White Papers Brady’s Quick Start Physical Trading Solution | Page 2

INTRODUCTION
In order to deal with the complexities of trading and managing multiple commodities, the soft-
ware solutions devised and offered by vendors are usually designed to be highly configurable.
This is particularly so when the scope of functionality includes the management of the commod-
ity through the supply chain (usually a mandatory requirement for customers trading in physical
agricultural, softs, metal ores, and other bulk commodity markets). By offering extensive config-
urability and personalization of their CTRM and/or Commodity Management (CM) solutions, the
vendor can service a larger group of customers with differing requirements and hence, extend
the potential market for it, ensuring that it can be a financial and commercial success – as it has
to be to be considered a true software product as opposed to a custom solution.
Configurability and personalization have become key
features of CTRM and CM software and have helped
to ensure widespread use of vendor supplied and sup-
ported solutions (a global market estimated at $1.5
billion per year). Providing customers with the ability to
configure the solution to meet their individual company
needs, and the user to personalize their screens, has
allowed the same solution to be deployed and used suc-
cessfully in many different markets, industry segments
and geographies - all using the same code base and
ensuring more cost-effective vendor supplied support.
Unfortunately, providing these capabilities has also nat-
urally added to the complexity of implementation, as it
requires significant forethought and planning in order to
set up the solutions in a way that truly supports the busi-
ness processes now and into the future. This complexity
invariably adds cost, time and risk to both the implemen-
tation effort and future product upgrades.
As buyers have become more savvy about the software
category generally and more cost sensitive (catalyzed
in part by the promise of cheaper cloud deployment),
vendors have begun to recognize the need to reduce
the complexity and costs related to configuration by
providing tools and processes users can leverage to
more quickly configure the software to meet their re-
quirements, reducing implementation time, effort and
costs. This paper will look at Brady’s Physical trading
solution Quick Start program as an example of such an
approach.
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