Rising metal prices driven by buoyant global demand present a huge opportunity for owners of physical assets such as mines. Yet, there are challenges related to price volatility, higher energy costs, shifting structural demand, production fluctuations, labour issues as well as environment and sustainability related concerns. Not just that, the challenge is also to ensure that acceptable returns can be achieved even in the lower points of the commodity cycle.

Eka is a solution to mines and metal producers can count on to ensure long term competitive advantage, helping you highlight price risk and exposures, streamlining physical operations to meet both current and future delivery commitments, as well as monitoring profitability and costs. Finally, it helps reduce time-to-market while improving decision support to help you make the most from market opportunities.

Eka’s powerful functionality includes managing current physical delivery commitments and future production forecasts, using LME and Nymex based derivative instruments to hedge the price risk for both, and streamlining logistics. You can create contracts for physical spot deliveries and forwards, and manage the complete physical movement of the cargo, right from booking of vessels, trucks and containers, through to shipment, intermediate storage and delivery to the customer.

The Eka application also helps you manage the complete documentation flow, including invoices, shipping advices, packing lists, instructions to transport companies, freight forwarders, warehouses and customs agents. At any point of time, you can view your entire physical position, including stocks across mines and warehouses, cargo in transit, as well as product delivered to customers.

For price risk management, you can hedge both current sales contracts as well as possible production output for the future. At any point of time, you can view your net position, hedges and exposures across delivery periods. To assess your risk profile, you can calculate your mark to market position on both physicals and futures and take appropriate action based on the same. 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.

All 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.