White Papers Addressing Commodity Market Challenges | страница 3

Addressing Commodity Market Challenges With Digitalization Enabled by Platform Technology
A ComTechAdvisory Whitepaper
Recognizing these and numerous other challenges, improve business agility by streamlining business
progressive commodity-centric firms, from traders to processes, accelerating information flow and providing
CPGs, are increasingly undertaking “digitalization” their commodity procurement and trading groups the
initiatives - leveraging existing and emerging technology tools necessary to optimize their operations across the
(such as ML and AI) to gain greater market insights, breadth of their markets and supply chains.
LEGACY SYSTEMS ARE PROVING
INADEQUATE
Unfortunately, the traditional technology infrastructures that support commodity traders,
merchants and producers are proving largely inadequate in these digitalization efforts. In
particular, the CTRM and CM products common to these markets, and usually comprised of
monolithic code bases, are proving to be particularly inflexible and limiting in digitalization
projects.
These systems are purpose-built software products
modeled to mimic and capture data from the highly
specific business processes of the customers they
serve. As the vendors of these products have tried to
continuously expanded their customer bases over the
last twenty-plus years, these systems have become
increasingly complex as new functionality has been
added to keep up with changing market rules and
conditions and address new markets or new and more
complex commodities. As these new requirements
are “baked-in” to those existing systems, the data
structures and business logic grows exponentially
complex, increasing the costs and difficulty of
maintaining and upgrading those systems for their
users. For customers that transact in a limited number
of commodities or markets, these one-size-fits-all code
upgrades associated with these monolithic systems
are particularly burdensome and continually increase
system complexity without providing any discernible
value.
Perhaps most critically though, and aside from rapidly
rising support costs and increasing difficult and
time-consuming maintenance and upgrade efforts,
these older technology platforms are also proving
to be a roadblock on the path to digitalization. Based
on extremely complex relational databases with
oblique table structures designed and optimized for
performance, not data access, the critical information
contained within these CTRM/CM systems is cloistered
and essentially unavailable to users outside of screen
dumps, canned reports or very limited APIs.
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