Nickel in demand

Relying on spreadsheets to compete
in today’s commodity markets
is like running against Usain Bolt
while wearing lead boots – and businesses,
like great athletes, need the best
tools and conditions.
The evidence is hard to refute:
swapping spreadsheets for specialist
commodity management solutions helps
create a winning business that makes
better decisions, faster, and with more
confidence.
Eight reasons to unhitch and make
the switch:
1. Meet new regulatory
requirements
The sense of complacency about
spreadsheets is becoming almost
impossible to sustain in the light of a tough
new regulatory framework. Underpinning
both Dodd-Frank in the US and EMIR in
Europe is the need to increase the amount
of transaction data to be recorded and
stored, speed up its availability, and
deepen the level of detail required. Timely
reporting across all regions and markets is
the minimum requirement to stay on the
right side of the regulator.
Spreadsheets were never developed to
collate and export large, comprehensive
and unified data sets from multiple
sources. They do not easily offer real-time
responsiveness or enterprise-wide visibility.
They do not support current needs for
comprehensive risk mitigation, reporting
and audit requirements and the regulations
are only going to get more onerous;
“Spreadsheets multiply; firms
that rely on one, tend to
rely on a dozen”
businesses need to adopt better toolsets
than spreadsheets to be compliant.
Fortunately, commodity management
vendors have worked closely with
regulators to develop the necessary
features within their solutions so that
organizations can be more compliant.
In contrast, a trading operation run on
spreadsheets is just one fat-finger error
away from a compliance breach, fines and
even jail time.
2. Break down the
corporate silos
Spreadsheets multiply; firms that rely on
one, tend to rely on a dozen. By their very
nature they silo information when having a
portfolio view of total exposure is the only
way to manage risk and make decisions
effectively. A critical spreadsheet with a
single owner/author is an accident waiting
to happen, and it happens frequently,
different people owning or enabling
their own part of the business through
one or more uncontrolled, unsecured
documents has been proven to be “the
weakest link” when it comes to financial
accuracy, regulatory transparency
and risk management.
Trust and transparency is key to the
current/future business model; the use
of spreadsheets is an indication that
information is inadequately shared. The
inevitable lack of data integration between
the number and variety of spreadsheets
usually results in different parts of the
business running and reporting on
incomplete or even inaccurate data
sets. At critical stages of the value
chain the left hand often doesn’t know
what the right hand is doing.
Where a commodity management
system is in place, however, it shows
that integrated, front-to-back, business
processes have been developed, and are
supported by common data and rules. This
22
[ Aug 2014 ] BE Monthly