Land O'Lakes Tackles Content Management Challenges with StellentLand O'Lakes Tackles Content Management Challenges with Stellent

Land O'Lakes, a national farmer-owned food and agricultural cooperative with annual sales of more than $6 billion, is using Stellent Universal Content Management across its enterprise to tackle a variety of content management challenges — allowing Land O'Lakes to increase employee productivity and access to knowledge, improve business processes, and reduce costs.

Land O'Lakes has partnered with Stellent since the late 1990s to power a variety of content-related initiatives. Currently, Land O'Lakes utilizes the document management, Web content management, and imaging components of the Stellent technology to store and manage project documentation; intranet, extranet and public Web site content; and accounts payable, credit, and human resources information.

"Stellent Universal Content Management enables us to effectively manage a variety of unstructured content and multiple content-centric applications within one architecture across our enterprise," said Curt Doble, director of corporate application services for Land O'Lakes. "Content management was in its infancy when we first began working with Stellent. At first, we didn't know what to expect. Yet, here we are today; our Stellent implementation is scaled across the organization to meet a diverse set of needs, with tremendous success and vast potential for additional expansion."

According to the companies, Stellent Universal Content Management serves as the enterprise content management standard for Land O'Lakes' business-critical information. For example, in Web content management and document management applications, the Dairy Foods division uses the Stellent system to manage project documentation, charts, status reports, and requirements. The corporate function of Land O'Lakes utilizes Stellent to power a vast intranet providing employees with access to company and industry news and information resources tailored to employee roles within the organization. The Stellent system's automatic content conversion capabilities allow Land O'Lakes to make its divisions responsible for daily updates to intranet, extranet, and public Web site content — increasing timely access to information and freeing up information services (IS) staff to work on additional information technology (IT) projects.

Land O'Lakes also utilizes Stellent imaging technology to alleviate common business process "chokepoints" across four major functions — including accounts payable (A/P), fixed assets, credit, and human resources. 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.

"The use of Stellent imaging functionality among the business groups that most often work with paper-based documentation is producing tangible benefits," Doble said. "Our Ag Services division scans, stores, and manages more than 180,000 A/P documents per month. After one year of using Stellent imaging technology in tandem with our enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, we believe we have achieved an estimated $250,000 in cost-savings related to improved efficiencies and reduced staffing."

"Land O'Lakes' ability to easily scale Stellent Universal Content Management across its enterprise to manage all forms of unstructured content speaks to our product's broad capabilities and powerful functionality," said Robert Olson, president and chief executive officer for Stellent. "Our track record of demonstrating multiple, rapid successes within Land O'Lakes has made Stellent a critical component of the company's IT infrastructure. We look forward to producing similar results for Land O'Lakes as its content management needs continue to expand."

An in-depth case study of Land O'Lakes' Stellent Universal Content Management implementation is available at http://www.stellent.com/landolakes.