White Papers Brady’s Quick Start Physical Trading Solution | Page 3

Brady’s Quick Start Physical Trading Solution
A ComTechAdvisory Whitepaper
THE NEED FOR CONFIGURABILITY
Wholesale commodity trading and risk management can include any number of business pro-
cesses and strategies, from brokered trades in which the buyer purchases some quantity of
commodity and then immediately resells it at the same point for (hopefully) a profit having never
physically handled that commodity – to multi-commodity transactions involving global move-
ments via complex supply chains, transformations, and complex financial hedging strategies.
Vendor-provided software to service this wide-rang-
ing market will often attempt to model and provide
the widest-ranging functional coverage for all possible
commodity classes and the unique physical operations
associated with each and every possible combination
in between. At the same time, the markets these prod-
ucts serve are continually impacted by rapidly shifting
requirements such as regulatory changes, shifting eco-
nomic/trade patterns, industrial technology advances
and geo-political conflict. With each change, new func-
tional requirements are established, and new demands
are thrust upon existing vendors and their solutions, in-
creasing product complexity and costs, and ultimately,
providing an opportunity for new vendors to enter the
markets with the “latest and greatest” products. Chang-
es and innovation in software technologies has also
heavily impacted the category, such as the earlier migra-
tion to client/server architectures - and now to web-en-
abled, cloud delivered solutions.
Besides building in capabilities to configure the way the
software works and what functionality it includes via set
up options, many vendors provide users the ability to
personalize screens and functions or have added exten-
sibility options that allow users to add fields and data
capture capabilities beyond those supplied with the
solution. In recent years, workflow has also been added
to many products - generally configurable to better mod-
el the client’s business processes. While these features
add flexibility and usability to the solution, their use will
almost certainly impact the implementation effort and
on-going support by making both more complex, time
consuming and expensive. While users seek out this
flexibility, they are often unwilling to spend the time and
make the required preparations necessary to properly
exploit them.
In an effort to meet the rapidly shifting and changing re-
quirements of users across a large enough marketplace
to make it an effort economically viable, the vendors
have often sought to develop a singular comprehensive
solution - one that covers all (or at least the most com-
mon) commodities, geographies, supply chains, and as-
sets. Again, this is often achieved using configuration at
set up time as well and via tools like workflow. Although
perhaps the trend has now shifted away from this ap-
proach to some degree, any solution that supports com-
plex commodities through the supply chain will remain
complex and will require a degree of set up and config-
uration.
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