Cree Lighting

Without a robust EDI (electronic data interchange) platform, companies struggle to exchange documents such as invoices and purchase orders with suppliers, customers, and other partners, resulting in manual business application data entry - a step that is both time-consuming and prone to costly errors and delays. In the search for more efficiency and effectiveness, Cree Lighting identified an opportunity to significantly improve the EDI platform with its supply chain network. Eric Nelson, IT Director of Business Systems at Cree Lighting, explained, “Our goal is to automate wherever we can, so we decided to change our EDI approach in order to more quickly and easily receive and transmit information with our domestic and overseas trading partners, minimize the need for manual intervention, and reduce our costs.”

Staying focused with Managed Services

Monitoring, managing, and maintaining a trading partner network requires ongoing investments in specialized technologies and skilled professionals. With limited resources and expertise, Cree Lighting wanted to move away from an on-premises solution that required internal resources for support, maintenance, and onboarding of trading partners. “By having to support our in-house solution, we had to manage a large number of issues, and having to acquire and maintain all the necessary skills in-house wasn’t the right move for us,” said Nelson.

Enlisting the support of an experienced company to manage the network was a logical choice, and Cree Lighting selected OpenText Integration Managed Services. Taking advantage of a cloud-based approach, Cree Lighting leverages ongoing expertise, process support, and technical infrastructure to meet current and future integration needs. OpenText takes care of the management of day-to-day operations, from systems management to integration to partner onboarding and transaction monitoring. By offloading these responsibilities to a trusted partner, Cree Lighting accelerates time to value, optimizes resources, and reduces costs.

Optimizing resources and accelerating value

OpenText Integration Managed Services shields the company from the complexities of managing its integration environment, allowing it to focus on core business activities. “By partnering with OpenText Integration Managed Services, we can now focus our resources on the areas where we have the internal expertise to accelerate further business automation,” said Nelson.

OpenText Integration Managed Services uses robust tools, techniques, and processes to accelerate the partner onboarding process, achieving value and efficiency for both company and customer alike.

Working with OpenText

In its quest to innovate and grow, Cree Lighting has a trusted partner in OpenText. “The cloud-based OpenText platform is very scalable,” Nelson summarized. “And OpenText has been easy to work with - the people have been very knowledgeable, responsive and collaborative.”

Cree Lighting’s trading partners can now easily submit orders and share data through the OpenText system that’s integrated with their Oracle ERP.