Aspect Enterprise Solutions Announces Industry First Ferrous And Steel Market News/Data Solution

Commodities market information and decision support leader Aspect Enterprise Solutions (AES) today unveils the industry’s first comprehensive Web-based ferrous metals and steel market news, data and decision support solution.

Building on its proven AspectDSC (Decision Support Center) energy and commodities platform, AES will for the first time provide real-time access to Platts’ ferrous market news, information and historical data, together with powerful decision support analytics, all through a single, easy to use and intuitive interface. Platts is a leading global publisher of energy and metals information.

AspectDSC will allow raw materials and steel producers, shippers, scrap dealers, smelters, stockholders and fabricators of ferrous metals and steel to make better informed buy/sell decisions, while minimizing their risk and exposure in what has become a volatile market. The solution provides vital global real-time and historical data and news for iron ore, coking coal, pig iron and semi-finished steel products (including HRC, CRC, billet, and long products) as well as all-important freight and holdings information.

“Until now this critical information has simply not been available from a single source in such an easy to understand way. Now users can have instant 24x7 access from their desktops, laptops, PDAs and mobile phones almost anywhere in the world,” explains AES global sales director for metals trading and risk management Rob Hamilton.

For many working in ferrous metals and steel the new solution fills a crucial gap in the sector. Traditionally a market characterized by long term, fixed price contracts it has of late become a highly volatile and fast changing one driven by growing demand, largely from emerging economies like China and India.

“As a consequence there’s a move towards shorter term, variable price deals with suppliers, producers and shippers all looking to manage their risk and exposure. With AspectDSC they have a single point of reference, underpinned by the best market data available,” adds Hamilton.

This new product offering joins the established portfolio of AspectDSC solutions serving the oil, base/precious metals and plastics, and agricultural markets. It is already widely deployed on desktop, Apple® iPhone®, Blackberry® and a wide range of other mobile devices with global traders, brokerage companies and financial institutions as well as commodity producers, processors and dealers.

AspectDSC brings together real-time and historical spot and futures prices and news from the most trusted market sources including Platts, CME Group, ICE, Dow Jones and others. Users are able to leverage these data sources with decision support tools found in AspectDSC to make quicker more informed minute-by-minute financial decisions in fast-moving energy, metals, agricultural and other commodities trading markets as well as analyzing trends and performing technical analyses.

Delivered as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application, AspectDSC requires no special software to be installed, making it ultra-fast to deploy, easy to support and simple to learn and use. Users can customize the solution to their own specific needs, displaying as little or as much information as they require.