Stringent government regulations, changing dietary preferences, health concerns, newer ways of pricing and selling, and diseases such as Mad Cow and Avian Flu, are some of the key issues of today that have exposed the meat, poultry and dairy industry to newer price, market, operational and financial risks. Whether you are a farmer, packer, processor, or distributor, the imperative to hedge your risks and improve operational efficiency is higher than ever. This is where Eka can provide substantial value-add by streamlining procurement, sales, operations as well as better management of price risk on both input (feeds) and output (lean hogs, pork bellies, butter, etc). It also helps reduce time-to-market while improving decision support to help you make the most from market opportunities.

On the input side, Eka helps you manage your feed procurement dealings, covering raw material purchase, hedging using futures and options, as well as transportation and intermediate storage. For management of risks and exposures, 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. You can create purchase contracts, view open positions and monitor performance per supplier. You can calculate your mark to market position 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 of both live and processed products, either 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.

Similarly, on the sales side, Eka enables complete control of all your deliveries. Price risk wherever possible is managed through futures and option trades, which can be linked 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.