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You may be able to manage and maintain your CTRM infrastructure, application enhancements, and reporting functions in-house, but at what cost? Could your employees be better deployed? Can you effectively allocate the time and cost to each task? Do you know the status of each project in real-time?
Value Creed has a better way to ensure you maintain oversight of your CTRM process without the investment required to bring in or develop expertise in-house. When you engage Value Creed to handle your CTRM functions, you get the services of a dedicated project manager to serve as a both a lookout and a navigator to safeguard your company’s interests and direct our implementation team’s activities on your behalf.
A recent project for a high-profile client illustrates our typical workflow. Based on client instructions, Value Creed calculated the hours spent and achievements logged over previous weeks. We noted time devoted to training, monitoring, and managed services, and presented them in an intuitive dashboard.
To deliver greater insights and granularity, we broke these figures for each day and charted the data so emerging trends could be identified. Early in the process, the managed services team logged significant time training to learn the client’s specific platform, workflows and reporting requirements. As the project progressed and our personnel became less dependent on the client’s team to explain processes, training time diminished. Conversely, as our employees became proficient with the client’s system, proportionately greater time devoted to value-adding project management and monitoring activities. These improvements are clearly delineated on the dashboard.
Value Creed’s managed services includes 24/7 report monitoring from two separate time zones to ensure comprehensive coverage and fast response to any failures. Occasionally an issue will arise during our monitoring of end-of-day reporting. When this happens, our team communicates and works with the vendor until the issue is resolved.
As with the client in our case study, you will receive a valuation spreadsheet several times per day detailing key metrics:
This dashboard is customized to the needs of every client to ensure daily, transparent tracking and reporting of key KPI’s. Tangentially, this report is supported by End-Of-Day logs and other materials in addition to the high-level dashboard view.
Value Creed’s open communication and ownership of our work responsibilities gives you the peace of mind of knowing that we are hard at work keeping your systems operable and your maintenance and reporting on schedule. Our transparent, accountable project management includes constantly vigilant leaders who see each repair ticket through to a successful resolution. It also means passing along any insights we glean from working with your team on your projects. Knowledge sharing makes us all smarter, more trusting, and more innovative, as we develop solutions that save time, money, and aggravation.
Contact Value Creed and let’s discuss how our transparent, accountable project management keeps you in control while alleviating the hassle of maintaining hardware, integrating applications, and updating reports.
It is the aim of the Value Creed team to outperform the rest by delivering on the promise to distinguish its #CTRM Managed Services by outperforming the competition – even the status quo – by providing excellence. In this three-part series, the team will step back and share why our services are superior in dimensions beyond technical aptitude. In this post, the team dives into the role the “Client Director.” This role is the key to success for long-term partnerships for managed services customers.
When IT teams and business users arrive at work to find price inconsistencies and incorrect reporting from the previous session’s end-of-day processes, it exposes companies to unnecessary risk and limits opportunities for maximized profit. The firm cannot conduct business with confidence until the matter gets sorted out, and that could potentially take the better part of the trading day. Unfortunately, most companies in the commodities trading sphere find themselves short of both the time and expertise they need to deal with CTRM platform malfunctions.
But what if you could rely on an extension of your staff to constantly monitor your CTRM system both during the trading day and overnight?
Dual Time Zones – Linked by Seamless Communication, Led by Value Creed’s Dedicated Client Directors
Value Creed does exactly just that, with its unique-in-the-industry dual-time-zone managed services solution. Our dedicated client director is instrumental in providing the personalized, immediate attention our clients need when problems arise overnight. Serving as a project manager liaising with Value Creed’s global team, the client director serves as our client’s representative, interfacing with our global team.
