eCapital Advisors Case Study: Hormel Foods Corporation
About Hormel Foods
Based in Austin, Minnesota, Hormel Foods Corporation is a Fortune 500 multinational manufacturer and marketer of high-quality, brand-name food and meat products for consumers throughout the world. Hormel Foods offers a wide variety of products including hams, bacon, sausages, franks, canned luncheon meats, stews, chili, hash, meat spreads, shelf-stable microwaveable entrees and salsas. Hormel Foods sells food under many brands, some of which include the CHI-CHI’S®, DINTY MOORE®, FARMER JOHN®, JENNIE-O TURKEY STORE®, LLOYD’S®, SPAM® and STAGG® brands, as well as under its own name.
Challenges Faced
The Hormel Foods Finance team had invested significant time and effort to refine and support the existing planning and reporting system. Despite their efforts, the legacy system wasn’t able to scale to meet Hormel Food’s expanding data, planning and reporting needs.
The existing reporting solution was slow, inflexible and required significant resource hours to update reports as the business changed. The reporting system would take nearly four hours to fully aggregate their financial data. Financial data was loaded only after the fiscal period close. Complex calculations were required within each report to define and produce the required alternate rollups to align with how the business wanted to view their data. Additionally Hormel Foods had to manually convert their financial results to generate external reporting.
The planning system consisted of a collection of Excel based input templates. Planning users would manually input data into the templates or copy and paste data from other planning Excel files where they were building their plans. The aggregation process took several hours and was only performed nightly, which made it difficult for users to see the impact of changes. Hormel Foods often wanted to run multiple iterations or versions within their planning cycles but that wasn’t possible in their existing system.
The Solution
Hormel Foods teamed with eCapital Advisors to design and develop an enterprisewide planning and reporting solution utilizing Hyperion. The project was divided into two phases with the first phase focused on developing a Hyperion Essbase solution to load, calculate and aggregate monthly financial data. The second phase leveraged Hyperion Planning to create a budgeting and forecasting solution to be utilized in time for the fall budgeting process. The two systems were fully integrated providing more flexibility for Hormel Foods users in the planning and variance reporting processes.
Hormel Foods team members participated in two eCapital University courses that provided product overviews, hands-on training exercises and design/build best practices. Phase 1 included the 2-day Hyperion Financial Reporting course and Phase 2 included the 3-day advanced Hyperion Planning course.
The Outcome
Hormel Foods designed and implemented a dynamic and flexible reporting solution in less than 10 weeks. The slow and rigid legacy reporting system was eliminated and replaced by a best in class financial reporting and analysis platform. Hormel Foods business users now have self-service reporting capability with either, highly-formatted interactive financial reports or ad-hoc analysis capabilities in Excel, Word, and PowerPoint.
KEY BENEFITS?
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Hormel Foods is able to quickly and easily update their board and management PowerPoint presentations using the Hyperion Smart View Connection to pull real time data from the system
- Hormel Foods reduced the time required to load and consolidate their financial data from four hours to less than one hour.
- Previously manual and systematically unavailable financial reports are now generated automatically by Hyperion.
Organization Size:
7.2 Billion in sales in 2010
19,500 employees
Operates in more than 20 manufacturing communities
Implementation Team:
Hormel Foods team consisted of both Finance and IT resources
eCapital consulting team Technology:
Oracle Hyperion Planning, Essbase, Oracle Data Integrator, Hyperion Financial Reporting
About eCapital Advisors
eCapital Advisors, 2010 IBM Cognos North American Partner of the Year, providing Business Analytics consulting. We apply our expertise in Finance, Technology, and Project Management to your business and processes. We listen to your needs, study how your company works, and create solutions customized to match your business. Expertise, flexibility, and results you can count on.
