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the latest version for a variety of reasons. However, the
level of the firm’s investment in the current monolithic
legacy solution is such that they cannot nor dare not
make a change. Yet others will find that they are using
a heavily customized version of a vendor’s product as
they requested and received enhancements during the
implementation program. Now, they too are hindered
in any attempt to upgrade by virtue of their custom
modifications.
Others took a different approach. They recognized that
there was no single CTRM or CM solution on the market
for all commodities and instead brought in and deployed
two or more different CTRM’s for different groups of
commodities, different regions or different aspects of
their business and so on. This approach often suffers
from all of the issues mentioned above as each solution
is now a customized legacy monolith that cannot be
upgraded or moved forward and these are knitted
together through custom integration code to allow for
an enterprise view of exposure and risk. This additional
layer must also be updated if any of the underlying
A ComTechAdvisory Whitepaper
solutions are upgraded and thus, while they may have
a better functional fit for the specific commodities, they
actually have a larger problem that lacks the needed
business agility and is expensive to maintain.
There is another issue associated with all of this and
that is that those who do not need to handle multiple
commodities wind up procuring a solution that has
much functionality that they will never use while lacking
a lot of very important commodity-specific functionality
that they do need. Essentially, single commodity firms
usually end up with CTRM solutions that are over
engineered in many respects and under deliver in
specific areas. CTRM solution designed this way almost
certainly lacked the detailed functionality for a specific
commodity and supply chain and would need some
form of off-system support for it to work effectively. If
you procured such a solution for a specific commodity
you were paying for more than needed and the solution
would likely be overly complex to use as well. Let’s
explore this further.
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