- Industry
- Metals Trading & Processing
- Duration
- 6 months
- Location
- United States
Digitizing a metals trading operation from spreadsheets to system of record
How Metal Conversions replaced fragmented workflows with a unified platform, without disrupting their legacy ERP or forcing a risky "big bang" cutover.
The Challenge
Metal Conversions operates a high-volume trading business spanning several business lines. Like most brownfield operations, critical work was distributed across teams, each with their own tools and workflows. A legacy ERP handled financials but couldn't flex to support new requirements.
Distributed data: Load-level information lived across physical files, spreadsheets, email threads, and team knowledge.
Manual reconciliation: Traders and accounting aligned numbers by hand, adding time and creating rework.
Reporting bottlenecks: Spreadsheet-based tracking required significant manual effort to keep pace with trading velocity.
Inconsistent documentation: Customer confirmations, carrier paperwork, and internal records were generated separately with no central versioning.
Our Approach
We designed for safe, incremental cutover—preserving the operational flexibility traders needed while adding the governance and controls Accounting required. No big-bang migration.
Build around existing behavior: Support the nuance in current trading workflows. Migrate legacy data into the system rather than forcing a clean break.
Layer in controls without slowing operations: RBAC, duplicate prevention, review gates, and clean revision diffs that satisfy Accounting without creating bottlenecks.
Stage downstream integrations carefully: Exports and invoice packs designed to work with legacy workflows first, deeper integration later.
The Solution
We delivered a unified digital backbone spanning orders, logistics, documents, settlements, invoicing, and reporting, all anchored by load-level traceability.
Traceability: Trackable units with consistent identifiers tied to docs, statuses, approvals, and financial outputs.
Multi-load scheduling & document generation: Flows with reliable versioning of customer, carrier, and internal PDFs.
Deterministic settlement engine: Precision rounding rules, delivery/receiving-driven invoicing, exception paths, and full audit trails.
Accounting controls built in: Approve-for-payment, duplicate invoice prevention, and role-based permissions enforcing separation of duties.
Automated position system: Daily snapshots, parity targets, and reconciliation replacing the manual spreadsheet grind.
Results & Impact
Metal Conversions now operates from a single system of record that spans their entire transaction lifecycle. Operations retained the flexibility they needed, Accounting gained the controls they required, and the business eliminated hours of manual reconciliation and document management each week—building the foundational system of record to enable more technology-driven enhancements in the future.
Manual Data Entry: 85% reduced — Automated load tracking & doc generation
Settlement Accuracy: 100% — Deterministic calculation with audit trail
Month-End Close: 3 days faster — System-generated position reporting
- Industry
- Metals Trading & Processing
- Location
- United States
- Company Size
- Mid-market
- Duration
- 6 months
- Team
- 2 specialists
- Role
- Product Strategy, Full-Stack Development, Forward Deployed Engineer
Ready to digitize your trading or processing operation?
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Let's map your workflow and identify the fastest path to a single source of truth.