Commodity Trading ERP

An integrated Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system for commodity traders, designed to streamline and manage the unique business processes of trading firms

What is this about?

With extensive experience in trading various types of commodities, we are developing an ERP system that offers comprehensive and robust functionality designed to support a wide array of business requirements. This system enables users to capture deals and monitor them throughout their entire trade lifecycle, ensuring full transparency with complete audit reporting. Additionally, the solution automates the generation of trade recaps, confirmations, and invoices, while providing real-time insights into physical price exposures and hedging activities through derivatives. It also delivers detailed Profit & Loss (P&L) and Value at Risk (VaR) analyses across multiple strategies and shipments, empowering businesses to make informed decisions with up-to-the-minute data.

In my opinion, the interface infrastructure of your digital everyday life should be consistent both visually and functionally across all systems. This way, you avoid any friction or confrontation when moving from one system to another. In other words, all interfaces should be either equally poor or equally pleasant and comfortable. Most everyday applications—such as taxi services, delivery apps, and messengers—have well-designed and user-friendly interfaces. Conversely, the majority of business or utility software tends to be less user-friendly, even though they fulfill the required functions.

The market for niche CTRM/ERM and other business systems, especially in the commodity trading sector, generally lacks pleasant, intuitive, and convenient interfaces. Wrapping a highly complex system in a user-friendly and attractive design, while simultaneously keeping up with the evolving functional demands of market players, is a challenging task. As a result, job postings often require experience with specific systems, or employees need months of training to become proficient.

This is precisely the challenge we aimed to address: to build and wrap all the necessary functionality into an interface that is easy on the eyes and the mind—one that doesn’t require excessive effort to navigate and find what you need. An interface where working feels comfortable and even enjoyable, with the potential to extend this design approach to all other applications in use.
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‍There’s a lot I want to share about the functionality and features, and I will write about it—but not now and not here. For now:

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Split system

There is nothing new here; it's simply convenient when you can customize all the required visibility zones and control panels to suit your needs, highlighting the important aspects and minimizing those that do not require immediate attention. The logistics manager currently needs the Request for Shipments and the data from the previous month or last half-year related to a specific direction and basis—bring that to the forefront and focus on it. As for the contractual changes in tolerance regarding moisture content in bulk gray, those can be minimized; only the person responsible for them will address them as needed. Keep readily accessible what requires your attention at the moment.

I believe that trying to replace specialized applications entirely or replicate all their functionality—such as building document collaboration like Google Docs or chat features like Telegram or Slack—within a product primarily designed to solve different tasks is rather inefficient. However, incorporating some of these functionalities in a convenient and focused way is a good initiative, especially when they are specifically useful. That’s how we operate!

For example: please auto-generate contracts, allow editing, tag responsible parties for each clause, fill in details via inputs or direct text entry, use your templates and train the system on them. Keep everyone engaged on this matter—not just here in the chat, but throughout the workflow.

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Another screenshot from hundreds of frames and thousands of connections between them, as we develop and test the prototype, creating effective solutions for commodity trading market players.