Your business runs with Six Sigma precision inside your walls. Vadar Alpha brings the same precision to the commercial decisions that set your margin: buying, making, selling, and managing risk. We price all four as the market moves, so you earn more on every decision and carry less risk on every exposure.
Purchasing, production, pricing and hedging each run on their own calendar and their own cost numbers. The market moves every day.
Purchasing buys at today's price for products sold next quarter. Sales quotes from last quarter's costs. By the time risk is reviewed monthly, the exposure is already locked in.
Your systems of record (ERP, TMS, OMS) run on standard costs set at budget time. The prices that decide your margin change long before the next budget.
When input costs rise faster than your prices can follow, the difference comes out of earnings, and the quarter misses plan.
Margin is engineered, not discovered.
Nobody can predict the market. Engineering margin means planning for the range it can move in. Vadar Alpha connects the physical, financial and commercial sides of your business: what you make, what you hedge and what you charge. Every purchase, production run, quote and hedge gets a target and a tolerance, set against live prices. When the market moves past a tolerance, you see it first, with the gap explained in dollars.
Vadar Alpha sits above your systems of record. It reads the data you already have and prices each decision against the live market. Because the four decisions are priced together, a change in one updates the other three.
Each team keeps the metric it reports today. Those metrics move your margin, and your margin moves your earnings.
How much more the business earns.
How far the year could fall below plan.
We record every instruction when it is given, read what happened from your own systems, and measure what it earned against a baseline your finance team agrees on before we start. We count each dollar once.
| Opportunity01 Sep · 09:12 | Q4 futures $1.10/cwt below today's spot | +$380K |
|---|---|---|
| Instruction01 Sep · 09:15 | Layer in 25% forward each month through Dec | +$380K |
| ActionSep to Dec | Bought 172 Class III contracts, avg $17.05/cwt | +$352K |
| Proof31 Dec | vs. buying at spot on plan dates | +$304K |
Schreiber Foods, a global dairy manufacturer, sells at fixed prices but buys milk at prices that move every day. Its product mix, contract prices and hedges used to be set in spreadsheets, often after the market had already moved. Now all three run on live prices: plants make each product the lowest cost way, Sales prices contracts so margin holds when costs rise, and the risk desk keeps exposure inside policy while it locks in gains.
Evans Network of Companies, a national trucking network, prices freight in a market that moves daily. Its agents used to quote from rates set once a quarter, so a quote was often too high to win or too low to earn. Now every agent prices any load in the US on demand, at today's market, and sees how sure that price is and what could move it.
Both start small: one decision, your own data, and its value shown in days, before any integration. Both run on one platform, with our team beside yours from day one.
Your team acts, with ours beside them.
Our team takes on more of the work, inside limits you set.
Our customers carry large input costs and thin margins, and sell into markets that resist price increases.
A 30 minute conversation to see where your margin leaks and whether we can help.
Book a callExperience Milwaukee sat down with Schreiber Foods CIDO Sri Kantamneni and our CEO Stephen Pounds to talk about how a food manufacturer and a startup founded two years ago work together on pricing, risk and the spread.
On paper a lemonade stand is two numbers: what a cup costs and what it sells for. Run one for a summer and neither number holds still, demand swings with the weather, and you are buying lemons today for a crowd that shows up tomorrow. A follow up on the hard part, and a calm way to handle it.
Bill Ackman modeled a lemonade stand to teach finance, and held the two hardest numbers still: what the lemons cost and what a cup sells for. In the businesses that make and move the physical world, those are the numbers that never sit still. A note on why Buy, Sell, and Risk are one income statement, not three departments.
Long form work on how commodity prices move margin, and what to do about it. Free to download, no form.
3 papers