Procurement & Hedging Optimisation
When to buy, when to hedge, when to hold — as a live decision, not a monthly review.
The margin between a good procurement or hedging call and a bad one is where physical trading businesses live or die. Colony builds a decision engine that combines forward curves, physical inventory, demand forecasts, and freight economics into a live “buy / hedge / hold” recommendation that follows the market minute by minute.
Procurement and hedging decisions get made in a monthly meeting. The market moves every second.
In physical trading and inventory-heavy wholesale, procurement and hedging decisions are typically made on a weekly or monthly cadence — often by a senior trader relying on gut feel and yesterday's forward curve. The information required to make the decision live — curve position, inventory age, demand forecast, freight rate, storage cost — lives in five different systems.
Signals it is you
Procurement and hedging decisions cadenced weekly or monthly rather than continuously
Inventory carry costs above 3% of turnover
Recurring “we should have bought / hedged earlier” post-mortems
No systematic modelling of forward-curve-vs-physical-inventory trade-off
A live buy / hedge / hold recommendation engine wired into your ERP.
Colony builds a decision engine that pulls physical inventory (age, cost basis, storage location), forward curves across all relevant benchmarks, demand forecast (bottom-up from customer order patterns), and freight economics — and outputs an updated buy / hedge / hold recommendation per commodity and per book, at chosen cadence (typically 15-minute to 4-hour, tuned to book volatility).
Components
Component · 01
Inventory data ingestion
ERP + warehouse feeds — age, cost basis, storage location per lot.
Component · 02
Forward curve aggregation
Spot + futures + swaps across all client benchmarks, updated continuously.
Component · 03
Demand forecasting
Per-SKU, per-grade, seasonal — bottom-up from customer order patterns.
Component · 04
Freight & storage economics
Live freight rates and storage carry costs baked into every recommendation.
Component · 05
Decision engine
Confidence-scored buy / hedge / hold recommendations with reasoning trail.
What lives under the hood.
ERP integrations
SAP, Sage 200, and MS Dynamics 365 Business Central out of the box.
Forward curve data
Refinitiv, ICE, and exchange-native APIs with per-commodity normalisation.
Demand forecasting
Prophet + custom LSTM per SKU cluster with confidence bands.
Decision engine
Python + FastAPI with sub-200ms per-recommendation response.
Reported weekly. Reconciled quarterly.
Procurement and hedging decisions arrive with a live recommendation and a written confidence score. Inventory carry falls as buys are timed better; hedging costs fall as unnecessary hedges are avoided. Head-trader time is reallocated from data gathering to judgement calls on genuinely borderline decisions.
Annual P&L Uplift
+£520k
Inventory Carry
−25%
Procurement Margin
+60bps
Decision Auditability
~95%
From diagnostic to measurable impact.
Phase · 01
Wk 0–2
Diagnostic, ERP + curve source audit, decision cadence scoping.
Phase · 02
Wk 2–6
Data pipelines live, demand model trained on client history.
Phase · 03
Wk 6–9
Decision engine calibrated, trader dashboard rollout.
Phase · 04
Wk 9–11
Full production; decision auditability tuned to client's governance model.
Where else this travels well.
Every Colony playbook is engineered to be portable. The core intervention shape holds — components adapt to the client context.
Metals wholesale
Agricultural commodities
Heavy industrial energy procurement
Steel and scrap trading
Food ingredient sourcing
Often deployed alongside this one.
Think this playbook fits your operation?
Three concise steps and a Colony operational specialist will respond within one working day with a bespoke margin-uplift projection scoped to your footprint.