Customer Relations
Background
This winter, Justin Burke, a merchandiser at FS Grain, set a goal to improve the cooperative’s bid production process. In collaboration with Contango, Justin and his team transformed a daily, hour-long process into a streamlined task that takes five minutes. Now, updating daily cash bids is quick, intuitive, and easy for new team members to master. Overall, transforming the bid production process has given the merchandising team more time and energy to focus on driving volume and margin.
The Challenge
“We were always importing and exporting data across multiple spreadsheets. With all the formulas and macros, we had to be cautious about closing files before running anything to avoid breaking sheets along the way."
Each day at 3:00 PM, Justin set aside time to update bids for FS Grain’s 18 locations. Justin started by manually recording data from emails, text and Teams messages, PDFs, and multiple websites. Then, he analyzed the data and determined what FS Grain should pay for grain at each location for each delivery period. Finally, he published the bids to the cooperative’s website, hedging platform, and created that day's PDF bid sheet.
The process involved multiple rounds of importing and exporting a large amounts of data across multiple, complex spreadsheets with complex formulas. When Justin was out of the office, it was challenging for other team members to fill in who weren't used to producing bids each day. Although rare, when mistakes happened, the process took even longer. “One of the most frustrating things was if a mistake was made, you might be able to catch it, but fixing it would add a lot of time,” said Justin.
Bid production monopolized Justin’s time each afternoon. If a trade needed to be made or an important meeting was scheduled during the 3 o’clock hour, it was a struggle for him to step away to make the deal or be a part of the conversation.
When markets moved quickly and FS Grain needed to adjust their bids accordingly, Justin had to repeat the process multiple times a day. In some cases, it took so long that they'd receive tens of thousands of bushels before their published bid caught up.
Ultimately, this process presented an exciting opportunity for Justin and his team to save time and preserve margin with technology.
The Solution
"It's one download and that's it. That's really opened up that time — There's certainly not an urgency or rush like there had been."
Justin recognized a need to streamline bid production and led the charge to migrate the process to the Contango platform. Now, data from FS Grain’s bid production spreadsheets, freight rate sheets, tributary markets, competitive bids, and futures prices are automatically aggregated in Contango.
When it’s time to update bids, Justin simply logs into Contango, refreshes the data, opens the bid recommendations, and adjusts them accordingly. Then, he saves and exports the bids to FS Grain’s hedging platform and website – All in five minutes, and with zero manual data entry.
"I taught my colleague how to produce bids in half an hour on Monday — Having more people who can assist with it helps out a lot."
Now, Justin has more flexibility each afternoon to focus on margin. “It's really made bid production not such a focus of the afternoon like it had been. It’s one download and that's it. That’s really opened up that time. There's certainly not an urgency or rush like there maybe had been,” he said.
When he’s out of the office, it’s much easier for another merchandiser to update bids. “I taught my colleague how to [produce bids] in a half hour on Monday. I feel like this could be taught to ten different people and having more people who can assist with it helps out a lot,” said Justin.
Additionally, Justin and his team are now better equipped to respond to fast-moving markets. If basis drops rapidly, they can quickly and easily adjust their published bid to ensure they're in line with the respective reference markets. In turn, they avoid buying large volumes significantly above the posted bid.
When asked about migrating bid production to Contango, Justin said, “It's working out really well. The customer service has been fantastic when we need changes or updates. I know I had some doubts at one point in time because bid production is such a big process, but it's been flawless.”
