Land O'Lakes Standardizes Enterprise on Data Integration Platform

Establishes Integration Competency Center to propagate reusable, accelerated data integration processes company-wide

Establishes Integration Competency Center to propagate reusable, accelerated data integration processes company-wide

Redwood City, CA — July 19, 2004 — Land O'Lakes has implemented a data integration platform from Informatica to serve as the foundation for a shared services integration center of excellence, or Integration Competency Center (ICC), supporting its data warehousing initiatives.

A farmer-owned food and agricultural cooperative with annual sales over $6 billion. Land O'Lakes does business in all 50 states and more than 50 countries, providing a variety of dairy-based consumer, foodservice and food ingredient products.

The company is using Informatica's PowerCenter data integration platform as part of its centralized enterprise data integration approach to aid in the creation of new products, drive business-process improvements and lower the risks associated with commodity trading.

As much of the data within Land O'Lakes moves through its information repositories on a daily basis to support tracking and historical reporting on sales and commodity trends, it is critical to Land O'Lakes that its myriad integration processes be architected in a standard and repeatable fashion.

A shared services ICC, or integration "center of excellence," is a centralized model for enterprise data integration that can help speed the deployment and reduce the costs of strategic integration projects by implementing consistent best practices and standards across multiple initiatives and reusing processes to optimize internal IT services.

"Informatica PowerCenter is helping to define our standardized enterprise approach to data integration and business visibility for sales analysis and strategic reporting," said Jim Erickson, data warehouse manager at Land O'Lakes. "Land O'Lakes now maintains one shared integration team that has standardized on PowerCenter as our shared integration platform. With all new data warehousing processes developed using PowerCenter, we've been able to lower integration costs, get new integration projects up and running more quickly and accelerate time-to-insight for our business users."

"Companies growing by acquisition often have a lot of data to integrate and consequently can gain value from data integration that leverages integration best practices and methodologies," said Paul Albright, executive vice president and chief marketing officer at Informatica. "In adopting an enterprise-wide shared services model, Land O'Lakes is taking to heart the mantra 'reuse, reuse and reuse.'"
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