KEEPING PACE WITH DYNAMIC COMMODITY MARKET DEMANDS
Change is the only constant for commodity trading enterprises and the businesses support them. Companies must evolve and optimize in order to thrive. To succeed, energy- and commodity-related organizations must constantly adapt – shifting strategies, acquiring and divesting, vertically and horizontally integrating, maturing business processes, streamlining workflow, and scaling activities to remain competitive.
Relying on disparate business processes can put you at a disadvantage as competitors adopt more sophisticated technologies and streamlined operations. Commodities industry players must redesign and optimize their processes to address a variety of issues:
Monitoring and detecting potential violations and mobilizing remediation |
Automating, and securing data functions to reduce errors and vulnerability |
Mapping structural and task dependencies to mitigate waste |
Real-time reporting and full disclosure of positions, inventory, forecasts, assets, etc. |
MATCHING BUSINESS PROCESS DESIGN TO ORGANIZATIONAL STRATEGY
Value Creed’s technical and functional expertise informs our business process design and optimization services. We have perfected a set of best practices aligned with our understanding of the relationships among front, middle, and back office business functions to deliver a comprehensive overhaul of your business processes.
Partnering with Value Creed to perform your business process design and optimization tasks gives you a structured approach to current state performance and future state competitive advantage. Tailoring operational flow to your niche will continue to deliver efficiency and profitability dividends over the long term.
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Several attributes make trade capture a particularly good fit for robotic process automation (RPA). These include:
RPA can perform trade capture tasks more quickly than is humanly possible, making results available for reporting and decision-making on the fly. In addition, robots never make calculation or data-entry errors.
Without employing RPA the trade capture process requires traders to perform several manual activities and encompasses many moving parts. Any of these can cause breakdowns and bottlenecks, robbing commodities trading organizations of productivity:
RPA streamlines the capture of both purchases and sales of physical liquid commodities by triggering their import from the spreadsheet into the corresponding fields in the CTRM platform.
The bot not only enters the provided data but also validates any data missing from the spreadsheet.
A major refined fuel supplier needed a faster and efficient method for scheduling deliveries, removing them from the docket once deliveries were made, and reviewing and entering bills of lading into its CTRM system. The legacy process required more than 50 person-hours every day to input data accurately and confirm that the entered information was accessible. The problem was made more acute because BOLs arrived in a variety of formats, depending on the shipment mode, vendor, and customer, making it difficult for workers to easily and consistently locate the details they needed to enter.
Bots used to compare 100+ different counterparty Bill of Lading formats, parse and enter them in the CTRM
In time spent entering data from shipment tracking into scheduling, actualization, and billing accounts
Large regional fuel refineries and logistics partners often are hindered by the need to retrieve and track information from various vendors, customers, and shippers. RPA streamlines these activities, expediting the flow of data from source to destination and formatting it for use by downstream processes and applications. RPA automates several components of refineries’ ongoing data management requirements:
Value Creed’s RPA generates programmed responses and instant sharing and validation of lease terms, pricing contracts, receipt tickets for fully integrated record-to-report workflow.
Value Creed’s robotic process automation services remove data flow bottlenecks and reduce the amount of human intervention required to accomplish routine, repetitive, no-value-added tasks. The use of this advanced technology streamlines business processes, reduces the risk of data corruption and loss of integrity.
Business Challenge A multi-state U.S. electric cooperative and its subsidiary required more powerful recording and calculation of the financial and physical risk associated with power
Security Challenge A coal producer operating in the United States and Australia needed a conduit for integrating on-premises CTRM, ERP, and risk interface infrastructure with
Improved Go-to-Market Strategies through Full Transparency An integrated biofuel and natural gas company sought Value Creed’s help in solving several reporting issues so it could
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Slow data and manual processes obscure the data your natural gas enterprise needs to maximize revenues and optimize strategy. Time your traders and schedulers spend entering, transferring, and massaging data is time they cannot devote to locking in profits, mitigating risks, and generating insights. These business processes cause distinct time wasters native to your business. Here are three common examples.
