peak effectiveness all your trades and transactions must be settled, matched, and transferred between your CTRM and ERP systems quickly and accurately.

Read More

Month End Closing

Cash flow issues arise when customers take as many as 20 days to come up with invoices. BPO teams send invoices out faster so they get paid, allowing clients to close out the month with greater peace of mind and more revenue.

Natural Gas Scheduling and Invoicing

Logistics and Back Office operations are often highly-repetitive, such as Electronic Bulletin Board (EBB) scheduling, where employees nominate gas flow into the pipes. A BPO team can handle the nomination process, as well as ensure invoices match the actual volumes moved, providing greater accuracy in the CTRM system.

CTRM & ERP Reconciliation

Most commodity trading and risk management companies will have multiple systems for storing and managing data. BPO teams have experience with cross-platform reconciliations, ensuring accuracy between the source of data and the destination system

Risk Analysis

Our BPO experts have over 35 years of collective Middle Office and Market Risk experience; they’re ready and able to assist with your Risk Monitoring, Assessment, Reporting, and Mitigation efforts.

Go beyond your in-house team’s capacity limits by bringing CTRM expert insights into your processes. Here are some of the ways Value Creed approaches BPO for our most valuable clients.

Value Creed clients often reach out to request additional or custom services. We are always available to identify automation opportunities, leveraging both our technical expertise and background in process management to create best practices.

Our BPO approach to CTRM services is unique. We have the ability to make the right decisions on operational effectiveness, leading to reduced costs of ownership for businesses over time.

If you’re ready to start outsourcing your business processes to a trusted team of CTRM experts, get in touch today and see how your company can overcome the challenges for the future.

Ready to Get started with BPO?

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If there’s one historic certainty in the commodities industry, it’s that everything is uncertain.

This is particularly true today, when an ever-changing business landscape of technology and geopolitics can present unique challenges to those vying to stay competitive. Your CTRM application is a business-critical platform, yet due to its complex nature, finding a reliable and reasonable run-operate support option poses a deceptively simple quandary: Do you outsource, or not?

If a business decides not to outsource, they will often try one of two options:

Option 1: Hire an individual who is already experienced in the application with a high level of capability.

Option 2: Hire and train a recruit with minimal CTRM experience and train them up to the challenge.

The problem with this binary choice is that neither scenario is ideal. Here’s why.

Hiring for Experience

Perhaps the first option seems the more viable of the two. You hire a staff member who already knows the application inside and out, with experience in day-to-day CTRM requirements. On a scale of one to 10, their application capability ranks a 9 or 10.

This person may start out strong, but their capability will likely dull over time due to their myopic focus on your internal use case. They will start to lose the broad frame of reference native to consulting practices, focus on the status quo and, as a result, recommend fewer optimizations for your users. When this happens, user satisfaction – from the front office to the back office – tends to wane for both your experts and users alike.

Building from Scratch

With that in mind, perhaps you decide to avoid the expense and eroding efficiency of a ready-made expert, instead opting to train a specialist internally from a “blank slate.” With the right training, this raw recruit could learn the application precisely the way your company uses it. In turn, you could call upon them to build your own dedicated application support team from the ground up.

While it might seem like a cost savings on the surface, this method is also expensive. Missteps and false starts aside, as your staff’s capability increases with time and experience, these individuals will become highly attractive to consulting agencies that look for the same, rare skill set you invested in them. With the lure of higher pay and benefits elsewhere, this may lead to large amounts of turnover and a never-ending cycle of: recruit, hire, train, lose—recruit, hire, train, lose, repeat.

Now Consider The 3rd Option—Value Creed’s Outsourcing for CTRM Run Operate Support

This leads us back to our original question: Is it better to outsource your CTRM services, or not? As we’ve explored, full-time staffing, whether expert or newcomer, presents a host of challenges that are often problematic or resource-intensive in a way that still doesn’t provide the kind of consideration your business needs.

Value Creed enables you to flexibly define your CTRM Run Operate support needs so your team is optimized, not replaced.

We give you the best of both worlds. You are guaranteed world-class expertise, the effective “Navy Seals” of the industry, that will not decline with time. We continually invest in our experts so they remain innovative in the application across a variety of industries. Plus, you’re not hiring one person across all capabilities front office to the back office – with experience where it matters most to your business.

Our team has deep competency in all of the following functional, business process and technical operations areas of CTRM applications so you can rely on one partner as your business needs evolve.

Variety Of Talent

Accelerating Value, While Lowering Overhead Costs

Your CTRM solution requires top talent from various disciplines. They’re all here – dedicated specifically to making you successful in a unique approach enabling you to tap into the knowledge workers you need, only when you need them.

Risk
Credit
Trading
Logistics
Accounting
Technical

Why Traditional Consulting Falls Short

Traditional consulting usually takes the form of either a per-project basis or a set number of hours towards a goal or task. The former is normally expensive and has minimal flexibility, while the latter has no guarantee of matching your particular problem to a provider with the necessary skills.

Both approaches are ultimately a losing proposition, and neither is designed to support your organizational needs in a way that is both cost-effective and efficient.

You Need Another Way. We Have It.

Value Creed has a business philosophy that is at the core of everything we do. How we are different, what we can do for your business—all of it can be summed up by the five business pillars that best define us:

  • Recruit & Retain Top Talent: Our team is the foundation of everything we do. We find the most knowledgeable experts in the world and leverage their peerless talent to your advantage.
  • Drive Innovation: A company in an ever-changing business environment cannot afford to be reactionary. We strive to ensure that your business has the on-demand tools it needs to become a trend-setter, never a trend-follower.
  • Extend for Excellence: Aligning your CTRM application to your business needs does not always conform to your available bandwidth. We take the guesswork out of integrating front-office operations to back-end systems management. No excuses, just results.
  • CTRM Differentiation: We optimize your CTRM at every point that it impacts your business, ensuring that that we fully coordinate with your executive, business, and technology teams to differentiate you from your competition.
  • Quantify the Results: We provide 24/7/365 access and visibility on every aspect of what we do for you. From system health to addressed anomalies, business reviews to recommended improvements, we seek to build solid business relationships with every deployment.

Signs That Value Creed is Right For Your Business
Of course, business needs vary greatly across the industry spectrum, but if any (or all) of these scenarios sound familiar, perhaps it’s time to outsource your CTRM application support:

  1. A change in the trajectory of your users’ satisfaction. There’s a declining level of
    satisfaction amongst your user base that indicates a lack of innovation, a lack of
    attentiveness, or misaligned priorities amongst your support team.
  2. A shift in your company’s business model with regard to commodity, complexity or size.
    Suddenly you find yourself in need of a different type of support for your CTRM solution.
  3. Speed of CTRM improvements. You’ve determined that you need to change the velocity of how your system is supported, and need to get things up and moving fast.

CTRM Managed Services Priced Right

Our CTRM Managed Services are priced to be competitive, while still giving you access to the best in the business. Keep your team focused on scoping new requirements and managing high-value requirements – leave the repetitive, day-to-day management to us.

Recommended: CTRM End of Day Reporting

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