Success story
Hain Daniels GroupIndustry• Consumer Packaged Goods• Food Services

Solution• OpenText™ Trading Grid™

Results
Accurate and timely orderfulfillment support growth
Outsourced approach enables
focus on core expertise
Flexibility and scalability
enhance market share

Leading food company enhances supply
Hain Daniels Group fulfills orders with speed and accuracy using
integrated OpenText Trading Grid
“The benefits of OpenText Trading Grid to us are accuracy andtimeliness. These have been vital to our growth, and they willremain vital to our future development and expansion.”
Malcolm Clarke

Business Systems Analyst
Hain Daniels GroupLeading food company enhances supply

Hain Daniels Group provides chilled, fresh, natural foods withoutcompromising taste. Its well-known brands include New Covent
Garden Food Company, Johnsons Juice products and Farmhouse
Fare. As the company has grown, these product brands have become
ubiquitous at retail outlets throughout the United Kingdom (UK).

Need for speed

One key to business success in this sector is fast turnaround—with theaim being to get chilled, fresh product onto shelves within 24 hours ofthe order being received from a retailer. This urgency is driven partly by
the fact that fresh foods often have a shelf life of only three to four days.
According to Malcolm Clarke, business systems analyst for Hain Daniels
Group, “Success in our sector comes down to product innovationand manufacturing fresh and tasty foods, as well as getting themout of manufacturing and onto shelves in as timely and efficientmanner as possible.”
There is an additional layer of complexity in chilled foods businesses as
the products are inherently seasonal. For example, New Covent Garden
was the first to introduce fresh soup products to the world. When sales ofsoup products rise sharply as the weather becomes cooler, New Covent
Garden must respond at lightning speed to changing circumstances,making accurate and timely electronic trading invaluable.
Although Hain Daniels products are to be found across many UK retail
outlets, the principal supermarkets represent the bulk of the company’s business. Orders from supermarkets are processed centrally atHain Daniels’ head office in Leeds before allocation to the company’s
network of UK factories and manufacturing facilities. On a typical day,Hain Daniels will receive 300 to 500 electronic data interchange (EDI)
orders from supermarket chains.

Responding to these orders is the lifeblood of the business, and this isa 24x7 activity.

Right order, right time

Although Hain Daniels Group depends on electronic trading with its
major customers, it does not have its own EDI team in-house. Instead,the company relies on the capability of OpenText™ Trading Grid™ tomanage the variety of different EDI and AS2 formats and to provide
a seamless interface to the company’s enterprise resource planning(ERP) application.
The IT team is focused on managing the ERP system and integrating newdivisions and operations into a highly centralized approach. “We don’t
have the staffing levels to look after the intricacies of electronic
trading standards. We don’t see that as part of our core expertise
and we are happy to rely on Trading Grid to take care of that partof the business process,” explained Clarke. “The benefits to us areaccuracy and timeliness. These have been vital to our growth, andthey will remain vital to our future development and expansion.”
Trading Grid also simplifies the additional complexities that result fromdifferent standards and formats of various vendors. “The supermarkets
like to interpret standards and formats in different ways. AS2 data,in particular, means different certificates and this could entail a lotof additional work if we did not have OpenText Trading Grid in place
to manage the translations and take the complexity off our plate,”
noted Clarke.
Recently, with the new interest in ASNs (advance ship notices), supermarket
customers are looking to streamline their warehouses. A new process
involves an ASN being sent electronically and then the truck is scannedin when it arrives at the warehouse. Once again, accuracy is vital.

“We don’t want to hire ourown staff with specialized
electronic trading
expertise, and a hugeadvantage for us is that
OpenText shields us fromthis complexity.”
Malcolm Clarke

Business Systems Analyst
Hain Daniels GroupLeading food company enhances supply

Private label is also growing, and Hain Daniels is a major player here. Thecompany uses the same Trading Grid infrastructure to manage its private
label business with major supermarkets. “Flexibility and scalability areimportant benefits for us,” said Clarke.

Simplified, sustained growth

The range of document types the company trades electronically include
orders, remittances, debit notes, invoices and price files. EDI is thus

integral to the company’s track record of sustained growth. A marker ofthis success is increased market share in four of its five core categories.
“OpenText Trading Grid is reliable and the help desk is excellent. We
don’t want to hire our own staff with specialized electronic trading
expertise, and a huge advantage for us is that OpenText shields us
from this complexity,” concluded Clarke.

About OpenText

OpenText, The Information Company,
enables organizations to gain insight
through market leading information
management solutions, on-premises orin the cloud. For more information about
OpenText (NASDAQ: OTEX, TSX: OTEX)
visit opentext.com.
Customer stories

opentext.com/contact
Twitter | LinkedIn

Copyright © 2018 Open Text. All Rights Reserved. Trademarks owned by Open Text.
For more information, visit: https://www.opentext.com/about/copyright-information
09752A.EN