New producerView CRM System Offers Integrated Data Tools for Commodity Markets

Barchart is introducing the producerView CRM system, a workflow tool designed to help commodity and financial market participants manage customer relationships alongside live market data. The system is built for businesses that track physical commodity flows, from grain elevators and ethanol plants to metals traders and energy brokers.

Until now, most CRM platforms have treated commodity market data as a separate input, something to be imported or referenced in another window. The producerView CRM system changes that by embedding real-time pricing, futures data, and historical analytics directly into the customer record view. A merchandiser looking at a producer account can see that producer's delivery history, current open contracts, and the day's basis offers all in one screen, without toggling between applications.

What the System Addresses

Commodity firms have long managed producer relationships through a patchwork of spreadsheets, accounting software, and phone calls. A grain buyer might use one program to track contracts, another to check futures, and a notebook to remember which farmer prefers early delivery. That fragmentation creates delays and errors. Offers go stale while a buyer searches for a price quote. A producer's credit limit gets missed because it is recorded in a file that is not open. The producerView CRM system is built to replace that workflow with a single, shared view of the customer and the market.

The system focuses on the "producer" in the agricultural sense. That is the farmer, the rancher, the grower who sells grain, cattle, or other raw commodities into the supply chain. But the design applies just as well to any counterparty relationship in commodity markets, including suppliers, brokers, and end users. The core idea is the same: put the counterparty's commercial history and the current market data side by side so that decisions are faster and more informed.

Key Functions

The system tracks the full lifecycle of a producer relationship. Onboarding captures the producer's basic details, credit terms, and delivery preferences. From there, every contract, every delivery ticket, and every settlement is linked to that producer record. When a new offer is created, the system pulls the producer's previous pricing patterns and the current basis grid so the buyer can price competitively without leaving the screen.

Analytics are built in rather than bolted on. The system displays a producer's delivery patterns over multiple seasons, showing whether they tend to deliver early or late, how much volume they typically move, and how their quality metrics trend. That context helps a buyer decide whether to offer a premium for early delivery or to adjust terms for a producer whose moisture content runs high. The data is drawn from the same market feeds that power Barchart's pricing and analytics tools, so it reflects the same numbers the rest of the trading desk sees.

The producerView CRM system also handles task management and reminders. A merchandiser can set follow-ups for contract expirations, credit reviews, or seasonal check-ins. Those tasks appear on the producer record and on a dashboard that shows the day's priorities. The system can generate notifications when a producer approaches a credit limit or when a contract is about to roll, reducing the risk of surprise exposures.

Why Integration Matters

Commodity markets move fast. Basis levels change hourly. Futures prices swing on weather reports and export news. A CRM that cannot keep up with that pace becomes a historical record rather than a working tool. By connecting the CRM database directly to the market data feed, the producerView CRM system ensures that the numbers a buyer sees are the same numbers that are driving the rest of the trading operation. There is no lag for manual updates. There is no risk of a buyer quoting a price from yesterday's close when the market has already moved.

That integration also helps with compliance. Commodity firms are subject to recordkeeping rules and audit requirements. A system that links every transaction to a producer record, with timestamps and data trails, makes it easier to demonstrate that pricing was fair and that terms were consistently applied. The system logs changes to producer records, so if a credit limit is adjusted or a contract is modified, the audit trail shows who made the change and when.

Target Users

The system is aimed at commodity firms that handle physical product. That includes grain elevators, feedlots, ethanol plants, oilseed crushers, and other first-handlers who buy directly from producers. It also applies to energy firms that contract with wellheads for crude oil or natural gas, and to metals companies that source from mines and recyclers. In each case, the producer is someone who delivers a raw commodity, and the buyer needs to manage hundreds or thousands of such relationships at the same time.

Financial traders who trade commodity derivatives but never take physical delivery probably will not need this tool. It is designed for the physical supply chain, where a buyer and a producer have an ongoing commercial relationship that includes credit, delivery scheduling, and quality grading. The system is intended to reduce the friction in those relationships and to help buyers make better pricing decisions based on complete information.

Deployment Model

The producerView CRM system is a cloud-based application. Users access it through a web browser, and data is stored in a central database that is maintained by Barchart. That means no on-premises servers to manage and no software to install on each user's machine. Updates and new features are deployed server-side, so all users see the same version at the same time. Security is handled at the cloud level, with role-based access controls so that only authorized users can view or modify producer records.

The system is designed to integrate with existing back-office systems. It can pull contract data from an accounting platform, push settlement data back to the general ledger, and sync producer records with a parent company's ERP system. Barchart provides an API for those integrations, and the system supports standard data formats so that custom programming is minimized.

Market Context

The commodity industry has been slower than other sectors to adopt CRM technology. Many firms still rely on relationship-based trading, where a buyer knows their producers personally and manages accounts through memory and paper notes. That model works when volumes are low and relationships are few, but it breaks down as firms grow or as the workforce turns over. A new merchandiser who takes over a territory needs to quickly understand each producer's history and preferences, and that knowledge is hard to transfer if it exists only in someone's head.

Software that combines CRM with market data has been available for other industries for years. In financial services, a wealth manager's desktop shows both the client's portfolio and the current market indices. In retail, a sales associate can see a customer's purchase history and the current promotions. The producerView CRM system applies that same principle to commodities, where the data is more specialized and the workflows are unique to each commodity type.

The system is not a replacement for a commodity trading platform or a grain accounting system. It sits between them, connecting the customer relationship data to the market data and the transaction history. It fills a gap that many commodity firms have identified but have not had a ready-made solution for, especially those that tried to build their own tools in-house and found them difficult to maintain.

About Barchart: Barchart is a financial and commodity market data provider offering market data, analytics, and workflow solutions for businesses in agriculture, energy, metals, and financial services.