ERP + CTRM in the Cloud – That’s What Satoshi Systems is Rolling Out!
I first met Saurabh Goyal a few years ago as he was a speaker at one of our CTRM Conference events. At the time, he was head of IT Systems, for a large Ags firm. I had heard that he had left that firm and helped to start a vendor called Satoshi Systems Ltd., but until I saw him again as a member of my CTRM panel at ComRisk earlier this year, I had more or less lost touch. A couple of weeks ago, Saurabh, his co-founder Khai Vualnam (an ex-colleague from the same Ags firm) and some of his team, took the time to give us a briefing and quick demo of their newly developed software platform.
With the emergence of the cloud, there have been quite a few new entrants into the CTRM space that attempt to leverage the native cloud model with focused services or fully functional CTRM solutions. In recent years, other technologies like AI and blockchain have also gained in interest and started to get some application in the space as well. However, Satoshi’s vision is for me, potentially unique. It set out to develop a fully functional ERP+CTRM solution in the cloud specifically targeted at small and medium enterprises in commodities. Its competitors are, on paper at least, vendors like SAP as well as the usual suspects in the broader commodities management field. As its website says its’, “mission is to transform the way commodity trade, finance and management is conducted via the leveraging of intelligent, efficient emerging technologies that will enable all participants to prosper and to profit.”
As Saurabh explained, “trading of physical commodities is an operationally intensive business which can be run efficiently using an appropriate ERP and CTRM solution. But, traditional ERPs are often customized heavily for each commodity customer and most popular CTRM systems were built on legacy technology, takes 9-18 months to implement, cost around $2-5 million to implement and $400-700K per annum to operate. In our opinion, these types of system are out of reach of Small and Medium Enterprise commodity traders. We have built a true SaaS solution on cloud using the latest tech stack that offers all ERP+CTRM functions on a web browser. Our solution is offered at an unbeatable price point, which makes the operations very cost effective without any compromises on the functionalities. Additionally, the implementation time is very less and the system can be integrated to a larger ecosystem of commodity supply chain partners such as customers, suppliers, transport & warehouse providers, financiers, supervision companies, etc. In effect, we are doing to the commodity management software industry what salesforce.com and xero.com did to the CRM and accounting software industries respectively.”
The solution as I saw it in the demonstration is well designed with an attractive, modern looking, configurable user interface including dashboards. It has all of the functionality at a high-level expected of an ERP such as BOM, Receivables, Purchases, Payables, Finance, Banking, Projects, Inventory and so on, as well as a CTRM section that supports physical and financial commodities. This is all cloud native and accessed via a web browser and available multi-tenanted. Functionally, it seems to cover pretty much everything I would expect and to be a functional solution. It also includes all the features that users have come to appreciate like online document management, workflow, approvals, dump to Excel etc.
Saurabh started the business in December 2016 with seed capital and as of 2019, has live customers using the product. The vendor is now adding emerging technologies such as IoT and Machine Learning to the solution and has obtained grant funding from Innovate UK to do this. “Now,” he told me, “we need to start marketing the software and make it known more widely.” To our knowledge, what the Satoshi team has done is unique as a start-up building out an ERP and CTRM targeted at smaller commodity entities and we will be keeping an eye on its future progress with considerable interest.
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