Hormel Foods meets efficiency, SOX and ROI needs with software from Aldon
Emeryville, CA — September 6, 2005 — Hormel Foods Corp., a multinational manufacturer and marketer of consumer-branded food and meat products, has purchased the Aldon Suite for its company-wide change management needs.
Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance was Hormel Foods' initial driver for replacing its time-consuming manual software development process with Aldon. Auditor Price Waterhouse asked Hormel Foods to provide an audit trail process, separation of duties, work tickets of what was charged and who made the charges, and report distribution logs. Aldon has given Hormel Foods a structured, repeatable and auditable software development process and has successfully helped Hormel Foods meet its SOX testing.
"We're pleased Hormel Foods Corp. chose to standardize on Aldon," said Daniel Magid, president and CEO of Aldon. "By simply providing Hormel Foods with Aldon's best practices software configuration management solution to effectively manage its software development process, we've also helped Hormel Foods increase its organizational productivity and comply with SOX regulations."
Hormel Foods will also use Aldon Lifecycle Manager to manage the development of its warehouse management application, which controls inventory levels and all transactions with grocery chains. Aldon will help Hormel Foods know where the inventory is and the levels at each warehouse. Hormel Foods will also rely on Aldon for its data collection application, which handles bar coding and tracking each product.
"With Aldon, all of our code will be centralized in one place," said Carroll Hermanson, director of facilities services at Hormel Foods. "As a result, our efficiency has increased. We've seen benefits in such a short period of time. We're looking forward to a very successful future with Aldon."
Hormel Foods said it has already seen benefits from using the Aldon Suite, such as improved programmer productivity by erasing the time needed to research what was unique about the source at each plant (20 hours per month) and shortened the time needed to set up a new facility (16 hours per facility, three facilities per year). Hormel Foods was able to justify Aldon on this savings alone because it met the company's strict recovery of investment requirements.
Hormel Foods has also eliminated inadvertent code overlays at plant and distribution facilities, which impacted production. In one case, Hormel Foods was unable to distribute products for four hours. Finally, the company has improved productivity by replacing manual effort in complying with SOX.
