Food and agricultural cooperative awarded for most creative and cutting-edge deployments of enterprise technology by InfoWorld magazine
Eden Prairie, MN — November 23, 2004 — The IT product information magazine InfoWorld has named Land O'Lakes' Stellent Image Management implementation one of the 100 most innovative corporate information technology (IT) solutions of 2004.
Land O'Lakes is a national farmer-owned food and agricultural cooperative with annual sales of more than $6 billion. Stellent Inc. is a provider of content management solutions.
The annual InfoWorld 100 awards honor companies that demonstrate the most creative use of technologies to further their business goals. Selected solutions must use multiple technologies in innovative ways to serve well-defined business goals.
"This year, InfoWorld honors a host of innovative projects that highlight the resourcefulness of the IT community," said Eric Knorr, senior features editor for InfoWorld. "IT departments have learned hard lessons about business realities and realistic return-on-investment (ROI). The InfoWorld 100 provides a forum for IT managers to get the recognition they deserve for smart projects."
"It is an honor to have our Stellent-powered document imaging and management project recognized by an audience of our peers as one of the most outstanding IT initiatives of the past year," said Curt Doble, director of corporate application services for Land O'Lakes. "This project has enabled us to provide quicker access to documents, reduce hard-copy document storage costs and store documents in a more efficient, electronic format."
Stellent Image Management is currently deployed across four major Land O'Lakes functions (accounts payable (AP), fixed assets, credit and human resources) to alleviate common business process "chokepoints." These chokepoints include the responsibility of managing an increasing amount of content; inefficient storage of documents in filing cabinets, at offsite locations or on microfilm; and limited data security, back-up or recovery capabilities.
In addition, Stellent Image Management works in tandem with Land O'Lakes' PeopleSoft and Oracle enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.
Overall, Land O'Lakes said the Stellent Image Management deployment has increased productivity, reduced costs and improved company-wide communication. For example, Land O'Lakes' Ag Services division has deployed an extensive document imaging application for its AP function. On average, this division scans, stores and manages more than 180,000 documents per month. After one year with Stellent, Land O'Lakes believes it has achieved savings of approximately $250,000 related to improved efficiencies and reduced staffing. In addition, instead of replacing its stand-alone microfilm system for approximately $125,000, Land O'Lakes was able to invest in the scalable Stellent system, which goes far beyond supporting one division and one application.
Furthermore, Land O'Lakes said it plans to use the interaction between Stellent Image Management and its existing Stellent Universal Content Management infrastructure — which includes Stellent Document Management and Stellent Web Content Management — to more effectively create, store and manage unstructured content.
