One system for how commercial business is won and delivered.

Commercial Management

Create greater visibility and discipline across the commercial organization.

One place for the companies you trade with, the people who decide, the opportunities in front of you and the agreements that follow. Commercial work stops living in individual inboxes and spreadsheets, and the organization can see what is actually being pursued.

• Keep companies, decision-makers and relationships in one shared commercial record.
• Follow an opportunity from first conversation through proposal and signed agreement.
• See the whole pipeline, what is moving, and what has gone quiet.
• Keep meetings, calls and commitments attached to the business they belong to.
• Develop existing accounts deliberately rather than reactively.

Market Intelligence

Turn fragmented market information into commercial intelligence you can act on.

Market knowledge arrives as reports, documents, conversations and email, and normally disperses just as quickly. K4 gathers it against the companies, commodities and locations it concerns, so what the organization already knows is available when a decision is being made.

• Build a durable picture of the companies in your market and what they move.
• Connect intelligence to the ports, terminals and commodities it concerns.
• Keep what a colleague learned available to the organization rather than to one inbox.
• See where an incumbent or competing relationship stands in the way of an opportunity.
• Understand market information alongside your own commercial record, not separately from it.

Commercial Governance

Bring structure, accountability and control to commercial decision-making.

Commercial organizations hold information that not everyone should see and make decisions that should be traceable. K4 lets an organization decide who sees what, who may approve what, and keeps a record of the decisions that were taken.

• Decide which commercial information is open to the organization and which is not.
• Share confidential information deliberately, with a stated purpose and an end date.
• Keep sensitive records restricted wherever they appear, including in search and exports.
• Record who approved what, and when.
• Give leadership a durable record of material commercial decisions.

Pricing, Estimates and Profitability

Price commercial work deliberately, and find out whether the assumptions held.

An estimate is where margin is decided. K4 keeps the assumptions behind a price, what was ultimately offered and agreed, and what the work actually cost — so profitability is something the organization can examine rather than infer at year end.

• Build a commercial estimate from stated cost and revenue assumptions.
• Keep what was assumed, what was quoted and what was agreed as one connected record.
• Compare expected against actual once the work has been done.
• See where cost moved, and where a comparison cannot honestly be made.
• Give commercial management a clearer view of where margin comes from.

Execution and Operations

Connect commercial commitments with what actually happens.

A signed agreement usually becomes many separate movements. K4 keeps the commercial commitment and its execution attached to each other, so operational performance can be read against what was promised and priced.

• Break an agreement into the shipments and activity that deliver it.
• Record operational activity against the commitment it belongs to.
• Capture what the work cost as it is incurred.
• See performance against the commercial expectation, per movement.
• Keep the operational record with the commercial record instead of beside it.

Performance Management

Make commercial performance measurable, and show how a result was reached.

Objectives, targets and incentives are usually managed outside the systems that hold the underlying performance. K4 keeps them together: what was expected of a commercial role, what was achieved, and what that means for incentive compensation — with the reasoning visible rather than asserted.

• Set measurable objectives and targets for commercial roles and business units.
• Track actual performance against target through the year.
• Hold structured commercial incentive plans rather than discretionary arrangements.
• Show how an incentive figure was reached from measured performance.
• Record management judgement explicitly where it is applied.
• Give leadership a clear view of commercial priorities, activity and results.

Alongside your existing systems

K4 Compass is not a replacement for a finance system, and it is not a ledger. Most organizations keep their accounting, ERP and operational systems and use K4 Compass for the commercial layer that currently has no home. Where information needs to move between them, that is scoped as part of an implementation rather than assumed.

Pricing

K4 Compass is configured to the organization that uses it. Pricing depends on scope, the number of users, the configuration and integrations required, and any implementation support. We provide pricing privately once we understand what an organization needs.