Gen10 and it’s CommOS – Demo Report
It had been a while since we had had a demo of Gen10’s CommOS software but recently, we were afforded an opportunity to change that. Richard Williamson, CEO of Gen10, has a vision in which people employed in the commodities world have seamless and up to the minute access to all the information that they need presented in a manner that optimizes their time, to get their job done. “We enable our customers to buy, sell, store, ship, trace, finance, insure and hedge commodities more effectively, at much lower cost and help drive value from their massive data flows,” he said. His vision has been delivered in the form of an application ecosystem delivered in the cloud that it calls CommOS. He told us that “what makes Gen10 different is our focus on making the day-to-day tasks of commodity trading faster and simpler through automation and collaboration.”
One thing that as an analyst I can say about Gen10 is that it has an uncanny ability to innovate almost continuously. This is all the more suprising because Gen10 doesn’t have an army of programmers in India or eastern Europe but rather has a small team of experts based largely in the UK. For example, it was one of the first vendors in the space to embrace an ecosystem approach and it has designed and built a Commodity Management/CTRM solution that is truly configurable. Its solution is cloud ready and SaaS. Want to add a new commodity? No coding required. It’s configuration. It also has embedded easy to structure and use workflow and document management into its solution meaning that developing controls over your business and reducing operational risk through checks and balances is both feasible and easy.
In terms of the demo, the software is slickly designed such that all of the information you need is actually available on the screen except that it is grouped in ‘buckets’ of summary type information that when accessed provides drilldown as well as navigation to other parts of the system that may be needed to fulfil a task. Of course, much of that is also well – configurable. Having worked in areas as diverse and as complex as cotton, concentrates, and oil and gas, much is catered for out of the box and much of that is also configurable. Communication with third-parties is easily achieved right from the screen allowing documents to be generated, distributed, received and stored or referenced. This includes various contracts, bills of lading and so on. Graphics are used yet not overused – these include if desired real-time vessel position and route plans on maps via integtration using APIs with vessel tracking services. In terms of functionality, it has everything for most supply chains including inventory and storage, shipping by almost all forms of transport, assays, bulk and break bulk, ability to manage finished goods as well as raw materials, estimates and costs, pricing even of concentrates, through to invoice or progress and estimated/final invoicing and integration to the accounting system of choice. It also includes a variety of risk limits – configurable and reports.
If it sound like I was impressed you would be right. I was. That doesn’t mean that it handles every situation, every company’s requirements and so on – just that what it does, it does seemingly as advertised on the box. Gen10, of course, is not a large vendor and so we would assume that buyers also have concerns other than the software in areas like implementation and lengevity and so on. Yet, Gen10 has been around almost a quarter of a century already and conducted over 150 projects to date, according to Richard, in diverse areas like “marine cargo insurance, inspection services, laboratories, and consortia.”
Configurability of course also comes with its own risks and potential downsides. Making sure you understand how the system can be configured to meet the needs and process flow in your business is key. Making configuration mistakes early can come back to haunt you later on in the project. Configurability is complexity I used to say and it is still true to an extent. It is a worthwhile activity and use of time to get to better understand the capabilities of a solution before rushing to deploy it.
The demo showed us that Gen10 has a fairly comprehensive and quite modern technology offering that has benefited from a diverse history of working in the commodities space and dealing with its complexities. It is an innovative vendor and has a track record to demonstrate it and at this point in its history and development, it seems set to grow. All vendors and solutions have their pros and cons and this is as true of Gen10 as its competitors. However, the demo suggests that Williamson has stuck true to his stated mission and while the only proof is using the solution in anger, seems to be well on the way to delivering on it.
