Reports The Use of Spreadsheets in Commodity Trading | Page 6

The Use of Spreadsheets in Commodity Trading – 2015

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Demographics
The 50 respondents were located all around the globe with
the majority being located in Europe and North America, with
a sizable group participating from the Asia-Pacific region (Figure 1).
Figure 1 | Geographic Distribution of Responses

a third of respondents were from a utility or generator; but,
hedge funds, financial institutions, chemical and petrochemical companies, consultants, metals and mining and ags and
softs were also quite well represented. We do believe that this
cross-section is an appropriate distribution and well reflects
the types of entities involved in commodity trading and commodity management globally.

Figure 2 | Types of Entities Represented

The types of companies responding to the survey represented a balanced distribution of the various types of entities involved in global commodity trading (Figure 2). Around

Findings

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ent
Ope
ra
Plan tions
ning
Orig
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ion
Sch
edu
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Trad
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aptu
Trea
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/Tra
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Fina
nce
Man Invento
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t
CRM
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Man ocume
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ERP

Figure 3 | Types of Solution Used Across Business

Functions/Application Areas

Risk
M

The first question asked of the respondents was designed
to establish what types of solutions were deployed and used
to support a number of broad functional/application areas
within their company. The results (Figure 3) show that commercially available vendor-provided solutions were used most
often in the ERP, Document Management, CRM, and Inventory Management areas, and least used in Risk Management,
Operations Planning, and Origination. However, commercial
solutions were also widely used and in each of the functional
areas, ranging from 25% in Operations Planning, up to 60% in
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). Custom-built solutions
also appear to be reasonably important in the C I4