Houston’s Elliptical International Chooses Aspect For Its Completeness, Service And Flexibility

Houston, Texas headquartered shipping and energy marketing/physical commodity trading firm Elliptical International, LLC has chosen the AspectCTRM trade and risk management solution as a key part of its oil and gas sales and marketing arm. Aspect’s leading global multi-commodity solution will also play a vital role in Elliptical’s shipping and logistics operations as the firm grows and develops its overseas markets.

The choice of Aspect’s advanced solution precedes news of Elliptical’s accreditation to trade with major Russian suppliers including Rosneft and Gazprom. Effective and credible systems for real time management of operations, trading and risk were key to the Russian deal as Elliptical’s Director of Operations Brad Mothersbaugh explains: “It was a defining moment as far as showing our capabilities. Having AspectCTRM underscored the fact that we had a solid capability of managing our operations. No doubt it played a part in obtaining these accreditations which we are justly proud to have received.”

AspectCTRM is now widely seen as the benchmark for cloud-based energy/physical commodity trading and risk management systems. As well as mainstream trade and risk functionality the solution has modules for physical operations, logistics, storage, and shipping by sea, road and rail. As more territories and logistical resources become available to Elliptical, managing supply chains and scheduling will become increasingly complex.

“We’re not worried about how we’re going to be handling all this,” added Elliptical’s Gail Randle. “AspectCTRM will be a life saver. The fact that Aspect can do all this too was a real influencer in our choice of the solution.”

Mothersbaugh and his colleagues were influenced in other ways too, not least of which were previous experiences with other solutions at prior employers. “In the past we’ve used other big name ETRM and CTRM software and found them inflexible, cumbersome and difficult to use. We’re talking square pegs in round holes.”

Conversely, other colleagues who had used Aspect at previous firms had nothing but good things to say, and this has since been borne out at Elliptical. “We like Aspect’s cloud foundation, we need no extra IT and as we travel a lot, we can get to our transactions from pretty much anywhere at any time Globally,” adds Mothersbaugh.

“With Aspect we literally hit the ground running. There’s a completeness to the system that’s missing in other offerings: it does everything we need in one system. Also the degree of understanding and the level of service we get from Aspect’s Houston team has been exemplary.”