Using software technologies for
ensuring compliance, information
security, business process optimization
and continuity for commodity traders
- Difficulty to differentiate between and to choose from the variety of available products;
!
- Difficulty of seeing business uses through the technical characteristics and description leading to distorted and wrong perception of the products;
!
- Difference in priorities of IT and operations teams leading to inability of the IT team to clear the technical fog and explain the business application of an IT product;
!
- Lack of knowledge and lack of training of the employees.
- Buying commodities in a producer country and selling at an international exchange, keeping the profits center in Switzerland and subject to the beneficial c o n d i t i o n s o f f e r e d b y t h e S w i s s jurisdiction;
!
- 10-30 employees;
A typical Swiss based commodity trading company
- No dedicated IT team. IT functions outsourced, or combined with other functions, e.g. with accounting;
!
- Software in use generally limited to MS Office - Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, a PDF viewer, web browser, WinRAR archiver, and antivirus.
Using specialized CRM or ERP solution:!
- Synchronization with Outlook;
- Access via web-interface from any device connected to the internet; - Reminders to follow-up or report a past event;
- Tracking performance of employees by their superiors; - Setting tasks by superiors;
- Ease of taking over tasks in case of absence or quitting by an employee;
- Available as OpenSource products at no cost to the company.
CRM and ERP
Standard practice:!
- Planning is usually done in Outlook calendar; - Reporting is either done on an event basis in Wo rd f o r m a t , c o u n t e r p a r t y b a s i s i n a spreadsheet, or not done at all;
- Widest used means of corporate communications;
- 75%-90% of all corporate data gets sent via email;
- Email is the most common source of leakage of confidential and sensitive information;
- ~40% of employees admit to spending 1 hour per day in the office using corporate email for personal correspondence;
- In an average company with 100 employees approximately 1700 business days per year are spent on personal email, amounting to the annual work time of 7.4 employees.
Email Facts
2009 2013
Av e r a g e d a i l y n u m b e r o f e m a i l messages sent and received by a business user
167 messages
219 messages
33% greymail and spam
67% business and personal emails
The average ratio of business and personal emails to greymail and spam
- Statistically, the estimated number of emails passing through the corporate email server of a company with 15 employees per year is:
15 employees * 240 workdays * 219 messages=788,400 messages;
!
- Storing messages directly on the email server overloads it and hinders its performance;
!
- In case of malfunction or failure of the email server, data from the server is likely to be unrecoverable;
!
- If an employe clears his mailbox before quitting, important corporate data may be lost;
!
- Specialized email archiving software, such as MailArchiva from Stimulus Software is a recommended solution.
- High compatibility with third party software and hardware;
!
- Index based search mechanism, similar to internet search engines, ensuring fast search times in large volumes of data. Search times of under 2 seconds in an archive of 12 terabytes as compared to 32 minutes search times by competitor product;
!
- 56 search criteria available by default ensure high accuracy of search results;
!
- Quick and easy installation and integration into the existing IT infrastructure - less than 2 hours;
!
- Highly competitive pricing;
!
- Worldwide network of technical support engineers;
!
- No dependence on third party database technologies and no related hidden costs of acquisition and costs of ownership;
!
-Highly competitive pricing.
- Compliance with laws and industry standards;
!
- Investigation of information security incidents;
!
- Data analysis for Business Intelligence purposes;
!
- Disaster recovery of data.
Uses of an email archive
- Business process optimization: case in point - accounting.
! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! Standard approach to accounting:!
!
- Individual transaction code is assigned to every contract. The individual code consists of
accounting code for type of
commodity, accounting code for type of delivery, and the contract number;
! ! !
- Contractual documents are sent and received by email in PDF format. Documents are printed out. The individual transaction code is stapled to them. The paper copy is stored;
!
- Upon receiving all of the documents relating to a specific transaction, the documents are scanned into a single file. The individual transaction code is used as the file name. The electronic file containing all of the documents is archived, while the hard copy is also stored.
Problems with the standard approach to accounting:!
!
- Where several contracts are performed in parallel, the volume of accounting
documents may exceed 10,000 pages per month;
!
- Inefficient use of employees’ time for printing and re-scanning documents;
!
- High requirements for physical space for storing the archive;
!
- Archiving documents electronically only after the completion of a contract.
Optimization of accounting processes using MailArchiva and free software tools:!
!
- A document relating to a specific contract is received via email.
- The document is opened in a PDF viewer. Annotate function is used to add the individual transaction number and other keywords to the file.
!
-The annotated file is sent to a dedicated mailbox [email protected] and immediately archived in MailArchiva;
- The process takes less than 1 minute;
!
- As new transaction documents arrive, the procedure is repeated;
!
- Using the individual transaction code as the search word gives a search result containing all of the documents related to the transaction. They may be downloaded in bulk and stored in a single archive file;
!
- Accounting item codes may be used as search word for finding documents relating to all transactions for a certain commodity, a certain supply term, a certain counterparty, etc.
- Addition of keywords allows using words and codes as search criteria, making the archive useable for work not only by accounting specialists.
- Mobility of workforce has become a major trend over the past decade.
!
- Mobility is a key issue particularly for commodities trading companies, as it is necessary to travel to meet suppliers and buyers.
!
Mobility of workforce has presented new challenges for the business world:
- Remote access to data;
!!
- Collaboration between employees in different locations;
!!
- Storage, backup, security and protection of data on mobile devices;
!!
- Recovery of data in case of malfunction, loss, or theft of mobile devices;
!!
- Control over mobile employees and their access to and usage of data.
- Remote access to data via a special client
program or via web-interface from any computer connected to the internet.
!
- Backup of data and software on mobile devices.
!
- Tracking of lost/stolen device location, even if it is not equipped with a GPS module.
!
- Function for remote data delete by admin in case of loss of mobile device.
!
- Function for automatic deletion of sensitive data in case of loss of mobile device.
!
- DLP functionality.
!
- Data collection for e-governance and investigation purposes.
- Swiss based software consultancy company;
!
- Official reseller of MailArchiva in Switzerland;
!
- More than 10 years experience in the software market;
!
- Specialization in OpenSource, proprietary, and software as a service solutions. ! ! ! ! ! [email protected] www.lygosoft.ch