A recent incident illustrates how the client director assumes control in order to coordinate and ensure problem-solving initiatives are carried out in a timely manner. By bridging Value Creed’s assets in two hemispheres, the client director works with technicians in our Hyderabad, India office as they monitor clients’ end-of-day processes and overnight reporting functions. When the team encountered a product price that could not be verified it was unable to determine the validity, they reached out to the Client Director for assistance in issue remediation. Had this anomaly – or any other problem in the run/operate/report cycle – occurred during the trading day, it would have monopolized Clients’ on-staff IT professionals’ time. Since it occurred after-hours, it would have wreaked havoc on the next day’s opening and operating procedures had the firm not partnered with a service provider working in dual time zones. But Value Creed’s client director immediately took charge. She made it clear that client satisfaction was the only objective, and to achieve it, the team would need to go the extra mile until the issue was resolved.
2 Continents, 1 Mission
Value Creed’s Hyderabad experts’ early detection and understanding of the potential consequences of the questionable price bought our team critical hours in which to solve the problem. Under our client director’s direction, our Hyderabad Run Smart™ crew works on the system malfunctions as soon as data appears corrupted, processes shut down, or reports fail to initiate. In the case of the mystery price, the Hyderabad team was unable to isolate the problem and interfaced with their US-based colleagues. Acting under full authority, our project manager marshaled Value Creed’s resources on both continents. Thanks to her strong leadership, our global and US teams work together seamlessly to alleviate the most pressing issues, resetting servers, clearing job queues, and initiating repair tickets. Value Creed’s onshore client support manager? contacted the company to apprise its IT team of the system failure and advised on the next steps for moving forward to resolve the issue.
Value Creed escalated the issue until it could isolate the cause and implement a long-term solution. Leveraging people, power and technology in both offices, Value Creed resolved the problem, documented the solution, and closed the case in the time it would have taken other CTRM support firms to discover that something was wrong. This result was made possible by our client director’s refusal to accept less than a complete solution. She made the critical decisions necessary and initiated the processes that ultimately delivered a quick resolution and exceeded the client’s expectations.
Seamless Teamwork
With a knowledgeable and, committed client director looking out for the Client’s vested interests, Value Creed’s US- and Global-based teams have perfected a collaborative workflow that assures overnight problems are addressed quickly and solutions are expedited:
Ready to learn how the dual-time-zone protection can save your company money and maximize your productive trading window? Contact Value Creed today.
Following our previous post on handling outlier data, our 5-part series on the benefits of Run Smart™ CRTM managed services from Value Creed concludes with a discussion of analyzing and managing Value at Risk.
Value at risk (VaR) is one of the most useful risk calculations, as it allows for a consistent analysis of positions and price movements for a given portfolio across time. By knowing with 95 percent confidence, for instance, that a position or portfolio’s predicted daily outcome will not exceed an established VaR limit, risk managers can make more informed decisions about whether to recommend that traders maintain, liquidate, or increase their holdings in a certain commodity, location, and time period.
Whether basing VaR calculations on historical price data, the covariance/variance method, or a Monte Carlo simulation, VaR enables commodities traders to visualize how observable market inputs such as current and forward prices, implied and historical volatility, interest rates, exchange rates, etc. affect their risk position.
Position analysis too often depends solely on end-of-day reports that may or may not reflect intraday volatility and trading patterns. The data loses much of its power as the new trading day evolves. It may be virtually worthless in the realm of automated and algorithmic trading executed by Ai capable of making decisions based on dozens of extrapolated distribution curves generated every second. Accurate VaR reports and intraday transparency empowers more sophisticated trading plans that reduce risk and enable greater profitability.
Without a unified, holistic view of the risks inherent in their positions and portfolio, risk managers cannot precisely evaluate their processes, workflows, trader activities, and external events to determine appropriate guidelines.
Commodity traders who rely on less-than-robust CTRM systems put themselves at a disadvantage. Legacy systems and those that depend on manual inputs and Excel spreadsheets are prone to human errors, inconsistent formatting, and difficulty integrating with scheduled processes and reporting tools.
Value Creed’s integrated CRTM managed service platform, Run Smart™, is easily customizable to any business model. The platform streamlines user-configurable trade rules and risk-management policies for enterprises at any link in the commodities value chain. Run Smart™ interfaces with downstream reporting software and upstream transaction-reporting and data sources. Its reporting capabilities capture, collect, and present real-time market updates, physical stores and portfolio positions. Users can isolate VaR (as well as P&L, credit, and other metrics) by asset, commodity, region, trader, and other inputs.
