Description
With years focused on just-in-time delivery and lean supply chains, operations disruptions can quickly turn into global market disruptions, causing prices to spike, supply shortages, and unexpected profit drops. Such market disruptions are often the result of world politics, weather conditions, natural calamities, cyberattacks, or other man-made interferences outside of our control and are more and more frequent. This customer deployed ION’s commodity trading and supply chain planning solutions to provide accurate, real-time operations and trading information, and to improve decision-making capabilities. This helped our customer to mitigate market disruptions, optimize operations, and eventually outperform competitors. This customer sought a software solution to manage trading and shipping, assess their market exposure, and evaluate alternative operating plans to improve their agility, minimize costs, and optimize supply chain operations. Critical solution requirements included the ability to: Track and predict physical positions- Track current inventory positions across the portfolio in real-time and predict future inventories based on computer-generated supply/demand plans. Determine volumetric obligations- Generate optimized transport schedules and review all obligations to receive, sell or deliver products for specific time periods. Also, determine where imbalances might occur. Manage counterparty obligations- Flag any counterparty risks and review counterparty obligations to determine potential impacts on the business. Quantify potential impacts- Identify financial and operational imbalances by running what-if simulations. Anticipate the impact early to mitigate risk like securing capital, increasing/ depleting inventory levels, or finding alternative routes to market. Liquid and dry bulk CMS- Integrate trading, risk management, scheduling, and settlement in a single, unified solution. RightAngle is a comprehensive CMS. It supports front-to-back-office workflow, from physical to financial deal capture, for liquid and bulk commodities companies. It is ideal for companies operating across the commodity supply chain that need deep logistics, accounting, and tax capabilities combined with trading and risk management. Supply chain optimization- Strengthen every link in your supply chain process WAM streamlines the supply chain process, including integrated business planning, sales and operations planning, demand planning, production and distribution scheduling, and inventory optimization. By providing complete visibility of global operations, WAM enables organizations to monitor and measure the performance of their supply chain, which helps improve profitability, market share, and responsiveness to customers.
Solution
A fully integrated combination of RightAngle, ION’s Commodity Management Solution (CMS), and WAM, ION’s supply chain optimization, was implemented to achieve these objectives. Combining ION’s CMS and supply chain optimization gave the customer better control and visibility into exposure and operations, with accurate data and insights across the value chain. The integrated solution allows them to make better and faster strategic and operational decisions.
