A commodities trading platform to support £3.5bn contracts and services each year

Client

ADM Agriculture is a UK subsidiary of ADM, one of the world’s largest agricultural processors and food ingredient providers, with more than 31,000 employees, serving customers in 170+ countries.

ADM Agriculture operates from offices throughout England and offers a people-based, quality service to farmers and consumers. As well as providing an integrated supply chain to ADMs UK assets in milling and oil seed crushing, ADM Agriculture supplies a full range of non-grain feed ingredients to the feed and fuel markets, alongside a comprehensive range of seed and fertilisers.

Background

ADM Agriculture’s legacy trading platform was becoming a barrier to the business’ growth, with many employees’ jobs starting to involve implementing workarounds to the system to carry out their roles, costing the business time and resources.

ADM sought to find a software development company that could develop a modern commodities trading platform as part of a complex legacy upgrade. It was important that the platform could scale in line with future business growth plans and make time savings for staff.

The company manages three core product areas: fertiliser, seed and grain. Each has 100's of different products and pricing rules, so ADM Agriculture was looking for a partner who could translate complex business logic into an intuitive and secure system. Building a fully bespoke system would give the company the flexibility and speed required to manage the complex workflows that they were dealing with on a daily basis. 

Solution

Audacia and ADM Agriculture worked together through analysis sessions to understand granular levels of detail of business processes, define scenarios and develop and test prototypes to create a fully future-proof system. This initial analysis discovered how employees were carrying out their work and honed in on what the business wanted to achieve. 

Collaborating with stakeholders and end-users throughout the development process, Audacia used a range of technologies, including SQL Server, Azure DevOps, .NET Core, Typescript, Angular and Cypress, to build a modern commodities trading platform. 

Integrated with ADM Agriculture’s two other core systems, NetSuite and Red Tractor Assurance, the platform streamlines and automates key areas of the business including purchase and sales contracts for products, pricing structures on contracts (added as fixed process or variable price dependent on market value at time of execution), and integrated price alerts to notify traders on price fluctuations.

The system contains vital functionality to support the business-critical invoicing module, streamlining the process of generating over 107,000 invoices a year. Covering deliveries between farms and consumers, including invoices for the farmer, haulier and consumer, with digitised footprints for claims made on delivery if the product does not match expected quality.

Providing synchronised and accurate information, there is consistent data transfer across the platform, updating factors including invoice generation and supplier validity in real-time, minimising the costs and obstructions to the commodity trading process and improving financial return.

Audacia worked closely with ADM Agriculture stakeholders to develop internal training programmes on the system and continue to support ADM as they work to further optimise business functions through integrated applications.  

Audacia helped ADM transition to an agile project management methodology and, working in collaboration with the company’s Head of IT, helped implement these processes across the organisation. Through these changes, ADM was able to maintain ongoing scalability and flexibility, supporting the project's evolving requirements and ensuring KPIs were met.

Results 

The solution meets the immediate needs of ADM today and has the capability to scale in line with future business plans. The project met all KPIs, budget and timescales and it is completely scalable, which allows for future changes and growth of the company.  The platform itself is user-focused, eliminating workarounds to the previous system as well as providing significant time and cost savings across the organisation.

The ADM trading platform is currently responsible for over £3.5 billion in trading activity with a global rollout currently underway. In addition, the new system has eliminated workarounds, as well as leading to a 97% reduction in processing time for cancelling truck movements and 12x faster invoicing speeds.

As a result of the platform's flexibility and scalability, the platform has been successfully rolled out across several of ADM Agriculture’s subsidiaries.

With the successful launch of this core trading platform, ADM has continued to invest in innovative technology solutions that can support their future growth plans. Examples of recent innovations include mobile applications for harvest sampling and a web-based portal for all customer-facing work. This additional portal allows customers to review sales contracts, delivery orders, balances over time and store collections, while farmers can review purchase contracts (grain), sales contracts (seed/fertiliser) and collections.

ADM Agriculture and Audacia have established a long-term partnership based on the quality of results secured and the strength of the client relationship developed through the project.