SUCCESS STORYHTC Group
Industry• RetailSolution• OpenText™ Freeway Professional

HCT Group streamlines processes
with OpenText Freeway Professional
Automation of complex order and billing processes and seamlessintegration of EDI with SAP B1 increase efficiency and consistency ofprocedures throughout the organization

Results
Created ability to handle multiple
sub-distributors at the same
location, with easy consignment
identification, tracking and billing
Streamlined onboarding ofcustomers to just a few
minutes with little bespoke
development required
Improved efficiency oforder-to-cash process throughaccurate order and bill processingIncreased automation andseamless integration to SAP® B1“OpenText worked with ourcustomers across Europe, ina multilingual environment,
to provide customizedsolutions for each one,enabling the integrationof our systems with ourtrading partners.”
Ken Peckett

Internal Systems Manager
HCT GroupHCT Group streamlines processes with OpenText Freeway Professional

The HCT Group specializes in the design and manufactureof luxury packaging and turnkey solutions for the cosmetics
industry. Established in the UK in 1992, the company began bymanufacturing innovative packaging products and has grown
to incorporate brand creation, design innovation, productdevelopment and logistics. Today, the Group has offices spread
across Europe, the US and Asia.

Expansion creates need for greater process automation
HCT Group’s full-service cosmetics business has seen an exponential
rise as the company takes on new customers across Europe. “Thisstrategic development has led to a meteoric growth that has
required a rapid change in our business processes,” said Ken
Peckett, Internal Systems Manager at HCT Europe. “We areregularly getting customers placing orders with between 300
and 500 SKUs. Where previously we were able to provide a good
service with a manual ordering process, we quickly realized thatour business growth demanded a move to a more automated,
electronic ordering process.”
With seven HCT companies in Europe, the company’s headquarters
in London houses centralized business functions, such as finance,
logistics, product development, design, marketing and project
management. As the business grew, the company decided itneeded to integrate its EDI software with its corporate ERP system,
SAP® Business One (SAP B1).
“Once we got SAP B1 as our central ERP and accounting system,
we were very keen to automate our business processes so that
there would be as little manual processing as possible,” saidPeckett. “We knew that integrating our ERP and EDI systems
would enable a good deal of the ordering and invoicing process
to be automated. We approached our SAP provider, whorecommended OpenText Freeway Professional for its seamlessintegration with this ERP.”The HCT Group evaluated three EDI providers before deciding
to go with their SAP provider’s recommendation to go withOpenText™ Freeway Professional.
“We were impressed by the close integration between SAP andFreeway Professional, but also with the depth of experience thatOpenText had within the retail sector. The company was alreadyworking with most of our customers and our potential customers.
It was clear that they understood the sector we are in and what
we needed to do to implement electronic trading successfully.”
Choosing the most appropriate EDI solution was only one
challenge facing the HCT Group. The company was seeing
impressive business growth across Europe, especially in Franceand Spain, and needed to quickly and effectively onboard those
European customers to be able to receive orders.
“OpenText worked with our customers across Europe, in a
multilingual environment, to provide customized solutions foreach one, enabling the integration of our systems with our tradingpartners,” said Peckett. “Often, we have presented them with achallenging environment and they have been able to provide asolution to our problems quickly and with the minimum of fuss.”“We were impressed by
the close integration
between SAP and Freeway
Professional, but also withthe depth of experiencethat OpenText had within
the retail sector. Thecompany was alreadyworking with most ofour customers and ourpotential customers.”
Ken Peckett

Internal Systems Manager
HCT GroupHCT Group streamlines processes with OpenText Freeway Professional

Tackling complex orders and meeting
challenging timeframes
The HCT Group uses Freeway Professional to exchange orders
and invoices with their customers throughout Europe, across theOpenText™ Trading Grid™ EDI network. They receive some extremely
large orders and some customers, such as EuroMadi in Spain, act
as the lead in a buying consortium for a community of associates,
which adds complexity to the process.
“It’s not so much the amount of orders we receive but the sizeof some of those orders, which can be complex,” says Peckett.
“For example, we receive one order a day from one of our Frenchcustomers that regularly includes more than 300 SKUs to bedelivered to more than 1,200 separate stores. That represents
80 to 100 hundred pages of orders that have to be processed. If
we receive the order at noon, it has to be ready to be sent to ourlogistics partner by 2 pm to meet our next-day delivery schedules.
Only the close integration of Freeway Professional and SAP
allows us to achieve this.
Processing the order is only half the challenge. The company needs
to know the correct orders have been sent to the right locations andthat it has the correct details to bill the right people. For example, one
customer has more than 300 associates that must be able to send
and receive orders and invoices individually and each associate hasa slightly different implementation of EDI.

OpenText helps handle non-standard EDI standards
EDI is a mature technology that delivers a reliable standards-based
data exchange format. But HCT has found that many organizations
have amended their EDI documents to better suit their businesspractices. Often the documentation that accompanies these internalchanges is either inadequate or lost.
The HCT Group challenged OpenText to ensure that all of thedifferent EDI systems would operate seamlessly together. “There
were a number of challenges,” said Peckett. “We could receive
documentation that wasn’t always correct for the system wewere connecting to. Our customers are very focused on billingand payment but not EDI. In most cases, they saw any EDI issues
as our problem. And, all of this was taking place in a multilingual
environment. Luckily, we were able to pass this challenge onto OpenText and they’d work with our European partners, andremarkably, nine times out of 10, they’d sort it out the first time.”
In one instance, a European distributor worked with five subdistributors. The HCT Group would receive a single order for all
six organizations but would have to distribute the product andinvoice separately. Three of the sub-distributors had their productshipped to the same delivery address, making it difficult to see
who was responsible for which order. OpenText modified theFreeway Professional software so that it could distinguish which
order belonged to which sub-distributor and they could be invoiced
correctly, without any manual intervention from HCT staff.

HCT Group streamlines processes with OpenText Freeway Professional“The learning curve for us has been to fully understand theinformation that our customers require on their orders andinvoices from the outset. Each has slightly different needs and,once identified, OpenText has proven its ability to quickly turn that
into a fully functioning solution,” said Peckett. “Their development
team has always worked hard to accommodate our short-noticeproject development needs. Some people told us that they were
too big a company to service a medium size business such as ours,
but we have certainly not found that to be the case.”

Establishing a model for future expansion
When working on the launch of its Lola range of cosmetic productswith a major UK retailer, Freeway Professional helped ensure smoothordering and invoicing of products during the trial, which ran in
50 stores, and during the rollout across the entire chain of stores.

Peckett believes this project is an ideal demonstration of anotherbenefit in selecting OpenText. “Since implementing Freeway
Professional, we have asked OpenText to undertake a good dealof bespoke development work, but the company’s long-standing
working relationship with key retailers worldwide means, in manycases, there is little work to be done, integrating systems takes
minutes and costs almost nothing. That’s been the case withthis project. The trading element has been something we simply
haven’t had to worry about,” he said, adding that this project was amodel to be followed when signing up more major retail customers.
“We aren’t a huge company, so we have to be careful how we grow.
Over the next few years, we will look to consolidate and build
our base of European retailers. Freeway Professional will be ourEDI solution to aid this planned expansion.”
hctgroup.com

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