Can a smarter application make your company even 1 cent richer? For your large commodities operation, an extra penny of margin on your massive transaction volume could mean $300 million a year—give or take a few cents. More important, a smarter decision-making platform will help you keep up with your competitors, who lately seem to be pulling the trigger with greater speed and accuracy than your trading team.

The heart of this new platform will be a custom-built, algorithm-driven data-analysis application that can boost your trading intelligence. The system will collect and analyze the dozens of information streams you track—including soybean yields from Brazil, weather forecasts for Asia and economic reports from Uncle Sam. Gathering and mapping all the necessary information will require a time-consuming, but straightforward, data integration effort by staff and consulting programmers.

The real challenge in your one-year startup will be to build an application that produces more intelligent decisions than those currently generated by your patched-together enterprise systems. You'll need help from a consultant with top-level experience in algorithmic applications. The consultant will help you align the application's decision-making component with the rules and strategies that drive your business. With proper planning and development, the new application will allow your traders to quickly analyze data, model trade scenarios and even expedite trading decisions.

But automated doesn't mean auto-pilot. The business value of algorithm-driven data-analysis applications lies in decision support, not decision-making, according to Greg Keers, head of execution services for LatentZero, a financial services technology consultancy.

"A black box would do very poorly against the market on its own," Keers says. "The big value comes with human oversight. The application needs to be hugely configurable so that it can allow for constant adjustments as the markets change."

To read the details behind this planner and to fill in your own numbers, click on the "Get the Tool" icon above.