White Papers Analytics to Address Agricultural Market | Page 5

Analytics to Address the Increasingly Complex Global Agricultural Market

That being said, with the release of the latest generation
of CM solutions, many vendors in this space have improved
their systems’ capabilities in the area of decision support.
While these updated systems have proven effective for some
portions of the value chain, particularly in the areas of trading
and physical logistics, they are limited in their capabilities to
address the entirety of that chain and the enterprise, which

A ComTechAdvisory Whitepaper

is why spreadsheets continue to be the dominant tool used
for analysis today. With such limited visibility, any optimization
strategies developed within any singular business unit such as
trading, or individual facility such as a processing plant, may
in fact create negative consequences for those units downstream, and therefore can have very limited utility.

TRANSACTION BASED, FIRST
GENERATION CM SYSTEMS NOT BUILT
FOR ANALYTICS
Despite the increasing maturity of CM systems, these systems are simply not architected to be a singular
system of record for the entirety of a global scale, multi-commodity business. Virtually all larger companies have
deployed CM solutions as components of an infrastructure that will contain a myriad of other systems – including
ERP solutions for accounting, administrative functions, and financial reporting. Additionally, rarely will a large
scale global business deploy only a single CTRM or CM solution for managing a diverse portfolio of agricultural
and softs commodities. Each of these commodities has very particular markets and uniquely complex functional
requirements that just simply are not addressed in total by any singular CTRM/CM vendor. As such, it is common
for larger commodity businesses to have an IT infrastructure that will include any number and combination of vendor supplied solutions and internally-developed software, including spreadsheets.

Given that the data required for enterprise level business
optimization exists across this wide breadth of systems, companies seeking to maximize profitability in today’s market are
faced with a complex and expensive challenge of aggregating,

via a complex integration infrastructure, huge amounts of data.
And even with such a data aggregation infrastructure, CM solutions can only provide a portion of the analytics that are necessary to truly optimize profitability at the enterprise level.

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