iRely Sees CM/CTRM-Accounting Integration as Key
We caught up with iRely again about a week ago. They were very keen to extoll the virtues of integrated accounting and Commodity Management/CTRM. “We have always had integrated accounting within the iRely solution,” iRely’s Sanjit Paul told us. “Many of our US customers have been using it for quite some time and now we are seeing interest in other geographies like Europe. We have 30-years of experience in the US of supply an integrated accounting/CM solution.” He told us that traditionally, many prospects use local accounting solutions and need to integrate. However, the integration is not easy and often ends up taking a lot of time and money to pull off. “The combination of the accounting and commodity management functionality is rapidly becoming a very interesting value proposition for iRely,” said iRely’s George Olney. “We are already implementing the entire solution for a large customer in Europe in the soft commodities space.”
ComTech cannot but agree that the integration of CM/CTRM with accounting solutions can be both problematic and expensive. In fact, we often hear that this interface or integration is routinely underestimated. As George told us, “Accruals and schedules are being accounted for and integrated and we are also looking at trade finance and planning on integrating that as well into our accounting solution.” He further explained that accounting happens at each stage in the commodity supply chain process and so tight integration is useful in order to give good visibility all the way through that set of business processes. iRely is hard at work making a few modifications to suit European customers in areas like IFRS, for example.
According to iRely, part of the problem is that ERP vendors often do not really get commodities at all having little experience or expertise with the complexities of a commodity business. They assert that this is iRely’s core business and they do understand commodities and their accounting subtleties. They see this area as very important and presenting a growing need in the market. “70% of our pipeline is looking for an integrated accounting system,” Sanjit told us. While many solutions come with an accounting interface of some sorts, it often does not remove the complexity of integration. Part of the issue is the needed granularity of transaction data in both systems and needing to reconcile this when building an interface. “Even if the customer has an accounting system that they want to continue to use, the very fact that we do too means that we can handle the granularity issue smoothly, quickly and easily,” George told us.
Meanwhile, iRely continues to add customers and has added a couple of new customers in Canada and Europe in recent months. It is also seeking to add expertise. In particular, it will be adding a risk management product manager in the very near future. As George told us in a previous briefing, 2021 is a year of re-investing in the business and that includes hiring additional staff to support and continue to develop the software.
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