Every night, Run Smart™ evaluates the calculated VaR for the portfolio or selected segment with the confidence interval, loss limit, and timeframe established by the user. Breaches are highlighted, so risk managers can reevaluate their position and make adjustments to contain risk.
The platform maintains a record of daily price and VaR fluctuations throughout the timeframe and confidence level the user desires. As asset values change, VaR changes. Risk managers can compare all variables from day to day, plot moving averages, and use statistical methods to spot profitable trends.
Understanding and limiting Value at Risk is a key ingredient in profitable commodities management. Contact Value Creed for a demonstration of how Run Smart™ technology can help your organization make better, data-driven decisions.
This post wraps up Value Creed’s series on the importance of professional managed services for CTRM/ETRM platforms. Read the other four installments to get the full picture:
#1: Overcoming Data Integration Breakdowns For Seamless Daily Starts
#2: How To Proactively Overcome Reporting Integration Failure for CTRM Platforms
#3: Moving Your CTRM Database from On-Prem Oracle to Cloud-based SQL Server
#4: What Do I Do about “Crazy Crude Prices” – Be Prepared for the Unexpected
After our previous post discussing the advantages of moving your database to cloud-based SQL Server, our series, 5 Reasons for Choosing Run Smart™ CTRM Managed Services, continues with Part 4. Today we write about how to ensure your system can handle unexpected outlier prices and other data.
We may never live to see crude oil prices tradeat negative $37 again, like we did in mid-April, but it is safe to say energy commodities will continue to fluctuate wildly over both the short and the long term. While the perfect storm that hit American crude futures may be a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence, it did expose weaknesses in several commodities trading risk management (CTRM) systems.
Many producers, refiners,, traders, investment funds, airlines, and major consumers of oil found themselves unable to process this unexpected data, creating errors in their reports and questions about how to manage their positions, credit, and risk.
Prepare for the Unexpected
The unprecedented demand-killing consequences of COVID-19, along with abnormal behavior from market participants under stress, shows that markets for any commodity are subject to extreme and unexpected volatility.. While rare in nature, Black Swans do exist; natural disasters, market shifts, technological advances, financial dislocations, and other disruptors can happen at any moment. It pays to ensure your CTRM system can handle the next onslaught of crazy crude prices or other outlier data:
Edge-case data has the potential to throw your system into a state of chaos. It can create errors that leave you in the dark, grasping for the information you need to make sound decisions. And it can delay reporting and aggregating position and financial data when time is critical.
Don’t let this happen to you.
How Run Smart™ CTRM Managed Services Tames Outlier Data
Value Creed’s Run Smart™ Managed Services include dual timezone coverage, so there is always someone monitoring your data inputs. No matter what time of day or night the crazy data rears its ugly head, a Value Creed CTRM/ETRM platform expert will immediately begin reconciling it and rectifying any errors it causes.
Value Creed has automated the process of searching for and isolating outliers as they occur. By isolating the cause of errors in real time, we empower data users to begin remediating them right away. Problems that occur overnight in the U.S. often can be rectified before the trading day starts. Users can run P&L and other reports on schedule, aggregating prices and positions and making data-informed decisions.
Value Creed’s Run Smart™ Managed Services on your team, outliers are resolved quickly so you can maintain optimal positions and manage strategies.
If you missed our former posts, learn three more reasons why more CTRM/ETRM application management teams and their CIOs are choosing Run Smart™ here: #1 Overcoming Data Integration Breakdowns For Seamless Daily Starts, #2 How To Proactively Overcome Reporting Integration Failure for CTRM Platforms, and #3: Moving Your CTRM Database from On-Prem Oracle to Cloud-based SQL Server.
After discussing solutions to failed end-of-day CTRM reporting in our last post Value Creed’s series, 5 Reasons for Choose Run Smart CTRM Managed Services, continues by showing how critical it is to quickly rectify problems with overnight reports.
