Discovery Phase

SITUATION

A multinational commodity trading company faced significant efficiency and scalability challenges as it expanded its operations in terms of book of business. The organization consisted of five subsidiaries located in Colombia, Paraguay, Brazil, the United States, and the British Virgin Islands, with additional team members in Bolivia, Costa Rica, and Uruguay.

The primary objective of the project was to implement technology solutions that would streamline operations, reduce repetitive tasks, and enhance overall efficiency and sustainability.

Challenges:

Logistics: Operations were highly manual, relying on more than 130 Excel spreadsheets to track positions, logistics programming, and loading schedules. This manual process led to frequent errors, impacting customer satisfaction and increasing costs due to delays.

Commercial Operations: The CRM system was underutilized, with only 15% of commercial operations automated. The system was not fully aligned with the company's needs, resulting in inefficiencies. Financial hedging operations were also not connected with the company’s operations, creating a need to perform manual calculations.

Accounting: Different accounting systems for each subsidiary resulted in a lack of consolidated financial visibility, hindering quick and accurate decision-making by management. This challenge was compounded by the need to comply with diverse local accounting regulations.[DG1] 

SOLUTION:

Nextant conducted a discovery project lasting six weeks to analyze the company’s current processes, systems, and general operations to identify and generate a concept for a technical solution that will help address the company’s challenges.

The project started with working sessions with departmental leaders of the client to understand the team’s strategic objectives, value chains, processes, and roles and responsibilities to identify business needs for running optimal operations. Business needs were then connected with technical needs from an application and data perspective.

As part of the project, Nextant delivered current-state process flow documentation detailing high level processes, sub-processes, activities, roles and current tools and systems. A report with opportunities for improvement in general operations and automation opportunities was also provided along with a proposed to-be process diagrams for all key processes.

Finally, Nextant helped evaluate different potential solutions that would help solve the identified business needs and provided a cost estimate that included potential licensing and implementation services costs that helped inform the decision on a strategic digital transformation project.

RESULTS AND IMPACT:

Based on Nextant’s project the client was able to establish more clarity around the status of their operations and identify improvement opportunities by streamlining processes and implementing technology solutions that automated tasks and connected processes.

Based on this understanding, the client, with advice from Nextant was able to select a solution that was adaptable to their business needs and was 50% more cost effective than other alternatives the client had initially identified on their own.  The client is currently undergoing a digital transformation process that will deliver operational efficiencies and will set up the organization for significant scalability and growth in the coming years.