Today I received feedback from a Procurement Manager who mainly buys bar stock: super duplex, Inconel, titanium, and tungsten carbide on the side. His point was simple. My market charts showed copper, aluminium and cocoa, but not the materials he requests quotes for every day. And above all he wanted one thing: to choose for himself what he sees.

So today I rebuilt the entire market section on the homepage.

What changed

Personalisation. With ＋ Custom card, a buyer builds his own chart to track exactly the raw materials and materials he buys. A bar-stock buyer can, for example, put Inconel 625, super duplex 2507, titanium and tungsten together in one card, give it his own name and compare them side by side. He chooses from every available series: raw materials, alloy surcharges, bar stock and carbide, plastics and energy. That goes up to 12 series per card and up to 4 custom cards. Every standard card now has a close button: if you don't need Food & agri, hide it, and bring it back at any time via "Cards". Cards, period and view are saved per account. Log in on another computer and you see your own dashboard; on a shared computer, the next user sees nothing of the previous one.

A new structure. The section is now called Market & Cost Intelligence, with five cards:

• Industrial raw materials
• Steel & special alloys
• Plastics & polymers
• Energy & logistics
• Food & agri

New materials:

• zinc and tin (LME);
• chromium, molybdenum, tungsten, cobalt, titanium, manganese and vanadium (EU import price per kg);
• the alloy surcharges for duplex 2205, super duplex 2507, Inconel 625, Inconel 718 and Hastelloy C-276;
• PP, PVC, POM, PA6 and PTFE.

Period and unit. A buyer chooses 1 to 36 months, and sees the series as an index or as a price in €/kg or $/t. For the conversion I use each month's own EUR/USD rate, not today's.

Why this makes a difference

These are the choices I spent most of today on:

• Every card says what kind of number you are looking at. Market quote, alloy surcharge, EU import price or price indicator. A nickel quote is not a quote for Inconel 625, and an alloy surcharge is the alloy component on top of the base price, not a total price for bar.
• No invented series. PEEK has no separate customs code, so PEEK is not included. If a series has less history than the selected period, the card says how much: "· 5 mo data".
• No average of apples and oranges. With several series, a card no longer shows one misleading total but the strongest and the weakest move.
• Source and date on every card. If you use a number in a supplier meeting, you need to be able to trace where it came from.

What isn't finished yet

Some sources publish their alloy surcharges for only a few months. From now on Orbecta stores them itself, so those series get longer every month.

Today Orbecta itself showed why that has to be the next step. The news feed reported an attack on a Russian refinery with an upward diesel risk, while the diesel chart on the same dashboard showed a decline. Both were right: the news describes a possible supply disruption, the chart what the market was doing at that moment. A buyer now sees both signals, but still has to put them side by side himself. The next step is for Orbecta to do that: show per commodity whether the news and the price move support or contradict each other, and what uncertainty comes with it.

Today's lesson

I know these materials from my own day-to-day procurement work. That is exactly why this feedback was so valuable: it confirmed what I see myself. Every buyer has his own basket of materials, and a dashboard with the same fixed charts for everyone falls short. This buyer took it one step further than I had planned: not adding more materials, but letting him choose for himself. That is what I built today.