Posted by Adrian Bridgwater, Guest Blogger
As a member-owned agricultural cooperative, Land O'Lakes, Inc.is a Fortune 200 agribusiness with over $14.2 billion in sales. With deep roots in the industry dating back to its formation in 1921, the company today is as equally focused on time-honored craftsmanship traditions as it is on progressive new innovations driven by technology.
The company has been laying down an international expansion path and performing some internal structural changes to position itself for rapid growth. It is now making changes and adjustments to its processes and systems to enable and support new global expansion.
“Functionality specific to global consolidation(opens in new tab), local statutory reporting, foreign exchange management and several other areas will need to be extended, changed or simply implemented to accommodate our potential expansion beyond our traditional U.S.-centric business model,” Todd Stabenow, director of IT, international and M&A, Land O'Lakes, said at a session at SuiteWorld 2014, recently held at the San Jose Convention Center.
The company is employing more use of technology-enabled agriculture, specifically an application called the R7® Tool, which helps farmers and sales teams better analyze the health of crops by the interpretation of satellite imagery and ultimately get more growth out of limited land growing resources.
The company’s newly formed Land O’ Lakes International division analyzed its business and technical needs prior to making expansion plans and selected NetSuite to help enable their future growth through foreign currency capabilities(opens in new tab), localized tax functionality and IFRS and statutory reporting capabilities.
NetSuite OneWorld offers “Out-of-the-Cloud” tax calculation and reporting for 54 countries, in 190 currencies and in 19 UI languages -- and the extent and scope of these capabilities represented an important decision factor for Land O’ Lakes.
NetSuite’s single cloud ERP(opens in new tab) instance also means that any customer is able to manage multiple subsidiaries, business units and legal entities. It is built to accelerate financial consolidation and visibility and is able to elevate productivity by localizing each employee’s workplace experience.
Land O’ Lakes now runs two subsidiaries on NetSuite and is considering further growth.. The platform itself is built to scale with real-time currency conversion and financial consolidation features. Before coming to work with NetSuite, Land O’ Lakes had no effective global consolidation engine for information technology.
Today the company is looking forward to extending its systems with gateways to disaster recovery and other additional service functionalities. It took roughly seven months for the company to implement its Mexico-based installation of NetSuite, which sets the standard for how long it takes the firm to roll out new subsidiaries, although there is a learning curve when new subsidiaries are rolled out.
As a company with an eye on the need to be able to produce 70% more food than we do now by 2050 to support the planet, Land O’ Lakes is committed to profitable but efficient expansion based on a newly empowered NetSuite operational computing platform.