HCS Group is a leading international supplier of high-quality hydrocarbon specialty solutions. The company’s heritage extends back to the 1800s and two of the oldest chemical companies in the world – Haltermann and Carless. Today, HCS encompasses three brands – Halterman Carless, ETS Racing Fuels, and Electrical Oil Services (EOS) – and delivers tailor-made products to customers in more than 90 countries around the world.
Headquartered in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, HCS Group’s global operations include seven production sites (three in Germany, two in the UK, and one each in France and the USA) and sales offices in Germany, France, the UK, USA, and Japan. The production and sales teams are supported by HCS Group’s world-class certified laboratories and technical teams who provide a wide range of application services. All told, HCS Group employs about 500 people who annually achieve overall sales activity of more than $470 million.
HCS Group’s consistent success is due in part to the company’s strategic shift toward a business model that combines a market-centric approach, application-specific strategies, and a customer-oriented service focus. In addition to offering an expansive selection of specialized and customized hydrocarbons and a highly reliable level of product quality, HCS Group also provides comprehensive solutions and services that align with a variety of customer needs and use cases.
The Challenge
HCS Group provides its high-quality hydrocarbon specialities (unused and recycled transformer oils, kerosene, gasoline, electronic-grade solvents, and more) to a wide variety of customers in the automotive, pharmaceutical, agricultural, energy, cosmetics, laboratory, printing, electronics, and plastics processing industries. Because of the company’s global reach, delivery of these products often involves long, international transport chains with strict delivery deadlines.
Prior to the implementation of project44, HCS Group found it difficult to maintain their high customer service standards because their legacy logistics solution was unable to detect delays in time for them to react. Time and time again, issues were detected – either by HCS Group or, worse, by their customers – too late in the delivery process to allow a quick resolution or time to source another delivery option.
Because the performance of their supply chain plays an integral role in HCS Group’s ability to deliver the best possible service and value to their customers, the organization sought a logistics solution that could provide significantly improved transparency, reliably map the entire transport chain to detect any kind of delay before it became an irreversible issue, and enable proactive response to help avert delivery delays and costly fees. HCS Group wanted a solution that would allow them to proactively inform customers about in-transit difficulties in time to collaborate on suitable solutions for minimizing the impact of a potential delay.
After conducting product research and engaging in discussions with a variety of market participants, HCS Group chose project44. “We needed a solution that covered as many of our transport chains as possible and offered a comprehensible, transparent billing model,” says Florenz Treschau, SVP Supply Chain Management, adding, “With project44, that’s exactly what we found.”
The Solution
HCS Group uses project44 for both overseas and land transportation visibility. The ease of implementation meant that the HCS Group team was able to start using the application quickly. Integration with HCS Group’s SAP system facilitates the transfer of shipment data to project44, which then tracks all the relevant details of each transport. To simplify and streamline the onboarding of HCS Group team members onto the new solution, HCS Group created a one-click experience that takes employees directly from their usual transport management module in SAP to the project44 shipment tracking. This allows them to see where goods are located in real time, along with their anticipated ETA at the final destination.
“We can already track 95% of our overseas containers via the project44 platform and that is very satisfying.”
The Results
Increased planning accuracy thanks to comprehensive visibility
Tracking of 95% of overseas containers via the platform
Timely notification to customers in case of delays
Reduction of the negative impact of late deliveries on production processes
Improved customer satisfaction due to proactive supply chain management that helps minimize delays
High employee satisfaction thanks to the sophisticated user interface and easy connection to the existing SAP system
Ready to bring advanced visibility to your supply chain?
Learn more about project44 and get in touch with our team today.