...Spring/Summer Release

Leading multi-commodity trading and risk management Cloud provider Aspect Enterprise Solutions announced the latest major release of its AspectCTRM suite with increased support for the physical delivery process for oil trading companies.

Because AspectCTRM is a Cloud solution, this Spring/Summer release required no software downloads, or on-site customization and deployment by consultants. New features were released to users over a weekend with no interruption to the business.

AspectCTRM features trade, risk, operations and financial management modules. This new Spring/Summer release features Railcar Operations Support which is delivered as part of its physical storage and shipment functions. To fully understand profits, losses and risk exposure, it’s important for trading companies to have accurate physical trading data, including movements and inventory changes.

Aspect has customers in Geneva and Moscow where it’s required for companies to be able to track railcar activities at a granular level, and on an individual railcar basis. AspectCTRM is flexible and can capture all data on each railcar, and also associated costs and demurrage detail. It also allows users to allocate any number of cars of a train to one contract. In Russia, for example, Aspect customers purchase contracts on the arrival at destination. This means the user can automatically trigger the pricing of a deal at multiple settlement prices based on predefined rules. Other systems cannot perform these actions, and are not this flexible.

In North America, with newly added crude production of more than 1 million bbls per day due to enhanced recovery techniques like fracking, traditional modes of transportation such as truck and pipelines are at or near present capacity. New rail lines and additional railcars are being built or converted to accommodate the changing supply/demand landscape to move crude closer to their regional market for processing.

AspectCTRM answers the market’s needs for railcar support, and features include critical planning and scheduling tools to track: Crude oil volumes in transit, loading and discharge quantities, scheduling and sorting for FIFO mapping; and the capability to calculate and valuate transport losses. Railcar delivery registry uploads and cargo deliveries are all managed in the same system, and not in several spreadsheets where major errors occur.

According to Aspect CEO Steve Hughes, these added functions are just another step toward AspectCTRM’s evolution as a world-class, complete solution for today’s physical trading companies.

“We’ve long been known for our trade and risk capabilities, and also for our high-performance technology which allows our solution to calculate large volumes of data in real time. Over the past two years we’ve really focused on the physical transport side of the trading business. And by adding and enhancing railcar functionality, which is already being implemented for several of our customers, shows that we’re responding to our customer’s needs – and the market’s,” says Hughes. “We’ll continue to enhance these functions, as well as the underlying architecture that allows us to stay at the forefront in technology.”

AspectCTRM’s Physical Operations Module includes a series of work benches to manage movements into, out of and between storage locations. Its reporting capabilities are unlike other systems, where reports many times are custom, costly and created by the vendor. Aspect’s reporting tools allow the users to create reports through easy, on-screen configuration commands.