The metals processing and fabrication industry is in the midst of rapid growth and market transformation, throwing up challenges and opportunities for the players. On the one hand, continuing rise in global demand presents a huge potential for growth and scale, but also leading to a structural shift in demand and increased competition from emerging markets. Input and energy costs have been rising resulting in pressure on profit margins, and there is stronger competition from industries such as steel and plastic.

In this situation, Eka can provide tremendous value to your processing and fabrication operations. It can streamline contract activity, physical cargo movement, identify exposures, help analyze your PnL, and bring about more effectiveness in price risk management. It works with you in reducing operational costs and streamlining data flow across the organization. Finally, it helps reduce time-to-market while improving decision support to help you make the most from market opportunities.

Eka works with you in managing risk and streamlining operations on both metal purchase and sale. 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.

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.

Similarly, on the sales side, Eka enables complete control of all your deliveries. Price risk 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.