Commodity data management is software that gathers prices and data on oil, gas, coal, metals and power from hundreds of sources into one system. Commodities are raw goods traded in bulk. Each source sends its data in its own format, at its own time. Trading desks, refiners and power companies use it.
The software does four things. It collects the data from exchanges, news providers, pipeline operators and weather services. It cleans the data, for example by fixing a price that was sent in the wrong unit, or by removing a price that is plainly a typing error. It converts everything to one form, such as one currency, one unit and one time zone. And it stores each price with its time as time series data, so that a trader can ask for the price of any day in the past ten years.
Say a trading desk in Mumbai buys oil products from three countries. One price feed gives crude oil at $80 a barrel. Another gives diesel at $720 a tonne. A third gives fuel oil at ₹52,000 per kilolitre. A barrel is about 159 litres, so $80 a barrel is about ₹47,800 per kilolitre at ₹95 to the dollar. Without the software, an employee has to convert all three every morning in a spreadsheet, and one wrong cell can cost lakhs. With the software, the three prices arrive in one table, in rupees per kilolitre.
A spreadsheet cannot do this reliably, because the sources are hundreds and they send millions of prices a day. There is also a reason for audit. When an auditor asks where the price that valued a trade came from, the software shows the source and the time of that price.
The cleaned data goes to energy trading and risk management to value trades, to energy market research for forecasts, and into a data warehouse for long-term storage.