How To Proactively Overcome Reporting Integration Failure for CTRM Platforms

You may be able to manage and maintain your CTRM infrastructure, application enhancements, and reporting functions in-house, but at what cost? Could your employees be better deployed?  Can you effectively allocate the time and cost to each task? Do you know the status of each project in real-time?

Value Creed has a better way to ensure you maintain oversight of your CTRM process without the investment required to bring in or develop expertise in-house. When you engage Value Creed to handle your CTRM functions, you get the services of a dedicated project manager to serve as a both a lookout and a navigator to safeguard your company’s interests and direct our implementation team’s activities on your behalf.

Transparency

A recent project for a high-profile client illustrates our typical workflow. Based on client instructions, Value Creed calculated the hours spent and achievements logged over previous weeks. We noted time devoted to training, monitoring, and managed services, and presented them in an intuitive dashboard. 

To deliver greater insights and granularity, we broke these figures for each day and charted the data so emerging trends could be identified. Early in the process, the managed services team logged significant time training to learn the client’s specific platform, workflows and reporting requirements. As the project progressed and our personnel became less dependent on the client’s team to explain processes, training time diminished. Conversely, as our employees became proficient with the client’s system, proportionately greater time devoted to value-adding project management and monitoring activities. These improvements are clearly delineated on the dashboard.

Coordination with CTRM/ETRM Vendors

Value Creed’s managed services includes 24/7 report monitoring from two separate time zones to ensure comprehensive coverage and fast response to any failures. Occasionally an issue will arise during our monitoring of end-of-day reporting. When this happens, our team communicates and works with the vendor until the issue is resolved.

As with the client in our case study, you will receive a valuation spreadsheet several times per day detailing key metrics:

  • Runtimes
  • Errors Encountered and Corrective Measures Taken
  • Task Completion Timetable
  • Server Status
  • Queue Exception Log
  • Intraday Exposure, Holdings, Valuations, Trades, etc.

Example Value Creed Run Smart™ Managed Services Client Dashboard

This dashboard is customized to the needs of every client to ensure daily, transparent tracking and reporting of key KPI’s.  Tangentially, this report is supported by End-Of-Day logs and other materials in addition to the high-level dashboard view.

Comfort and Confidence

Value Creed’s open communication and ownership of our work responsibilities gives you the peace of mind of knowing that we are hard at work keeping your systems operable and your maintenance and reporting on schedule. Our transparent, accountable project management includes constantly vigilant leaders who see each repair ticket through to a successful resolution. It also means passing along any insights we glean from working with your team on your projects. Knowledge sharing makes us all smarter, more trusting, and more innovative, as we develop solutions that save time, money, and aggravation.

Contact Value Creed and let’s discuss how our transparent, accountable project management keeps you in control while alleviating the hassle of maintaining hardware, integrating applications, and updating reports.

Value Creed's Run Smart Managed Services Start at $3,500 a month

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Delivering Quality Client Services in a Dual-Time-Zone Model

It is the aim of the Value Creed team to outperform the rest by delivering on the promise to distinguish its #CTRM Managed Services by outperforming the competition – even the status quo – by providing excellence.  In this three-part series, the team will step back and share why our services are superior in dimensions beyond technical aptitude.  In this post, the team dives into the role of the “Client Director.” This role is the key to success for long-term partnerships for managed services customers.

When IT teams and business users arrive at work to find price inconsistencies and incorrect reporting from the previous session’s end-of-day processes, it exposes companies to unnecessary risk and limits opportunities for maximized profit. The firm cannot conduct business with confidence until the matter gets sorted out, and that could potentially take the better part of the trading day. Unfortunately, most companies in the commodities trading sphere find themselves short of both the time and expertise they need to deal with CTRM platform malfunctions.

But what if you could rely on an extension of your staff to constantly monitor your CTRM system both during the trading day and overnight? 

Dual Time Zones – Linked by Seamless Communication, Led by Value Creed’s Dedicated Client Directors 

Value Creed does exactly just that, with its unique-in-the-industry dual-time-zone managed services solution. Our dedicated client director is instrumental in providing the personalized, immediate attention our clients need when problems arise overnight. Serving as a project manager liaising with Value Creed’s global team, the client director serves as our client’s representative, interfacing with our global team. 