This makes it difficult to locate the data that answers key business questions.
Value Creed applies their specialized CTRM expertise to translate these and other business process bottlenecks into accelerated workflows by leveraging robotic process automation. This approach allows your business to continue without disruption and increase productivity by taking manual, human-centric processes and streamlining them by using “bots” to perform defined, repetitive tasks.
Value Creed’s robotic process automation services streamline business processes, alleviate major data entry bottlenecks, and reduce the time humans spend on low-level, repetitive tasks.
You know RPA is not a new concept, it is just now truly useful to CTRM/ETRM business leaders and IT teams. The use of this advanced technology helps by expediting complex CTRM business processes, while relieving associated data integrity risks.
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You only make money when you sell your product to a broker, refinery, or manufacturer. Doesn’t it make sense for your traders and marketers to focus on these activities. Spending time entering data into CTRM platforms and updating spreadsheets leads to incomplete information.
Robotic process automation (RPA) gives front, middle, and back office workers the time to analyze and evaluate market and position data rather than generating and recording it.
Value Creed harnesses RPA to perform routine, repetitive tasks automatically so data gets where it needs to be, without errors, and without manual input that detracts from more valuable activities. Expedited dataflow and instant availability makes downstream applications more efficient and decisions more informed.
Automatically matching receipt and delivery tickets and scheduling transportation for hundreds of transactions per day the instant they are presented and recording them errorlessly without the need for human intervention.
Scanning of bills of lading to extract data, record it in the CTRM platform and daily logs, link the delivery to the corresponding inventory and order, apply the proper terms and prices, generate the invoice, and record payment.
Review, data extraction, and automatic form population from a variety of document styles and formats, including .pdf, email text, hard copies, scanned images, and electronic downloads.
Value Creed has established the processes and assembled the experts who can build the RPA management system that suits your organization and business model. Our team will engineer a program that delivers institutional control, operational excellence, and replicable profitability.
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Refinery Operations are complex by nature requiring cross functional, multi-system data entry and data validation aligned with enterprise governance standards to answer business critical questions needed . This process can take hours and hours of human effort to perform repetitive, yet critical tasks. These tasks lead to business questions requiring timely data like.
These questions are critical to the health of the business. However, business process complexity often hinders productive teams from providing up-to-the-moment data needed by management. Robotic process automation (RPA) offers a better solution. By documenting the steps involved in answering these questions, RPA can perform these manual processes much faster.
Verifying shipments, deliveries, and quantities and assigning them to the correct orders and invoices can be performed flawlessly and quickly with CTRM robotic process automation. Bots can scan invoices, compare them to contract terms, pinpoint discrepancies and reconcile discrepancies, and initiate payments with minimal human intervention to capture early payment discounts and eliminate late fees.
The journey from well to refinery may involve several transfers: pipelines, barges, trucks, trains, etc., each with unique fees, terms, bills of lading, etc. The RPA services Value Creed offers are specifically designed to flow the correct data source files to CTRM software platforms and then into popular destination systems like Oracle ERP, NetSuite ERP and SAP ERP or others.
By automatically reconciling hedged/unhedged positions, RPA gives traders the insights they need to predict demand and pricing for both feedstock and refined products. Instant updates allow quick action to cover exposures and identify trade books that do not conform to the organization’s hedging guidelines.
Proper RPA initiation,optimization, and management requires an integrated, enterprise-wide solution. Unfortunately, many energy refiners are too busy with business development and operations to devote the resources to build RPA at a scale that can deliver tangible results. Value Creed RPA: Control, Efficiency, Profitability
Value Creed’s robotic process automation services streamline business processes, alleviate major data entry bottlenecks and reduce the time humans spend on low level, repetitive tasks with “bots.
You know RPA is not a new concept, it is just now truly useful to CTRM/ETRM business leaders and IT teams. The use of this advanced technology helps by expediting complex CTRM business processes, while relieving associated data integrity risks.
Let Us Know