Value Creed’s Run Smart CTRM Managed Services runs in conjunction with your reporting system to ensure your pricing, credit, risk, and other reports are complete and accurate so have the most complete information for basing your positioning decisions. Your business day typically starts with a review of your firm’s prior day activities. Your trading platform runs several reports overnight — valuation, value at risk, credit, physical balance, etc. — in the format you need and commodity managers can use. You ensure all the transactions you expected to move, did in fact, value and finalize, and that no anomalies occurred.
It’s all routine. Except when it isn’t.
What happens if the report log does not include the most recently scheduled report? What if it ran but generated errors or unexpected results?
Unfortunately, this occurs all too frequently. Some energy traders rely on legacy systems and outdated technologies that may not be as reliable as the market demands.
Enterprises without access to a professional CTRM Managed Services provider face a raft of problems when their reports cannot be validated or integrated. In the best case, the user responsible for reporting and integration can rerun the affected reports, rectifying the crisis in a matter of hours. However, even this solution can cost money, time, and other company resources.
Thornier reporting setbacks require support from IT staff and, often, tedious manual intervention to discover and correct database and spreadsheet errors. Companies caught in “Excel hell,” are especially vulnerable to delayed reporting and integration. Even low-level failures at a local natural gas desk, for instance, can snowball. Without these reports, it would be impossible to generate accurate inventory totals, risk figures, and aggregated P&L statements for the region and commodity.
Value Creed’s Run Smart™ CTRM managed service works alongside your reporting platform to validate your internal data with that from exchange, pricing, and other source systems. Run Smart™ delivers value by ensuring pricing, positions, credit, risk, and regulatory reports are accurate and current. This helps our clients identify potential risks and spot opportunities for profitable transactions. Fully customizable and compatible with internal workflows, processes, trading platforms, and technologies, Value Creed’s solutions give energy traders the power to locate, extract, extrapolate, and analyze position and market variables in order to plot data-informed strategies.
By automating report integration, Run Smart™ streamlines workflows so management resources can be used more efficiently. Run Smart™ is the product of Value Creed’s sophisticated CTRM managed service platform infrastructure and our team’s expertise borne of decades of industry experience.
A cost-efficient way to expand your CTRM platform and resources, partnering with Value Creed provides your team with on-demand support. Harnessing the cloud’s agility and reliability makes the Run Smart™ product perfect for businesses. It is readily scalable, so it can grow along with your operation. Troubleshooting and reconciling report integration disruptions is one of the most important benefits Run Smart™ delivers. The service includes ready access to experts and CTRM guides who provide personal attention to keep your system running smoothly.
Engage with Value Creed and we can show you how you can minimize report integration malfunctions and resolve them quickly when they do happen.
For most of us, the first thing we want to do is grab a cup of joe when we reach the office after a long commute. These days, we may have a short walk to the coffee maker, but that doesn’t mean we want to return to our desk with a feeling of trepidation over potentially failed processes like:
or…you get the idea.
Rather, every CTRM platform application management team is expected to keep the system running, while automatically generating reports and performing end-of-day processes flawlessly. But, some days do not go as planned.
For most CTRM/ETRM application managers, the once civil cup-of-joe turns abruptly to a fevered pace upon a notification that a key process failed. Individual log files and processes are scoured to diagnose the cause of overnight mishaps. This effort consumes IT staff members’ time, and these fail points also impact traders, schedulers, risk professionals, and accounting teams. These Systemic conditions can detrimentally impact the day’s trading profitability – a consequence to avoid.
Every CTRM/ETRM platform is responsible for aggregating prices, tracking positions, and creating reports for decision making. But spending half a day or more searching for the source of failed processes or reporting errors turns high-value resources into low value tasks, misaligning the company’s goals of achieving performance targets.
This fact led to the formation of a new approach. One designed to remedy overnight complications that inevitably lead to next day challenges. Run Smart™ is the nexus of high-value, expert-driven managed services support for CTRM/ETRM platforms. Designed by well-respected industry experts, Priyankar Datta and Raja Kanthadai, Value Creed’s CTRM Run Smart™ Managed Services enable companies to take advantage of monitoring and support delivered in a dual-time zone model with expert-led monitoring 24/7/365.
