  We introduce a novel realization of the open heavy-flavour hadroproduction in
general-mass variable flavour number scheme at next-to-leading order in
perturbative QCD. The principal novelty with respect to the earlier works is in
the treatment of small-transverse-momentum limit, which has been a particularly
challenging kinematic region in the past. We show that by a suitable choice of
scheme, it is possible to obtain a well-behaved description of the open
heavy-flavour hadroproduction cross sections from zero up to asymptotically
high transverse momentum. We contrast our calculation with the available
D$^0$-meson data as measured by the LHCb and ALICE collaborations at the LHC,
finding a very good agreement within the theoretical and experimental
uncertainties. We also compare our framework with other theoretical approaches.