A recent incident illustrates how the client director assumes control in order to coordinate and ensure problem-solving initiatives are carried out in a timely manner.  Here’s the step-by-step process and benefit of the dual timezone model of managed services. 

  1. By bridging Value Creed’s assets in two hemispheres, the Client Director works with technicians in our Hyderabad, India office as they monitor clients’ end-of-day processes and overnight reporting functions. 
  2. When the team encountered a product price that could not be verified it was unable to determine the validity, they reached out to the Client Director for assistance in issue remediation. Had this anomaly – or any other problem in the run/operate/report cycle – occurred during the trading day, it would have monopolized Clients’ on-staff IT professionals’ time. Since it occurred after-hours, it would have wreaked havoc on the next day’s opening and operating procedures had the firm not partnered with a service provider working in dual time zones.
  3. Value Creed’s client director immediately took charge. She made it clear that client satisfaction was the only objective, and to achieve it, the team would need to go the extra mile until the issue was resolved.
  4. The Client was provided with complete documentation of the issue was provided to the client to minimize the risk of future issues 

Delivering the Modern Approach to CTRM Managed Services

Value Creed’s Hyderabad experts’ early detection and understanding of the potential consequences of the questionable price bought our team critical hours in which to solve the problem. Under our client director’s direction, our Hyderabad Run Smart™ crew works on the system malfunctions as soon as data appears corrupted, processes shut down, or reports fail to initiate. In the case of the mystery price, the Hyderabad team was unable to isolate the problem and interfaced with their US-based colleagues.

Acting under full authority, our project manager marshaled Value Creed’s resources on both continents. Thanks to her strong leadership, our global and US teams work together seamlessly to alleviate the most pressing issues, resetting servers, clearing job queues, and initiating repair tickets. Value Creed’s onshore client support manager contacted the company to apprise its IT team of the system failure and advised on the next steps for moving forward to resolve the issue.

Value Creed escalated the issue until it could isolate the cause and implement a long-term solution. Leveraging people, power and technology in both offices, Value Creed resolved the problem, documented the solution, and closed the case in the time it would have taken other CTRM support firms to discover that something was wrong. This result was made possible by our client director’s refusal to accept less than a complete solution. She made the critical decisions necessary and initiated the processes that ultimately delivered a quick resolution and exceeded the client’s expectations. 


Seamless Teamwork

With a knowledgeable and, committed client director looking out for the Client’s vested interests, Value Creed’s US- and Global-based teams have perfected a collaborative workflow that assures overnight  problems are addressed quickly and solutions are expedited:

  • The Global team identifies an issue and logs a ticket.
  • A client director will formulate a problem-solving strategy, assign resources, and oversee the execution of workflow to resolve the problem.
  • If the Global team cannot solve the issue in short order, a Value Creed team member in the US will be assigned.
  • The US team will gather information from the client and inform them of remedial action taken.
  • With commodities professionals and technical experts in both timezones, Value Creed delivers around-the-clock collaborative solutions at a lower cost than our competitors.

Ready to learn how the dual-time-zone protection can save your company money and maximize your productive trading window? Contact Value Creed today.

Value Creed's Run Smart Managed Services Start at $3,500 a month

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#5: Keeping Value At Risk (VaR) Reports On Track

Following our previous post on handling outlier data, our 5-part series on the benefits of Run Smart™ CRTM managed services from Value Creed concludes with a discussion of analyzing and managing Value at Risk.

Value at risk (VaR) is one of the most useful risk calculations, as it allows for a consistent analysis of positions and price movements for a given portfolio across time.  By knowing with 95 percent confidence, for instance, that a position or portfolio’s predicted daily outcome will not exceed an established VaR limit, risk managers can make more informed decisions about whether to recommend that traders maintain, liquidate, or increase their holdings in a certain commodity, location, and time period. 

Whether basing VaR calculations on historical price data, the covariance/variance method, or a Monte Carlo simulation, VaR enables commodities traders to visualize how observable market inputs such as current and forward prices, implied and historical volatility, interest rates, exchange rates, etc. affect their risk position.

Consequences of Weak VaR Reporting and Analysis

The Run Smart™ Integrated Solution for Reliable Intraday VaR Reporting

Value Creed’s integrated CRTM managed service platform, Run Smart™, is easily customizable to any business model. The platform streamlines user-configurable trade rules and risk-management policies for enterprises at any link in the commodities value chain. Run Smart™ interfaces with downstream reporting software and upstream transaction-reporting and data sources. Its reporting capabilities capture, collect, and present real-time market updates, physical stores and portfolio positions. Users can isolate VaR (as well as P&L, credit, and other metrics) by asset, commodity, region, trader, and other inputs. 

