White Papers Is It Time to Replace Your E/CTRM? | Page 6

A ComTechAdvisory Whitepaper
Is It Time to Replace Your E/CTRM?
AN EXAMPLE OF A REPLACEMENT
STRATEGY – ENUIT
Enuit, an emerging vendor with a multi-commodity trading and risk solution called Entrade and
which aims to ’give its customers complete visibility, insights, control and management over
their business operations, helping them to have peace of mind to make quick and informed
decisions that affect the bottom line,’ is one of the vendors targeting the developing replacement
market. In order to do so, it has developed an approach. This starts with providing an effective
implementation and testing framework with a prototype-driven approach. It also advocates
replacements that operate with a parallel run mindset to reduce risks.
The idea behind the prototyping approach is to allow
users to see as early as possible in the replacement
how trades will run from front to back so giving early
confidence in the delivery. The approach also helps to
highlight any gaps early in the project. The testing and
operation of the prototype is done using pre-prepared
test portfolios that represent the user’s business and
these are used to repeatedly test through a series of
lifecycle processes covering front-, middle- and back
office. Middle office processes and key controls are also
tested so that end of day processes can be simulated
and so on.
Enuit also strongly urges users to measure believing
that what gets measured, gets done. It sees the key to
successful testing and the prototype-based approach is
to pre-measure (and maybe more than once) the trade
calculations and process events within a ‘’test portfolio’’
so that the entire project team is working on the same set
of constant data to first configure the system. Following
this approach, it believes that the replacement can
deliver advantages to the customer such as,
• Reducing the amount of rework and reconfiguration
during the UAT and Parallel run,
• Iterative testing and small issues resolution creates
immediate transparency into any CTRM project,
• Stakeholders are well informed,
• All test results, open issues, and measurable
scorecards can then be used to arm the Project
Management team and steering committee
members to move forward the project from testing
to Go-live.
In an example of a replacement at a global resources
trading business with operations across Asia, Europe and
North America handling a wide range of commodities
in ferrous raw materials, steel products and non-ferrous
raw materials, Enuit found a highly fragmented CTRM
and IT landscape. This meant that the user suffered
from substantial issues including;
• High levels of tedious manual effort,
• Inconsistent information, error and omissions,
• Numerous interfaces between components of the
solution with a high maintenance cost,
© Commodity Technology Advisory LLC, 2020, All Rights Reserved.
6