The Low Commodity Price Challenge

A quick peak at our lists of vendors and their clients is enough to see that many top tier firms in commodities such as the big marketers, for example, have at one time, procured many different CTRM solutions or built their own. The large marketers have complex operations often spanning origination, trading and distribution in a global context. They invariably are involved with many different commodities and even in the transformation of commodity to commodity. Often, they view some aspect(s) of their operation as strategic or proprietary and will have many organizational business units across the enterprise sometimes operating as independent profit centers. This adds up to almost overwhelming complexity and so it is hardly surprising that these companies have built their own software or utilize multiple CTRM solutions in different divisions and geographies for different commodities. In the past, the costs of managing these complex IT environments, was probably less important than simply being able to operate the business. That, of course, has now changed. Sustained low commodity prices have placed significant cost pressure on these businesses, as is evident in the daily news. Suddenly, companies that were making good profits and expanding have to reassess their debt levels … continue reading

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