Commodity Auction Automation System

A commodity is defined as a raw material or a primary agricultural product that can be bought, sold or exchanged. There are various commodities that are in use all over the world. The key difference is their type. Hard commodities that need to be mined or extracted, like gold, oil or rubber and soft commodities that are grown or reared, like tea, corn, coffee, sugar, soybeans or pork and beef.

Most commodities are part of the agricultural supply chain and an integral part of the Agri Tech value chain. There are various markets where each of these commodities are sold and traded and a some of these commodities are sold in auctions. These auctions are a popular means of ensuring that the farmers get the right prices for their produce. Auctions are also the most efficient means to sell large volumes of agricultural commodities and are widely prevalent across the world. Countries like Ethiopia, Uganda and Tanzania for Coffee, Ivory Coast & Ghana for cocoa and Sri Lanka and India for Tea are a few examples.

Auctioning as a platform was undertaken by most of these countries to ensure the farmers get their monies on time and are not dependent on middlemen who earlier managed the commodities and drove prices downwards, leading to farmers not getting the right price.

The Commodity Auction Automation System, is a complete commodity auction platform that provides the following benefits:

Introduces real time availability of auction results.
Increases transparency through built in audit trail.
Creates opportunity to increase trading windows, increase buyer/producer participation and volumes of teas traded at the auction.
Improves time to make decisions.
Reduces time to dispatch teas/receive teas.
Reduces period between auction date and prompt date from 9 days to 5 days.
Improves the quality and speed of access to critical tea trade reports and statistics.
Improves traceability and supply chain visibility.

The key features of the Commodity Auction Automation system are the following:

Typically, these auctions are managed by various Agricultural Boards and to enable these Boards to efficiently manage their auctions, CSM built a platform that enables these commodities to be auctioned in a transparent & efficient process, that can save up to 25% of the time needed to complete an auction cycle. The system uses our proprietary algorithms in Machine Learning to build valuations and pricing models.

Membership Management

Provides a system to register all the stakeholders of the ecosystem. They include producers, buyers, brokers, warehouses, transporters and banks. The system is built to provide each of the stakeholders a customisable business rule-based system access, while ensuring that each of the stakeholders profiling and verification is done online. The workflows are enabled for all the three processes, Bid, Buy Sell.

Catalogue Management

This is the core of the system and is driven by the various commodities available for auctioning. The system showcases a aggregated catalogue to each stakeholder, based on their profiling at the time of registration. The module can provide producers & brokers the options to import various certifications and valuation information from third party systems.

e-Auction

Using real time bidding & price discovery, this allows the stakeholders to efficiently bid for lots as per their requirements. The system also allows for splitting of lots, anonymous bidding and generates auction information, including auction sales data including out lots and sale price of each lot and buyer details. The comprehensive reporting tool can also give historical analysis of all auctioning activity.

Business Management

All the post auction processes including Sale invoice, payment confirmation, Commodity Release Document, delivery order Loading Instructions. Key business reports based on data analytics and BI and logging of all transactions and activities in the e-Auction Catalogue Management modules.