Every night, Run Smart™ evaluates the calculated VaR for the portfolio or selected segment with the confidence interval, loss limit, and timeframe established by the user. Breaches are highlighted, so risk managers can reevaluate their position and make adjustments to contain risk.

The platform maintains a record of daily price and VaR fluctuations throughout the timeframe and confidence level the user desires. As asset values change, VaR changes. Risk managers can compare all variables from day to day, plot moving averages, and use statistical methods to spot profitable trends. Understanding and limiting Value at Risk is a key ingredient in profitable commodities management. 

Want to Know More?

Contact Value Creed for a demonstration of how Run Smart™ technology can help your organization make better, data-driven decisions.

This post wraps up Value Creed’s series on the importance of professional managed services for CTRM/ETRM platforms. Read the other four installments to get the full picture:

#1 Overcoming Data Integration Breakdowns For Seamless Daily Starts

#2 How To Proactively Overcome Reporting Integration Failure for CTRM Platforms

#3 Cloud & Database Monitoring & Maintenance

#4 What Do I Do about “Crazy Crude Prices” – Be Prepared for the Unexpected

Value Creed's Run Smart Managed Services Start at $3,500 a month

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#4 What Do I Do about “Crazy Crude Prices:” Be Prepared for the Unexpected

After our previous post discussing the advantages of moving your database to cloud-based SQL Server, our series, 5 Reasons for Choosing Run Smart™ CTRM Managed Services, continues with Part 4. Today we write about how to ensure your system can handle unexpected outlier prices and other data.

We may never live to see crude oil prices tradeat negative $37 again, like we did in mid-April, but it is safe to say energy commodities will continue to fluctuate wildly over both the short and the long term. While the perfect storm that hit American crude futures may be a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence, it did expose weaknesses in several commodities trading risk management (CTRM) systems.

Many producers, refiners,, traders, investment funds, airlines, and major consumers of oil found themselves unable to process this unexpected data, creating errors in their reports and questions about how to manage their positions, credit, and risk.

Prepare for the Unexpected

The unprecedented demand-killing consequences of COVID-19, along with abnormal behavior from market participants under stress,  shows that markets for any commodity are subject to extreme and unexpected volatility.. While rare in nature, Black Swans do exist; natural disasters, market shifts, technological advances, financial dislocations, and other disruptors can happen at any moment. It pays to ensure your CTRM system can handle the next onslaught of crazy crude prices or other outlier data:

Test your system for its ability to respond appropriately to severe deviations from the norm. When prices, risk, inventory, credit conditions, or other critical inputs creep toward the edges of the bell curve, you want to be sure your system can report your positions accurately and instantly.

If you don’t have the resources available in-house to evaluate your system, hire a professional CTRM managed service provider to conduct a comprehensive stress test. 

Forewarned is forearmed. Build a leading indicator of possible upheaval into your system so you can fortify your forecasting and decision-making tools. You can develop better responses to potential calamities if you can anticipate when automatic price and other data feeds may become unreliable.

Edge-case data has the potential to throw your system into a state of chaos. It can create errors that leave you in the dark, grasping for the information you need to make sound decisions. And it can delay reporting and aggregating position and financial data when time is critical.

Don’t let this happen to you.

How Run Smart™ CTRM Managed Services Tames Outlier Data

Value Creed’s Run Smart™ Managed Services include dual timezone coverage, so there is always someone monitoring your data inputs. No matter what time of day or night the crazy data rears its ugly head, a Value Creed CTRM/ETRM platform expert will immediately begin reconciling it and rectifying any errors it causes.

Value Creed has automated the process of searching for and isolating outliers as they occur. By isolating the cause of errors in real time, we empower data users to begin remediating them right away. Problems that occur overnight in the U.S. often can be rectified before the trading day starts. Users can run P&L and other reports on schedule, aggregating prices and positions and making data-informed decisions.

Be Prepared, For Every Market Turn with Run Smart Managed Services

Value Creed’s Run Smart™ Managed Services on your team, outliers are resolved quickly so you can maintain optimal positions and manage strategies.  

