Our client, a renowned international commodities trading company had been heavily relying on manual tools to handle a number of tasks. Shared spreadsheets for booking transactions and managing the workflow, managing market risk, and monitoring logistics. Document editors for manually creating and editing shipment notices, contracts, and invoices. This posed several issues: multiple inputs of the same data on different systems created operational risk, manual tools created latencies in managing market risk, and providing business reports required running stale VBA macros on excel sheets resulting in unfriendly static reports making it very unpleasant to stay on top of a booming business.
Idea
Our idea was to create a resource portal at the enterprise level. A unique source of data, web-based, composed of separable modules relying on a set of rules allowing the necessary actions to the relevant roles and providing confidentiality of data where needed. We replaced an inefficient process of multiple inputs with a smart sequential workflow needing a single input of each bit of data, followed by validation by risk teams, and reporting to management. The data is always accessible by all the users with the needed clearance and is securely backed up on the cloud at regular time intervals. Documents are generated and shared automatically using cron jobs instead of needing manual editing.
Impact
This portal has deeply transformed the operations of our client. It has saved 20 to 50% of work hours for both front-office and back-office employees and reduced at the same time the number of errors and the stress caused by not being able to spot them. Management is now in a position where decision-making is much easier due to real-time reports and customizable dashboards accessible even from their mobile phones. The impact is such that the need to generalize it to other departments has led Aikyo to develop additional modules to enrich the portal, mainly API integration with external systems ( HR portal, futures trading, logistics, payments, invoices, and accounting )
