Cortec Solutions' origins reach back to the mid '80s where it started as the IT services division of Hedsorboard, an independent board distributor with a reputation for innovation and it's radical and unique commitment to IT. Hedsorboard's growth was supported by what were, for their time, highly advanced IT solutions designed and built in-house. When the company acquired its own sheeting and converting facilities it became necessary for the IT division to grow in order to provide round-the-clock support for the sophisticated sales, production and warehousing systems that had become essential elements of the business.

In 1992 the company was sold to a leading international forest products group Metsa-Serla (now known as m-real). The IT division separated from the parent company and began to market its services to other group and external customers. It was the connection with Metsa-Serla that introduced Progress to the business – a relationship that has underpinned the technology of our products since 1993. Following a management acquisition in 1997 the IT services operation became a wholly independent software and IT services company.

The development of Cortec began in 1998. The design objective was to develop a flexible and powerful end-to-end business solution aimed at trading organisations that buy, stock and sell for a living.

An extensive look at competitive solutions revealed that the financial management and accounting elements that had been developed in house were frequently well below best of breed standards. To avoid this weakness it was decided that Cortec would be designed to integrate with ledger and accounting system rather that have it’s own functionality. In 1998 Cortec Solutions became an accredited Delivery Partner of OpenAccounts and it is this package that is normally supplied with Cortec. Interfaces for other accounting systems have also been developed.

The first implementation of Cortec and OpenAccounts was completed in November 1999 for Ovenden Papers, a North London paper merchant.

Additional functionality was quickly developed for publishers paper management and the first of these systems, known as Cortec PBS, went in to commercial use in 2000.
In parallel with the PBS development, Cortec was also being developed to handle value added manufacturing. Specific functionality was added to provide full production control for paper and board converting. The sales order processing modules of the system were also enhanced to provide material usage optimisation and costing and to feed order requirements directly to the production system.

The first sales and production system was implemented to replace the original 1980’s system at Hedsorboard in 2000. To date this was the most challenging deployment as the system had to deal with fifty users spread over three sites.

Cortec IPM, an industry specific package solution that provides very specific vertical market orientated functionality for UK Paper Merchants, was released in October 2001. This launch also rolled out the first version 2 systems. During that year the company undertook it’s first non-UK implementation for Winpac bv, a Dutch paper and board converting company that had formally been part of m-real.

In 2002 work was begun on enabling Cortec for XML message based e-commerce. In addition to a new API for Cortec the decision was taken to build and XML integration module to manage messages and XML schema. The first application for the new Mercury XML system was a project to separate the sheeting and converting operations of Hedsorboard from the merchant parent. The aim was for both business operation to work with separate Cortec systems linked using papiNet XML messages. This project was successfully completed early in 2003 becoming one of the first live papiNet implementations in Europe.

Version 3 of Cortec was released in mid-2003 with the first implementation being for a production and warehouse management solution for Limehouse Board Mills. Version 3 represents a very significant step forward both in terms of functionality and ease of use.

Due to the rapidly expanding demand for electronic trading much work has been undertaken for clients in the area of business to business message handling and processing. The Winpac Group have been particularly active in this area where they have linked their European converting service centres to the sales systems of their paper and board mill customers.