If you missed our former posts, learn three more reasons why more CTRM/ETRM application management teams and their CIOs are choosing Run Smart  here:

#1 Overcoming Data Integration Breakdowns For Seamless Daily Starts,

#2 How To Proactively Overcome Reporting Integration Failure for CTRM Platforms, and

#3 Cloud & Database Monitoring & Maintenance

 

Value Creed's Run Smart Managed Services Start at $3,500 a month

Interested? Let’s Chat

#3: Cloud & Database Monitoring & Maintenance

In the former post in our series, 5 Reasons for Choose Run Smart CTRM Managed Services, we provided you with a perspective on how Run Smart CTRM/ETRM platform managed services enable application managers to be more proactive in resolving reporting and processing errors in advance of your daily start.

In this post, we write about how with our Cloud & Database Managed services the CTRM platforms perform at 99% uptime, delivering reliability for your team and lower overall cost of ownership over the long-term. 

What happens when your database or cloud environment is not configured or set up properly?

Your hosting environment is key to system performance, as well as your ability to recover, upgrade, test & deploy patches and enhancements, and secure your data. 

How Run Smart™ Managed Services maintains your Database or Cloud implementation

Whether your CTRM is hosted on-prem or in the cloud, our Managed Services team ensures availability and fine tunes your environment to improve performance.

Take Your CTRM Platform to the Cloud with Value Creed

Monitoring

Reporting

Alerts

Want The Full Story? 

This is post #3 in our series, 5 Reasons for Choosing Run Smart™ CTRM Managed Services.  Learn more about key reasons for moving to Value Creed’s Run Smart Managed services with theses former posts:

Value Creed's Run Smart Managed Services Start at $3,500 a month

Interested? Let’s Chat

#2 How To Proactively Overcome Reporting Integration Failure for CTRM Platforms

After discussing solutions to failed end-of-day CTRM reporting in our last post Value Creed’s series, 5 Reasons for Choose Run Smart CTRM Managed Services, continues by showing how critical it is to quickly rectify problems with overnight reports.

Value Creed’s Run Smart CTRM Managed Services runs in conjunction with your reporting system to ensure your pricing, credit, risk, and other reports are complete and accurate so have the most complete information for basing your positioning decisions. Your business day typically starts with a review of your firm’s prior day activities. Your trading platform runs several reports overnight — valuation, value at risk, credit, physical balance, etc. — in the format you need and commodity managers can use. You ensure all the transactions you expected to move, did in fact, value and finalize, and that no anomalies occurred.

It’s all routine. Except when it isn’t.

What happens if the report log does not include the most recently scheduled report? What if it ran but generated errors or unexpected results? 

Unfortunately, this occurs all too frequently. Some energy traders rely on legacy systems and outdated technologies that may not be as reliable as the market demands.

Consequences of Failed Reporting Integration

How Run Smart™ Managed Services Proactively Resolves Reporting Integration Challenges

Value Creed’s Run Smart™ CTRM managed service works alongside your reporting platform to validate your internal data with that from exchange, pricing, and other source systems. Run Smart™ delivers value by ensuring pricing, positions, credit, risk, and regulatory reports are accurate and current. This helps our clients identify potential risks and spot opportunities for profitable transactions. Fully customizable and compatible with internal workflows, processes, trading platforms, and technologies, Value Creed’s solutions give energy traders the power to locate, extract, extrapolate, and analyze position and market variables in order to plot data-informed strategies.

By automating report integration, Run Smart™ streamlines workflows so management resources can be used more efficiently. Run Smart™ is the product of Value Creed’s  sophisticated CTRM managed service platform infrastructure and our team’s expertise borne of decades of industry experience.

 

Engaging a Capable Partner Ensures Peace of Mind

A cost-efficient way to expand your CTRM platform and resources, partnering with Value Creed provides your team with on-demand support.  Harnessing the cloud’s agility and reliability makes the Run Smart™ product perfect for businesses. It is readily scalable, so it can grow along with your operation. Troubleshooting and reconciling report integration disruptions is one of the most important benefits Run Smart™ delivers. The service includes ready access to experts and CTRM guides who provide personal attention to keep your system running smoothly.

Engage with Value Creed and we can show you how you can minimize report integration malfunctions and resolve them quickly when they do happen.

Value Creed's Run Smart Managed Services Start at $3,500 a month

Interested? Let’s Chat