Advanced Global Platform for a Large Manufacturer of Industrial Lubricants
Smart Market Intelligence Software for Underserved Commodities Markets
Emerline built a market intelligence solution for a prospective agriculture startup, aggregating the information on available underserved commodities’ offers for suppliers and customers.
Background
Kontango is an aspiring startup providing solutions to optimize supply chains in chemicals and underserved commodity markets. As market traders had to manually set prices and adjust them to the changing market demands, they were looking for ways to optimize trading procedures. Manual manipulations of prices always took time between market analytics and price adjustments to market gyrations, which led to postponed reactions and delays in decision-making and lost profits.
Another problem was human factor-related mistakes. At this point, the task was not only to react to the changing market conditions in time with competitive prices, but set the correct (intended) price on each commodity asset — quite a challenge when you need to handle multiple assets simultaneously.
Challenge
The client struggled with the following challenges:
Resource-intensive market intelligence
The client had to employ a whole array of human resources to perform market research across producers, traders, distributors, and end-consumers, which involved significant financial investments, including payroll.
Manual workflows
The lack of a digital market intelligence solution forced the client to manually organize, structure, analyze, and report sales data. At this point, they always had to handle large data amounts by themselves.
Inefficient data handling
As a result, they kept all market research data in spreadsheets, which complicated data management and maintenance in the actual state. Consequently, the tracking of market pricing, competitors, and other mission-critical data was a challenging process for traders, suppliers, distributors, end-consumers, and other parties involved.
High loads and lack of scalability
Large data streams and high operational loads led to system interruptions during operation. This issue necessitated the building of a high-performing and scalable market analytics solution to handle growing data volumes error-free.
They needed a digital solution to unify data analytics across underserved, opaque, and illiquid markets and present it to commodity traders and buyers in a convenient, aggregated format.
Methodology & Approach
For the project, we provided a dedicated team that communicated directly with the client in the form of project status syncs, sprint reviews, and other meetings. They regularly collected feedback and gathered new requirements from the client, provided consulting, and jointly worked on particular tasks and projects. This proactive approach ensured rapid decision-making during the development.
Solution
Kontango’s focus was to develop lightweight and purpose-built software solutions, making their products easy to use. With this in mind, our team provided an all-in-one market intelligence solution for underserved commodities. It allowed Kontango’s customers to anticipate gyrations in the market while excluding many of the manual workflows, data management, and reporting challenges of the existing tools. The solution we offered comprised the following functionality:
Dynamic price adjustments
The application enables suppliers and commodity traders to control and dynamically adjust prices (for purchasing and delivery) for agricultural fertilizers depending on a particular location.
Custom application configurations
Commodity traders and suppliers can assemble a unique configuration of the application tailored to their specific needs by adding or excluding any functions (such as chats, comments, analytics charts, individual report tables and their tabs, etc.) to cater for the specific needs of a user/organization.
Customizable maps of commodity offers
The application features a dynamic map of all available vendors within the selected area. From there, users can further set up additional filters to find the best offers.
- Real-time, location-based dashboards with the latest changes of prices/players in the selected location.
- Flexible location management, including dynamic creation of locations on the map, locations’ grouping by specific criteria, and their sharing with other users.
- Configurable viewing permissions: each location’s visibility can be adjusted per user role to prevent unauthorized access.
- Supplier/client modes allow for changing information on offers within the specified location by switching between supplier/client modes.
- Dynamic delivery routes that can be adjusted by location.
Live chats
Users can communicate on any system event (commodities’ availability, prices, delivery terms, etc.) through live chats available right on the map.
Detailed logs
Detailed logs for every event allow users to track the workflow of each deal end-to-end, in particular, checking price dynamics through the time periods specified.
Technology Stack
Business Results
Over time, the provided application helped the client achieve the following business results:
- Operational costs’ reduction. Thanks to process automation, the client managed to reduce the amount of paperwork and cut operational and maintenance costs by 60%.
- Simplified record-keeping. With a unified data storage, the client managed to organize more efficient and consistent document workflows. Since documents were kept in a single system, it became easy for everyone to access the required information whenever needed and maintain the actual state of data.
- Continuous growth of the client base. The application’s usability allowed the client to attract new customers to the app, turning it into a so-called ‘supplier-client hub’. As a result, Kontango’s client base grew by 150% (and this number keeps growing, with new locations regularly added to the map).
- Business growth opportunities. Thanks to the application’s scalability, the client could enter new markets, find new partners, and help more market players build connections and communicate in a more efficient way.
The new application helped the client cut operational costs and attract new clients, which led to a revenue growth of 70% and an overall business efficiency boost. Process automation and great scalability of the new product enabled the client to achieve their goals, and continue growing their business.
Customer review
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The team gladly brought their expertise and delivered us a perfect solution to meet our customers’ business needs.
The Emerline team wasn’t scared of any challenges and managed to design a solution to cater to any analytical or supply chain tasks. Their enthusiasm and process transparency ensured seamless communication and prompt reaction to any adjustment or focus shift from our side. Their experience and dedication allowed them to provide the solution really fast. We highly recommend choosing Emerline as a development partner if you need a high-end solution for your business.
Founder & CEO, Kontango
country
USA
company
Kontango
project summary
PoC and development of the market intelligence software for underserved commodities trading.
solution category
Market intelligence software
industry
Chemical, Supply Chain Management