Spotlight

Enabling real-time commodity trade

Eka's solutions help manage the cycle of trading and risk management. By Mohammed Shariff PA

Eka Software Solution is the provider of commodity trade and risk management software solutions. The company is a global player in the agriculture and metal commodity markets. It has some large global customers such as Noble Group, Louis Dreyfus, The Savola Group, Erpasa, Ducab, Mercon Trading LLC, Seda Solubles, Al Bogari Trading Company, Coffein Compagnie, Remia, Mark Daniels Limited and Tristao. Eka has proved its mettle in the enterprise application market. The solution has been used to managing physical trading, positions, risk, logistics and financial operations.

Manav Garg, CEO & founder, Eka Software Solutions said, “Given the growth we are witnessing in the agriculture and metals verticals, we are growing at 100% CAGR and we are putting our strategies in place to become a $100 million company by end 2012.” Eka is derived from the word Ekam, which means unified or integrated. Garg added “It signifies our organizational intent to provide a single-platform solution for managing trade and risk across commodities, industry verticals and business segments.”

The company’s team of over 80 members consists of domain consultants, product specialists and technical experts who are single minded, focused towards delivering the maximum possible value to the customer, something that goes beyond providing products and services and extends to the quality of the company’s engagement and the nature of its relationship with its customers.

Garg explained, “Most Indian commodity traders and others have deployed ERP from different vendors, but we feel that there are some specific areas such as commodity trade and risk management, which are yet to be addressed as per Indian regulations and requirements.” In India it has created a market opportunity for new technology that suits the Indian business ecology. Eka, which was founded in 2001, is providing IT solutions (commodity trade and risk management software) for companies involved in export, import and trading activities across the globe. This is integrated software that streamlines all the operations—from contracts to shipment, finance, risk management and reporting. A single-input philosophy, combined with automatic document handling and real-time reporting, ensure maximum efficiency and greater profit.

Helping customers manage risk and reduce costs

Eka’s solutions are helping its customers to reduce costs, manage risks and improve control over their operations. This is achieved by providing real time visibility over contracts, simplified task management, comprehensive reporting and tools to assist in smarter decision making. Garg said, “This is the reason why hundreds of managers across geographies, industries and businesses trust Eka for their mission-critical operations.”

The Eka Commodity Trade & Risk Management (CTRM) Solution covers the complete lifecycle of both physical and financial commodity contracts. This solution, which is multi-commodity, flexible and comprehensive, recognizes the significant differences between different commodity groups (metals vs. soft vs. renewable) and segments (traders, processors, exporters, etc). So whatever may be the business model and the company size, the adaptive solution helps streamline operations, manage risks, control costs and maximize opportunities. In the same way it has solutions for agriculture on a single platform that streamlines operations, manages positions and improves productivity to maximize profits.

The company’s strength lies in its technology, design and architecture. The multi-tiered architecture comprises of a front-end user interface layer, a middle layer of business logic, a back-end persistent (database) layer, and an embedded reporting tool. The selection of technologies has ensured that the Eka application delivers on key parameters such as solution flexibility, scalability, performance and security. The Web-based application interface enables a single-server deployment, with all office locations connected over the Internet, intranet or network. This ensures that information on contracts, cargo statuses, hedges, position, stocks, invoicing, receivables, etc, is always updated and available in real-time across the organization, without the need for any additional tools. This, along with the thin-client nature of the application, significantly reduces the cost of hardware, deployment and maintenance over the immediate and long term.

In a nutshell, its solution provide the customers with a single platform for managing all the complexities of your commodity business by integrating your trade, risk, traffic and treasury operations making the real time commodity trading possible.

Capitalizing on the Indian opportunity

The company has a new business philosophy for the emerging Indian market. This philosophy permeates all customer touch points and processes including a superior product experience, rewarding and enriching delivery engagement and support practices, and a partnership model that promises the lowest total cost of ownership. All these practices are designed to exceed customer expectations produce faster return on investment (RoI) and generate high stakeholder and user satisfaction, which they believe is where the product scores. It combines advanced functionality, user-friendly displays and navigation, on a modern technological platform. Practical industry experience from team members acts as vital business inputs to solution design, ensuring rich product functionality and ease of use.

Garg said, “Our working philosophy and client engagement practices clearly differentiate us from the rest. Our single-minded focus is to ensure highest possible client satisfaction, which manifests itself in a number of ways—the efforts we put in to understand your requirements, our flexibility, the working relationships we form, our solution ideas, technical capabilities, how we structure the project governance and delivery, and our long-term customer-centric relationship approach which is people, processes and engagement philosophy.”

The company understands the significance and value of IT investment of its customers. . With this in mind, they have designed the Customer-Partnership approach to act as a long-term low-cost IT solution provider for its customer in India. Eka is trying to achieve this by combining onsite project coordination that ensures the convenience of local interaction, with offshore IT development that significantly lowers the costs of customisation and support which it calls partnership approach and total value delivery.

For sustainable growth

Having it’s headquarters in India and sales office in Amsterdam, Eka has a specific strategy to tap the Indian market. The company believes that the marketing strategy in India and that for the rest of the world have to be entirely different. In the West it is more about the professional touch that makes or breaks a business, whereas in India a different business ecology exists where 70% of businesses are still running legacy applications. Garg said, “Vertical-specific solutions would help agro business and metal companies to go-live faster and reduce the cost of implementation and lower TCO.” The Indian market still needs to mature as far as IT is concerned. Here the personal relationships and understanding of enterprise mentality play a major role.

As India is going through a process of migrating from legacy applications to standard business applications, Eka expects considerable business from the Indian market. The market shows good signs for Eka in spite of rupee appreciation and the future looks bright for the company.

mohammed.shariff@expressindia.com