Client Spotlight Hormel Foods

Hormel Foods Cuts T&E Administrative Hours by 90% with a Completely Paperless Process

Strong Sales and a Strong Reputation
Hormel Foods Corporation is a multinational manufacturer and marketer of consumer-branded meat and food products headquartered in Austin, Minnesota. The company is best known for its canned ham product, SPAM, and for other branded prepared foods lines, including Dinty Moore beef stew and Jennie-O Turkey Store products. With approximately 18,000 employees and annual sales of $5.4 billion, Hormel Foods operates facilities in Iowa, Georgia, Illinois, Wisconsin, Nebraska, California, Texas and Kansas. The company enjoys a strong reputation among consumers, retail grocers, and foodservice and industrial customers.

A Business Challenge
Before implementing the Gelco solution, twelve full-time employees processed more than 39,000 expense reports annually using a paper-based process. With $20 million in annual travel spend, the company accumulated 500 boxes of T&E-related paperwork each year. T&E policies and procedures were different in every division of the company and Hormel Foods managers possessed no corporate-wide travel data.

The company wanted to support all of its locations with standardized T&E policies and processes in order to:

• reduce administrative costs
• refocus staff on core business activities shorten the reimbursement cycle time
• increase corporate card spend
• gain insight into travel spend in order to leverage volume discounts

The Gelco Solution helps Hormel Foods Eliminate 11 FTEs
Hormel Foods has achieved exceptional results working with Gelco. Standardizing T&E policies and processes across the company has provided insight into travel spend, improved compliance with the company's corporate card policy, and enabled the company to lower administrative costs substantially.

Through business acquisitions, the company added 3,000 new employees while simultaneously managing to:

• reduce T&E administrative FTEs from 12 to 1
• reimburse employees nearly 5 times faster
• create as paperless a process as allowed by law with 100% of receipts imaged
• eliminate 2-3% of unnecessary expenditure categories
• increase corporate card spend by 75%, resulting in substantial rebates

Integration with the company's corporate card, issued to 100% of Hormel Foods travelers, has been especially beneficial. Prior to the Gelco implementation, only 10% of eligible travel expenses were charged to the card. That figure now tops 85% and increased corporate card spend has helped the company improve its negotiations with vendors and suppliers. Because charges are pre-populated in the Gelco system, Hormel Foods' travelers find that on-line completion of their reports is quick and easy.

New Insights – Next Steps
In the future, Hormel Foods plans to use the insights it has gained into corporate-wide travel spend to determine the appropriate expenses and to image the required receipts to support greater VAT recovery. Gelco continues to help Hormel Foods reduce the direct and indirect costs associated with T&E expense management, while providing visibility into corporate data that will help the company remain an industry leader.

To find out more about how Gelco can help your company

• drive corporate card spend,
• support VAT recovery or
• decrease expenditure categories, contact your Gelco Account Representative.