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KEEPING PACE WITH DYNAMIC COMMODITY MARKET DEMANDS

Building Efficiency, Scalability, Flexibility into Business Processes

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.

Rapidly Shifting Market Dynamics Presents Unique Challenges

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:

Regulatory
Compliance

Monitoring and detecting potential violations and mobilizing remediation

Risk
Management

Automating, and securing data functions  to reduce errors and vulnerability

Resource
Efficiency

Mapping structural and task dependencies to mitigate waste

Lack of
Visibility

Real-time reporting and full disclosure of positions, inventory, forecasts, assets, etc. 

MATCHING BUSINESS PROCESS DESIGN TO ORGANIZATIONAL STRATEGY

Value Creed Customizes CTRM Attributes and Functionality

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.

The Value Creed Approach

Align Business Process Design with Expected Outcomes

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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Trade Capture Automation For CTRM Platforms Using RPA

Trade Capture Automation For CTRM Platforms Using RPA

Capture Trades Automatically to Optimize Efficiency

While trade capture is a critical component of CTRM transaction management, it requires no particular skill or knowledge. So, traders’ time is spent documenting pricing, fees, and other trade details within the CTRM platform which is a low-value, error-prone and time-consuming task.

Why CTRM Trade Capture is Well Suited to RPA

Several attributes make trade capture a particularly good fit for robotic process automation (RPA). These include:

  • Well-structured data
  • Defined workflow and outcomes
  • Importable data sets
  • Multiple iterations daily

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.

Current Trade Capture Processes

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:

Steps CTRM Trade Professionals Take to Capture Trade Data in CTRM Platforms

Watch This Video As Value Creed Explains How It Works

Value Creed’s CTRM experts explain how robotic process automation makes a multi-step manual process for trade entry into a more productive and efficient automated process.​
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Trade Capture with Power Automate

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. 

Click to Enlarge

Ready to Get Robotic Process Automation Working for your CTRM Platform?​

The Challenge

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.

Key Results

100% Counterparty Comparisons

Bots used to compare 100+ different counterparty Bill of Lading formats, parse and enter them in the CTRM

 

92% Decrease
in Time Spent

In time spent entering data from shipment tracking into scheduling, actualization, and billing accounts 

Instant Emails

Bots automatically compare BOL data with scheduling and marketers, highlight discrepancies and email responsible parties for correction.

Logistics Automation Made Simple

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:

  • Shipment audits to confirm deliveries, invoicing and payments
  • Demand forecasting and route selection for better planning and cost savings
  • Contract and inventory management for instantaneous position updates.

The Closing

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.

Value Creed Services Mobilized:

Robotic Process Automation

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.

 

Read More

Recommended Resources

Get more information about Managed Services proactive & reactive monitoring, as well as five ways Expertise On Demand adds value to CTRM teams.

Ready to Get Robotic Process Automation
Working for your CTRM Platform?​

Let Us Know

Manual Administrative Processes are Slowing You Down

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.

3 Business Process Bottlenecks Slowing Down Natural Gas Productivity

 This makes it difficult to locate the data that answers key business questions.   

Key Robotic Process Automation Opportunities for Natural Gas

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.

Natural Gas Business Processes Have Multiple Uses for Robotic Process Automation

Updating pricing and reconciliation
Enter volumes into EBB
Scheduling trades and tracking daily volumes
Cash-out or roll imbalances
Validate scheduling trades
Settling and invoicing
Import & Process schedules from systems & spreadsheets
Automate price uploads
Reconcile external statements to CTRM
Automate credit execption reporting

Ways Robotic Process Automation Accelerates Business Processes​

Supercharge Trade Logistics

RPA alleviates monotonous and potentially costly manual activities by combining the communications, documentation, and reporting process into a single, computerized operations.

Streamline Gas Scheduling

RPA can enter data into all destinations – the CTRM platform, EBB, and spreadsheet – simultaneously, giving all applications and stakeholders the same accurate, current insight into the organization’s positions.

Expedite Actualization and Invoicing

RPA macros can update pipeline route fees and contract terms to ensure the expected, quoted, and invoiced rates match. This is especially helpful in a natural gas environment where the product must be moved among multiple locations, at various rates.

How Robotic Process Automation for Invoice Reconciliation Works

This video shows how automating common business processes accelerates workflow
and improves accuracy

Watch Now

How to Get Started with Robotic Process Automation

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.

CTRM Process for Identifying RPA Opportunities

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.

Ready to Explore Robotic Process Automation?

Let Us Know

Common Producer Operations Bottlenecks - How To Compete

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.

Manual Data Processes Creates More Questions Than Answers

Robotic Process Automation Optimizes Producer Operations

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.

Hover on the Orange Icons to Discover RPA Opportunities for Producers

Updating pricing and leases on contracts with 100s of leases
Inputing 1,000s of receipt tickets
Validating 1,000s of receipt tickets
Validating counterparty statements
Settling & Invoicing transactions for 1,000s of wells

3 Ways Robotic Process Automation Accelerates Common Workflows

Product Tracking

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.

Payment Processing

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.

Contract Management

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.

How Robotic Process Automation for Invoice Reconciliation Works

Watch the video to see how RPA accelerates workflow and improves accuracy

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Get Started with Value Creed RPA:

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.

Our Process for Identifying RPA Opportunities in CTRM

Ready to Put Robotic Process Automation to Work?

Let’s Talk

Business Questions Refinery Operations Stakeholders Need to Answer

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.

Common Business Questions Asked by Refinery Operations

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. 

Key Robotic Process Automation Opportunities for Refinery Operations

Automating Policy Checklists
Upload movements data
Uploading feedstock logistics tickets
Uploading weather data and supply events
Automating Policy Checklists
Upload movements data
Uploading feedstock logistics tickets
Uploading weather data and supply events

3 Top Uses for Robotic Process Automation
in Refinery Operations CTRM Systems ​

Reconciling Actualization and Payment

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.

Automating Feedstock Monitoring

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.

Highlight Optimal Hedging Opportunities

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.

How Robotic Process Automation for Invoice Reconciliation Works

This video shows how automating common business processes accelerates workflow
and improves accuracy

Watch Now

Value Creed’s RPA Governance

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

CTRM Robotic Process Automation Governance Model Video

Watch Now

How to Get Started with Robotic Process Automation

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. 

CTRM Process for Identifying RPA Opportunities

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.

Ready to Explore Robotic Process Automation?

Let Us Know

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