Press Release
 

HORMEL FOODS SELECTS ALDON SUITE AS CHANGE MANAGEMENT STANDARD

Hormel Foods Meets Efficiency, SOX and ROI Needs

Emeryville, Calif. - Sept 06, 2005 - Aldon, the leading provider of enterprise software configuration and change management solutions, today announced that Hormel Foods Corporation, a multinational manufacturer and marketer of consumer-branded food and meat products, has purchased the Aldon Suite for its iSeries change management needs.

Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance was the initial driver for Hormel Foods to replace its time-consuming manual software development and deployment process with Aldon. To be compliant with the legislation, the Information Technology Services team of Hormel Foods needed to provide an audit trail process, separation of duties, work tickets of what was changed and who made the changes, and report distribution logs. Aldon has given Hormel Foods a structured, repeatable and auditable software development and deployment process and has successfully helped the company meet its SOX testing requirements.

"We're pleased Hormel Foods Corporation 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. This application controls inventory levels and helps manage transactions with its customers, and data collection application, which handles bar coding and tracking of product through the manufacturing process.

"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 dramatically increased. We've seen amazing benefits in such a short period of time. We're looking forward to a very successful future with Aldon."

Hormel Foods has already seen impressive benefits from using the Aldon Suite, such as:

• Improved programmer productivity by erasing time needed to research what was unique about the source at each plant (20 hours per month) and shortened 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 required return on investment.
• 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.
• Improved productivity by replacing manual effort in complying with SOX.

About Hormel Foods Corporation

Hormel Foods Corporation, based in Austin, Minn., is a multinational manufacturer and marketer of consumer-branded food and meat products, many of which are among the best known and trusted in the food industry. The company leverages its extensive expertise, innovation and high competencies in pork and turkey processing and marketing to bring quality, value-added brands to the global marketplace. In each of the past five years, Hormel Foods was named one of "The 400 Best Big Companies in America" by Forbes magazine. The company enjoys a strong reputation among consumers, retail grocers and foodservice and industrial customers for products highly regarded for quality, taste, nutrition, convenience and value. For more information, visit www.hormel.com.

The Aldon Suite

The Aldon Suite provides IT business process automation, requirements management, software configuration management, multiple version management and software deployment to companies worldwide. Built to address the needs of geographically distributed IT organizations and complex multi-platform environments, the Aldon Suite gives companies a defined, repeatable, measurable and traceable process for every stage of their application development. The integrated suite is comprised of Aldon Lifecycle Manager, Aldon Deployment Manager and Aldon Community Manager.

About Aldon

Aldon is the leading provider of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solutions that brings the benefits of process-driven application change management to IT, accelerating the delivery of mission-critical business applications. Aldon ALM solutions support today's agile organizations by enabling IT teams to greatly improve their products' time to market, reduce business disruptions, achieve regulatory compliance and increase return on investment. More than 1,300 companies, including 70 of the Fortune 100, rely on Aldon ALM solutions for enterprise software configuration and change management for their IT business processes. Established in 1979, Aldon is headquartered in Emeryville, California and maintains 14 offices worldwide serving more than 40 countries. For more information, please visit www.aldon.com .