Discover what ION can do for you
Over 300 unique agricultural organizations rely on ION solutions to manage their risk
Volatile prices, congested supply chains, fluctuations in demand, growth in population, unexpected severe weather impacts, soaring fertilizer costs, and unstructured data are just a few of the challenges for the agriculture industry. The greatest pains and also the greatest potential gains arise from the aggregation, storage, and distribution of raw commodities. To mitigate market risks and maximize margins, your business needs a front-, middle-, and back-office solution designed for agricultural commodities trading and consumer-packaged goods (CPG). Whether you are a farmer-facing originator, a trader, or a procurement specialist, ION offers solutions that span the entire agribusiness value chain from farm to fork.
Value delivered
- Challenge
Managing inventory and relationships
Empty space returns nothing. However, filling storage space is harder than ever before. Relationships with producers are key to buying enough to fill storage space and maximize carry in the market. Crisp communication of bids, transparency of tickets, and clear visibility of open contracts are all valuable to building relationships. Having adequate software tools, like an agricultural commodity trading platform, to manage the warehousing of both owned and unowned inventory is crucial in today’s market.
SolutionMaximize the value of your storage
ION offers solutions that provide producers with real-time mobile access to contracts, tickets, and settlement data derived straight from our commodity management systems. Our solutions are designed for agriculture value chain management, accurately monitoring inventory and position while accounting for all front-, middle-, and back-office activity in real time so you can leverage scenario intelligence to make faster, better decisions.
- Challenge
Inefficient operations
Whether a plant is crushing, milling, malting, or refining, it’s crucial that its supply and demand needs are met. The right software tools can give visibility and insight into the processing operations to boost efficiency. Maximizing the processing margin and keeping the plant running at ideal capacity requires the constant monitoring of logistics, positions, and margins.
SolutionOptimize business processes
ION offers solutions that address the contract management of both raw material supply and processed product demand while offering formula-based manufacturing tracking. With cost-based manufacturing of ingredients, formulas and recipes can be used to compute production, by-products, and scraps. Contract execution tools and inventory management are used to aggregate positions across plants and market exposure to provide a complete operational view.
- Challenge
Uncertain margins
Buying at the current replacement value, irrespective of the last sale price, is part of a trader’s daily management of market dynamics. The trader assumes that all current unallocated quantities sell at market. As volatility increases, commodity price risk mitigation is crucial to avoid shifts in profit and loss. Hedging strategies are deployed to support trading of a more manageable basis component. This requires accurate positions in real time to avoid hedge slippage and undesired shifts in profits.
SolutionTrade with confidence
ION’s multi-commodity solutions offer tools that provide complete control over trading operations. With functionality for contracting, trading, hedging, execution, settlement, and risk management, our end-to-end solutions ensure support for your entire business. By gaining visibility into positions, exposures, P&L, and margins, your business can make more confident trading decisions.
- Challenge
Unpredictable markets
Supply chain bottlenecks and a lack of real-time risk visibility make procurement departments scramble for answers. Price volatility in raw materials and food inflation is difficult to pass to end consumers because retail markets are more inelastic than the commodity world. Tools to generate and track risk positions are crucial to cover the forecasted spend associated with raw materials.
SolutionAnalyze raw material forecast, coverage, and spend in one glance
ION’s raw material coverage, spend, and performance reporting give your organization a competitive advantage. By applying standard ERP integration, raw material forecasts can be broken down with cost models to separate ingredients into underlying exposure buckets, giving granular risk reporting.
Frequently asked questions
I am a small country elevator with a few locations and need a powerful, yet simple solution that fits my budget. Which products should I consider?
Agtech is specifically designed for farm-gate origination, with specific features for grain contracting and warehousing. TriplePoint is also a solution worth consideration if you need more depth around FX and risk analytics. ION offers a portfolio of commodity management systems to support agribusiness. Contact us so we can work together to determine the right ION solution for you.
I am a global organization that trades a diverse set of commodities. I desire a solution that can be configured to work differently based on geography and region, but can still report centrally. Which products should I consider?
Openlink is a sophisticated solution with standard agricultural features that can be customized and configured to fit the specific needs of a diverse organization. Since many factors need to be considered, contact us to learn if Openlink is the best solution for your business.
I am a manufacturer of food and beverage retail and I need a solution to help manage my coverage of raw material spend by ingredient price component. Which products should I consider?
TriplePoint supports the analysis of raw material forecast, coverage, and spend in one glance. By leveraging standard ERP integration, raw material forecasts can be broken down with cost models to separate ingredients into underlying exposure buckets, giving the most granular reporting of risk possible. Contact us to determine if TriplePoint is the right ION solution for you.
What should agriculture businesses look for when considering CTRM tools?
Growers, originators, and producers have started adopting CTRM systems to gain the real-time business intelligence necessary to make better, smarter decisions around trade execution, position management, and physical logistics. Here is a checklist of the key functionalities that agriculture businesses should look for when considering CTRM solutions.
- Trading: A CTRM solution should provide complete control over trading operations and enable traders to better manage current positions. It should integrate physical and financial trading, improve trading efficiencies, provide sensitivity analysis, and enable “what if” scenarios.
- Price risk management: Sophisticated analytical tools will allow portfolio stress testing and enable you to analyze real-time position and exposure for optimized price risk management.
- Chartering and vessel operations: A CTRM system should allow you to manage all chartering, post-fixture activities (including freight risk management), and financial aspects of commercial vessel operations in a single system.
- Scheduling: A CTRM system should manage the logistical complexities and streamline the supply chain operations required to transport bulk commodities. It should handle all transactions from straightforward physical trade matching to complex itinerary scheduling.
- Counterparty credit risk management: A CTRM solution should address the entire credit risk process and provide a full range of credit analysis and operational tools in all key areas.
- Hedge accounting: A key component of any CTRM solution is the ability to manage the daunting set of requirements under hedge accounting regulations.
- Fair value disclosure: The system must provide the tools and framework to define, measure, and manage fair value levels and meet all disclosure requirements for compliance.