Hutchinson gains business agility on back of GXS grid

The company, which employs 25,000 staff and has annual revenues in excess of €2.5 billion, is now communicating standard business documents such as purchase orders, invoices and advanced ship notices, using any EDI or XML document format. Didier Carn, Hutchinson's IT corporate director, explains that GXS effectively mediates the differences between its own preferred document format and other formats chosen by its trading partners. "The business environment is changing very quickly, [so] we have to build IT systems that can respond to this, even as we make sure that we are firmly controlling the costs of our IT investment," he explains. "There is an important balance between giving systems the flexibility to cope with change and managing the costs of such flexibility," he adds – which is why, he says, he went for GXS. Carn points out that Hutchinson required an infrastructure capable of adding new partners in different parts of the world, as the company opened plants in locations such as Brazil, China, Romania and Tunisia. Its B2B infrastructure also had to deal seamlessly with technical challenges, such as new standards and different network protocols. "We have set out to achieve a globally efficient solution," explains Carn. "Our aim was to provide a consistent and high-quality service to our customers anywhere in the world, and to do so at the lowest possible costs." Drawing on the services of GXS's TGMS is now enabling Hutchinson to get precisely that, with the service effectively masking the complexities of diverse Internet communication standards and potentially rapid change. As for the detail, Carn says that the performance of B2B is tracked via a dashboard that measures KPIs, including the number of messages handled by the trading hub and the cost of those messages. He says that the simplest evidence of the company's success with GSX's B2B is that, while the number of partner connections have increased, the cost of managing those B2B transactions has remained static. For him, B2B has converted what was formerly a largely manual process into an automated, IT-driven alternative, also bringing improvements in the quality of data, reducing manual errors and improving data integrity. And he adds that the new system is providing the business agility that is key to Hutchinson's continued success,