CIOs and IT managers at well-known industry leaders have shown their support for this novel approach to CTRM/ETRM support by adding to the Run & Operate Phases of their CTRM journey.
Transform your harried mornings of log file lookups into straightforward inbox report confirmations showing you critical processes and end-of-day reports ran as expected. And, in the case where there is a glitch, don’t face troubleshooting alone – rather leverage the expertise of our team and the one-on-one personalized account management and troubleshooting led by leading CTRM platform experts with over ten years of experience
It all really comes down to a civil cup of joe. Learn how in just 20 minutes with our team. We’ll show you how you can resolve common run operate challenges before they happen.
Value Creed and BroadPeak will discuss the common data challenges customers face when trying to keep up with shifting exchange requirements. We’ll use the TransAlta case study to illustrate how customers can overcome those challenges in the short and long term, particularly on a tight schedule.
Energy CIO recognized Value Creed’s dedication to disrupt conventional CTRM/ETRM application support by awarding the firm Top Managed Services Solution Provider. Read the full article here: Energy CIO Insights Magazine awarded Value Creed’s CTRM (Run Smart) the Top Managed Services Solution Provider Recognition for 2020.
“We seamlessly partner with our clients as proactive team members devoted to ensuring the necessary proactive steps are taken daily to deliver expected functional and technical performance, with maximum up-time for business users and traders,” said Priyankar Datta, Principal and Founder of Value Creed.
Value Creed’s Managed Services provide round-the-clock management of your CTRM infrastructure and critical application functions. Backed by an industry-leading, Service Level Agreement (SLA), we offer comprehensive monitoring and support of your CTRM application and business processes. As an extension of your business, we come alongside your team by providing:
Benefit from our award-winning Run Smart platform and watch your business increase both revenue and efficiency.
“We had an incredibly short period to make these changes so we could maintain automation of our trade data feeds. Interrupting business operations was not an option. Luckily, BroadPeak and Value Creed met our deadline. Their commitment to our project was impressive.”
-Chris Koch, Risk Systems Specialist, TransAlta
Like many large and dynamic firms, TransAlta’s trading business in commodities is undergoing rapid change. As a large organization, they had made many custom changes to their trading systems that slowed their ability to meet internal project goals. Yet, as their business strategy evolved to increase trading in financial derivatives markets, so did their needs.
TransAlta hit a roadblock when ICE announced breaking changes to the ICE Trade Capture API. TransAlta learned that they would have to make technical changes on a short timeframe to maintain trade data automation in this key derivatives market.
To make the required technical changes, TransAlta would be forced to redo many of their customizations. With the deadline to complete these technical changes just weeks away, this was simply too disruptive and risky.
TransAlta began to search for third-party operational support in order to:
TransAlta was already successfully relying on BroadPeak’s K3 solution for other exchange data feeds related to compliance. They sought to additionally leverage K3 to automatically retrieve all necessary derivatives trade data and prevent disruption to their business.
For day-to-day operational support, TransAlta selected Value Creed for unmatched expertise in outsourced trading platform management. Since Value Creed already had a strong relationship with BroadPeak, working together was seamless.
Value Creed led the implementation of K3 to replace the existing vendor’s trade feeds within a month. During the process, the collaborative team uncovered additional operational improvements to implement for increased efficiencies.
Organizational factors from TransAlta were also key to a successful delivery: A well-organized IT group who can execute under time constraints, executive sponsorship, and technical folks with the ability to solve unexpected issues and reduce friction throughout the effort.
TransAlta met the key ICE Trade Capture API deadline without making risky changes or otherwise disrupting business. And with Value Creed managing their software platform, they are no longer battling day-to-day operational issues.
Thanks to their expanded implementation of K3 and outsourced software support, they are now able to:
Value Creed, LLC, founded in 2016, is a managed services firm headquartered in Dallas, TX, specializing in commodity trading and risk management technology and business process optimization. The firm offers expert-driven managed services, business process outsourcing, cloud enablement, and CTRM complementary technologies to help CTRM customers achieve optimal value in their software investment. For more information, visit www.valuecreed.com or call (833) 282-7333.
