Scalable ERP & Commodity Trading Solution | Arantys 3.5 Scalable ERP & Commodity Trading Solution | Arantys 3.5
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‘A Scalable ERP, and commodity trading solution’ – Arantys Release 3.5

Cadran Consultancy announces its latest release of Arantys, the number one ERP & CTRM solution for Commodity Traders. This release is publicly available as per May 2020. This release includes 3 main topics:

  1. New and different integrations to standard JD Edwards
  2. Lot costing improvements and
  3. New functionality to allow for registration of the Ultimate Beneficiary Owner.

Support the end-to-end value chain

Marjan van Son, Arantys Product Owner comments: “This release came about both from feedback from the market (UBO registration) and clients on their use of our system. It required a rethinking of core functionality, allowing us to further build on this towards the future. Our team has used this release to further improve our product development. Next releases will focus on further integration with core JD Edwards ERP functionality”.

Mark Kamphuis, CTRM Business Unit Manager about the future of Arantys: “With this release, we further position Arantys as a scalable solution for clients wishing to benefit both from a strong future proof ERP and a commodity trading solution that allows them to have key insight into their value chain. This release allows us to further integrate our solution, and to meet increasing demand in transactions. Further, with the registration of UBO’s we aid our clients in their regulatory compliance”.

Three main topics in this Release

1. JDEdwards 9.2 Integration: from batches to Business Functions

Many of our clients rely on our software in a more real-time fashion, where more and more users trigger similar transactions that run in batches. As our software interacts with standard JD Edwards functions (to allow for an accurate general ledger automatically) this functionality is crucial for a scalable system.

This provided the following challenges:

  • Batch processes (within JD Edwards terms “UBEs”) run in a single thread, where we noticed that the increased size of data being run made the system less performant. Especially when a batch process was followed by another batch process this led to performance challenges.
  • In our previous versions of Arantys batch jobs ran in the background, where error messages would sometimes would go unnoticed by end users. This caused frustration and inefficiency, in many occasions this is changed with above described change.

In release 3.5 many of these batch processes have been changed to Business Functions, allowing for better error handling and a more responsive and scalable system. This also allows us to further build on this system in the future. As part of this change we also further improved documentation of our system and error handling towards end-users. Any errors are now visible immediately so that the end-user can act upon this.

2. Lot Costing: An Improved Insight Into Profitability

Lot costing in the Arantys system allows for accurate registration of any costs incurred during the contract to cash process to the specific lot, allowing for a detailed and accurate pre vs post calculation on several levels of detail. This can be seen on the specific lot, on a contract level, commodity level, or many other dimensions. Similar to the integrations being improved above, lot costing is a process that is used often at clients, more and more at scale. Besides a performance update, we have implemented several improvements here.

The following changes have been implemented:

  • The system now looks for every trigger point at which costs need to be added to a lot
  • It assembles these costs and processes any changes to the unit cost
  • It now displays the costs and profitability in an application with an improved user interface

This solution is made to be flexible: the user can choose which transactions they wish to see and whether they want the costs, the revenue, or both. This can help users increase the predictability for future transactions.

The new Lot Costing application in action

Fig 1: The new Lot Costing application in action

This module has now been separated from other core functionality and can be switched on and off, a practice we are now implementing further in Arantys.

It has become increasingly important to ensure that the money flowing through a business is not being used for nefarious and illegal activities. An Ultimate Beneficial Owner (UBO) is a key figure in an organization, such as a CEO, or a person who owns 25% or more of the company. Banks and companies alike are obliged to register these UBO’s and be able to provide proof of this. The goal of our UBO module is to register the key details of UBOs for the purposes of a background check and to ensure the user can only make transactions with appropriate counterparties.

With this new functionality, a user can register the key details of any UBO for any counterparty they (are planning to) do business with. Every UBO for a given counterparty has a status, depending on where they are in the approval process. As this functionality is guided by legal requirements, it is strict: if a single UBO fails to meet a single requirement, the counterparty is blocked from transactions until this is resolved. An automated check (using the JDE Orchestrator) to ensure details have not expired and notifications that make communications about the approval process easier is included.

An Orchestration that blocks a UBO whose passport has expired

Fig 2: An Orchestration that blocks a UBO whose passport has expired

Read more about our product strategy, development approach and team in our recently published blog Product Update: ‘4 Strategies improving the Arantys product development’.

Interested in Arantys?

Would you like to learn more about ERP for Commodity Traders? Get in touch with Bart Dix today, and discover the endless possibilities of Arantys for your organization.