Garden products maker Hozelock has deployed a new outsourced electronic trading solution to enable the company to respond quickly to customer requests.

Hozelock is a leading manufacturer of garden equipment based in Birmingham, specialising in garden watering systems, pressure sprayers and aquatic equipment.

Hozelock had been electronically exchanging invoices and orders with its customers for over 20 years, using an on premise third party EDI solution.
However, the company was finding it increasingly difficult to accommodate forever changing customer requirements.

Each time there was a change in a customer’s trading requirement, the solution needed to be reconfigured by Hozelock’s IT department. It was felt that this was an unnecessary drain on resources and was not a core competence of the business.

The company decided to outsource its EDI to Wesupply as a fully managed service. The OneTime platform from Wesupply means Hozelock needs no on premise hardware, software, database or integration tools, so no internal project teams or maintenance are required.

Trevor Austin, director of IT at Hozelock, said, “Our existing solution lacked flexibility to meet the changing requirements of our customers and it could not easily support non-standard requirements and new technologies. As a result, the lead-time for adapting to new requirements or on-boarding a new customer was lengthy.”