capSpire Blog

You wouldn’t take a Ferrari to any standard garage when it needs to be serviced, right?

Of course not.

You’d take it to a service center that, at minimum, specializes in high-end sports cars or luxury European automobiles.

Why? It comes down to quality.

Specialized technicians are more likely to know your vehicle make and model, and have experience working on it. The service center is also more likely to have the most compatible parts and won’t install anything that could compromise the performance and long-term integrity of your car. They’ll help to protect your substantial purchase and maximize your use and enjoyment of it.

The same is true for commodity trading and risk management systems. You wouldn’t want to place such a sophisticated system in the care of a standard CTRM support service provider or an IT department that isn’t at all familiar with this niche area of expertise. Doing so risks major business disruptions and less-than-optimal system performance. Companies can waste a lot of time and money chasing fixes that don’t pan out and end up causing more harm.

Companies need a support team that knows their particular system inside out, in addition to understanding their industry and business processes.

This is the value that capSpire brings: In-depth knowledge of both the technology and the business the technology supports. The quality of our support services ensures that companies get high-quality results and the biggest return on investment over the life of their CTRM system.

How the quality of capSpire’s Operations Support team is a cut above other managed services providers:

• We minimize costs associated with CTRM systems over the long term by emphasizing quality at the outset of any case.
• We don’t try to cover up any mistakes we make. In fact, we highlight where we find problems and we fix them. We’re always reviewing our own code and we have our own internal optimization guides.
• Comprising of former IT professionals and employees of major CTRM vendors, our team knows quite a bit. But if there’s something we don’t know, we’ll take the time to research it within our team—honestly and openly—to get companies the best results.
• We understand how to minimize business disruptions—and avoid any negative repercussions—when delivering support services. That’s because we understand CTRM systems and the full end-to-end infrastructure operating around them, along with integrated market systems. We know how one thing impacts another.
• Our recommendations for fixing technical issues also come with advice for how to enhance system performance in alignment with business needs.
• Our work happens effortlessly and seamlessly. No one sees the complexity behind the scenes. We do the job correctly and efficiently, and we make your IT department look good. 

Need more proof? The majority of our work comes from referrals. The hundreds of leading energy and commodity companies around the world that we’ve partnered with wouldn’t trust us if others couldn’t vouch for our service quality.

Previously, my colleague Dave Webb wrote about why having a commodity trading and risk management (CTRM) support services partner is so beneficial. To expand on the conversation about why capSpire is different from other CTRM consultancies, read more about what else, in addition to our quality of support, sets us apart: our governance, service delivery, user engagement, and our dedication to continuous improvement.

If you have any questions about capSpire’s operations support team, please contact me and my team at operations@capspire.com.

Rob Parker has more than 21 years of experience in technology and CTRM systems and provides solutions that consider underlying technical infrastructure, trade life cycle, and user expectations. He has experience working with public and private sectors in client-engagement, vendor-facing, and client-facing roles in demanding environments. With years of functional and technical-implementation experience across multiple commodities, Rob has deep expertise of leading CTRM systems. He has delivered many enterprise-ready solutions that solve complex business problems within these applications, and his expertise helps clients maximize their investments, optimize performance, and achieve project success.