For food producers and ingredient suppliers, volatility in input and energy costs, ever-increasing competition, stringent government regulations, health concerns and the rise of new markets are only some of the issues affecting the strategic landscape, business performance and profitability. That is why greater control over procurement of raw material, derivatives based price risk management, along with closer monitoring of risks and exposures, become some of the key mantras for business success. Whether you are a small manufacturer buying a single commodity or a large diversified organization having exposures across different commodity groups and origins, Eka offers you the right solution for your local and global sourcing and distribution. It works with you to reduce the time-to-market while improving decision support to help make the most from market opportunities.

For management of risks and exposures of your commodity purchases, Eka helps you quickly identify unpriced, unhedged and undelivered positions. You can create physical contracts, record your futures and options transactions, link these to the physical contracts, and get a real time overall position. Eka also calculates your mark-to-market and PnL on both physical and derivatives positions. The system also allows you to track factors responsible for an increase or decrease in PnL between any two dates, so that you can isolate favourable and unfavourable factors in order to devise relevant strategies and take appropriate actions on the same.

Eka contains equally strong functionality for managing logistics of incoming cargo. You can organize transport by containers, rail cars, trucks or vessels. You can issue instructions to suppliers, transport companies, shipping lines, customs agents and other service providers, and track the status of the cargo in real-time – unshipped, in transit, or arrived at location. You can store cargo across locations, and track weights at different steps of the contract execution cycle.

On the sales side, Eka enables entry of spot and cash contracts. This covers direct trading of raw material and sale of intermediate and finished products. Price risk is managed through futures and option trades, which you have the flexibility to link these to individual physical trades or matched against an overall position. For distribution-based businesses, Eka gives you the flexibility to create multiple storage locations and manage deliveries for either local or export sales.

In addition, several decision support tools are provided to monitor delivery schedules, pricing information and hedging details, including net exposures between physicals and futures. All purchase and sales contract information is easily integrated with your other packages (ERP, accounting, master databases, etc), made possible by Eka’s integration layer. This ensures that your valuable data is shared across the company, eliminating any duplication of effort and supporting decision making at all levels.

EKA’s CTRM solution has been deployed successfully by global trading and processing organizations, helping them to effectively manage risks while bringing operational efficiency in day-to-day operations.