BroadPeak is the developer of K3, a real-time streaming ETL solution that helps businesses quickly access up-to-the-minute data for critical business decisions. K3 is used by Fortune 500 companies that want to tackle their data challenges with a low-code solution. Trading firms in particular leverage K3 for exchange connectivity, position limits, and trade surveillance. BroadPeak was named a TechCrunch Disrupt NYC finalist. For more information, visit https://broadpeakpartners.com/
TransAlta owns, operates and develops a diverse fleet of electrical power generation assets in Canada, the United States and Australia with a focus on long-term shareholder value. TransAlta provides municipalities, medium and large industries, businesses and utility customers with clean, affordable, energy efficient and reliable power. Today, TransAlta is one of Canada’s largest producers of wind power and Alberta’s largest producer of hydro-electric power. For over 100 years, TransAlta has been a responsible operator and a proud community-member where its employees work and live. TransAlta aligns its corporate goals with the UN Sustainable Development Goals and has been recognized by CDP (formerly Climate Disclosure Project) as an industry leader on Climate Change Management. TransAlta is proud to have achieved the Silver level PAR (Progressive Aboriginal Relations) designation by the Canadian Council for Aboriginal Business. For more information about TransAlta, visit our web site at transalta.com.
Key Results:
“With Value Creed, I’m leveraging their knowledge and expertise. The high agility of Value Creed’s technical expertise meant we could get to the bottom of what we needed to do very quickly.”
Manny Neupane, Director Applications & Business Intelligence
Capital Power is a power producer that develops, acquires, owns, and operates power generation facilities across North America. While they are well-established with effective business processes in place, they need to continually maximize efficiency to maintain their competitive edge. That means keeping complex system platforms, like their CTRM solution, current with the latest functionalities.
Manny Neupane, Director Applications & Business Intelligence, understood that an upgrade would extend the life of Capital Power’s CTRM platform. But in the past, consultants they’d contracted to support an upgrade did not understand the product well and seemed to be learning on the fly.
Manny and his team wanted to maximize the value of Capital Power’s existing CTRM investment, while minimizing or avoiding the usual headaches of a large system upgrade. These included:
Capital Power needed to nimbly execute an upgrade by leveraging their in-house expertise and partnering with a firm capable of coming alongside their team to create a win-win to optimize investment while minimizing business disruption.
Value Creed offered a very agile delivery model, so Capital Power reached out to secure right-sized CTRM expertise and services. Working closely with Manny, Value Creed helped Capital Power achieve their goals by:
After completing the upgrade, Manny and his team are getting new value out of their CTRM platform. They have extended the life of their CTRM solution and can avoid an expensive full reimplementation in the future. Now they are able to increase efficiency, update their approach to evolving markets, and have peace of mind knowing their system is current and relevant to business goals.
“Now that the upgrade is done, we’re starting to leverage new functionality to simplify and add more value, like enhancements to the power module and environmental commodities module. VC’s agile methodology helped us get over the hump and adopt these new efficiencies we needed.”
Manny Neupane, Director Applications & Business Intelligence
Value Creed, LLC, founded in 2016, is a managed services firm headquartered in Dallas, TX, specializing in commodity trading and risk management technology and business process optimization. The firm offers expert-driven managed services, business process outsourcing, cloud enablement, and CTRM complementary technologies to help CTRM customers achieve optimal value in their software investment. For more information, visit www.valuecreed.com or call (833) 282-7333.
Capital Power (TSX: CPX) is a growth-oriented North American power producer headquartered in Edmonton, Alberta. The company develops, acquires, owns, and operates power generation facilities using a variety of energy sources. Capital Power owns approximately 6,200 megawatts (MW) of power generation capacity at 26 facilities across North America. Approximately 800 MW of owned generation capacity is in advanced development in Alberta and Illinois.
For more information, visit www.capitalpower.com.