CRM Solutions: Competitive Advantages for Grain Traders
The original article was published on Latifundist.
How to buy more? From whom to buy? How to purchase more efficiently? Where is it most profitable to source the grain from, and to which port should it be delivered? IT technologies allow for quick answers to all these questions, helping to develop the business more effectively.
Machine vs Human Factor
Of course, if you’re alone in the company, you can use a notebook, your memory, or an Excel spreadsheet for these tasks. Everything changes when a team appears, and the number of potential clients exceeds a hundred, with dozens of different records for each of them — from volumes and planted areas to contacts and details. This notebook grows to the size of Tolstoy’s novels, and to look up the grain prices from previous years, you need to pull out a ladder and search through volumes on the top shelves.
The situation escalates when your buyer, for instance, in the Kherson region, needs to know that price, and you naturally have to answer calls (many phone calls). And so do your employees. Some might enjoy this pace, but it certainly does not contribute to scaling the team and the business as a whole. That is why businesses aiming to remain competitive have long been considering automating such simple processes.
The IT market has had solutions for 20 years aimed at automating such relationships within companies. This industry originated from universal solutions for any type of business, designed to bring all company business processes to a single template. In different industries, this has been achieved with varying degrees of success. Therefore, in the past five years, there has been a trend of evolving such systems into specialized fields: each industry now has its own IT solutions that most accurately describe all company processes. Grain trading is no exception.
But first, let’s clarify what a CRM system is. It’s a module for managing customer relationships (in the case of grain traders — suppliers, buyers, farms, elevators). It allows for the convenient storage of all contacts, the entry of information about potential deals, market indicators, access to the entire history of prices and relationships, and knowledge of available volumes for purchase from various market players.
One of the most important functions of such a CRM module is to reduce the influence of the human factor and cut costs. The system automates many processes: it can compile and display the best purchasing offers and the best available sales options, taking into account logistics and related grain transportation expenses to the destination point. Such a CRM should consider the performance and efficiency of each purchasing manager, allowing them to work both in a team and remotely, with each user having access only to their own database.
How can a CRM help improve business efficiency? Let’s look at an example of how a CRM can enhance purchasing efficiency. Regional managers, after communicating with suppliers, enter data on the availability of certain amounts of grain for different crops, as well as yield and planting area indicators (for forecasts).
Managers, while interacting with counterparts, track the market and enter data into the system. This might include information about the volume, price, deadlines, and locations where buyers are ready to make a purchase. Based on this data, along with logistics information (elevator and farm locations, tariffs), the program selects and compiles the most advantageous options for deals. Additionally, the system stores price and calculation history and allows for automatic cost calculations of the grain at the moment of purchase at the elevator or sale at the port.
As demonstrated by the practice of using the CRM module by GrainTrack clients, this drastically reduces the number of unnecessary office calls asking for prices or requests like “Lena, calculate the logistics.” All the necessary data is available in the system, with the ability to limit different representatives’ access to information, so each buyer can see only their own suppliers. It also allows for tracking individual performance, setting tasks, receiving action notifications, and seeing any changes made by any user in the system.
Another important aspect: CRM systems are designed not to complicate users’ lives with a complex, unfamiliar interface or work approach but to make the employee’s work more enjoyable and the company more transparent for the manager. With dropdown lists, prompts, calendars, and reminders, employees will be focused solely on the essentials. Managers, in turn, will get a complete picture of events and forecasts thanks to tools for analysis, change tracking, and efficiency monitoring.
In developed countries, having a tool for automating business processes is a competitive advantage, as it not only helps reduce internal communication costs but also enables faster decision-making and more efficient business operations in the rapidly changing grain market.
In general, a CRM module (for managing customer relationships) can be implemented together with an ERP system (for managing contracts, logistics, payments, and reports). The example of GrainTrack shows how all data is centralized and interconnected in one place, rather than scattered across multiple files throughout the back office.