# Land O'Lakes' Playbook for Supply Chain Transformation - Turning Volatility into an Advantage ## Метаданные - **Канал:** SupplyChainBrain - **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBEpXUaYgi4 - **Дата:** 06.05.2026 - **Длительность:** 55:51 - **Просмотры:** 62 ## Описание As a farmer-owned cooperative, Land O’Lakes cannot afford supply chain disruptions. Milk keeps flowing whether demand is there or not. Any misstep can wipe out profitability overnight. Land O’Lakes’ supply chain leaders share how they transformed planning across three fundamentally different businesses, each with its own volatility profile and constraints. You’ll learn how they simplify networks, centralize decision-making, and implement end-to-end planning capabilities with OMP’s AI-powered Unison Planning™. This session goes beyond technology to reveal how leadership alignment, phased execution, and deep collaboration turned complexity into resilience while achieving real, measurable results. What you will take away: 1. In push-driven supply chains, you don’t control supply; you orchestrate it. When supply can’t be turned off, resilience comes from visibility and orchestration, not reactive firefighting. Understanding where and how much supply and demand are disconnected enables Land O’Lakes to make smarter decisions across its supply chain. 2. Resilient transformations are won with people, not just technology. Technology can enable change, but leadership alignment, collaboration across functions, and phased implementation will make it stick. From redefining planner roles to expanding capabilities, Land O’Lakes shows how adoption, trust, and disciplined execution ultimately unlock resilience. 3. True resilience results from fewer, better decisions. Land O’Lakes improved performance by deliberately reducing planning complexity: consolidating networks, centralizing inventory decisions, segmenting portfolios, and setting clear service trade-offs. The outcome was lower inventory, fewer assets, and improved cost control without sacrificing customer service. ## Содержание ### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBEpXUaYgi4) Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00) Hi everybody. I'm Bob Bowman, editor-in-chief of Supply Chain Brain. Welcome to this special presentation, Land O'Lakes Playbook for Supply Chain Transformation. Turning volatility into an advantage. Quick reminder, there will be a question and answer session at the end of this presentation. Audience members are encouraged to submit their questions at any time during this presentation by clicking on that Q& A icon at the bottom of your screen. So, as a farmer-owned cooperative, Land O'Lakes cannot afford supply chain disruptions. Milk keeps flowing whether demand is there or not. Any misstep can wipe out profitability overnight. So, today Land O'Lakes supply chain leaders are going to share how they transform planning across three fundamentally different businesses, each with its own volatility profile and constraints. You'll learn how they simplified networks, centralized decision-making, and implemented end-to-end planning capabilities with OMP's AI-powered Unison Planning. The discussion goes beyond technology to reveal how leadership alignment, phased execution, and deep collaboration turn complexity into resilience while achieving real, measurable results. So, with that, I'd like to introduce our speakers for today. Tomaz Vrabec is director of digital supply chain lead at Land O'Lakes. Tomaz is an accomplished supply chain leader with more than 25 years of global experience spanning corporate and consulting roles. At Land O'Lakes, he leads enterprise-wide transformation initiatives including digital transformation, advanced analytics, and supply chain design optimization. Erica Westernbrook is VP of logistics and planning at Land O'Lakes. Erica has nearly two decades of experience leading complex operations across the food and agriculture industry overseeing a network of distribution facilities, transportation assets, planning professionals, and frontline employees. Erica has led transformative initiatives across warehousing, transportation, and international logistics. And Philip Vervloesem is chief commercial and markets officer with OMP. Philip plays a key role in connecting market trends to corporate vision. At OMP, he focuses on enhancing customer satisfaction, driving value realization, and ensuring future-proof solutions. Philip's career has involved identifying market opportunities, exploring emerging sub-segments, and aligning sales development with business goals. So, welcome everybody. Great to have everyone here on this fantastic panel, and welcome audience as well. With that, I'd like to turn over the presentation to Erica Westernbrook. Erica, take it away. Well, good morning everyone. Um, I want to start by thanking Supply Chain Brain for hosting and to our partners at OMP for inviting us to speak with them today and to all of you for turning in. I'm sure the audience is filled with supply chain professionals who are busily multi-tasking dealing with the volatility and uncertainty that you are facing today. Um, and so I hope our story from Land O Lakes about our story of supply chain transformation, how we've learned to turn volatility, uncertainty and complexity into an advantage helps you out. Uh, you'll hear about how those advantages came as we simplified decision-making processes, orchestrating our push and pull portions of our supply chain, and made those changes stick through leadership alignment and our phases of execution. But before I tell you that story, I want to tell you a little bit more about Land O Lakes. You all probably know us for this, our most famous product, uh, but we are so much more than butter. Land O Lakes was founded 100 years ago. ### [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBEpXUaYgi4&t=300s) Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00) It was the third It's the third largest cooperative in the United States. Um, and the most important thing that you should know is that we're owned by farmers. 1,700 dairy producers and hundreds of agricultural retailers, who themselves are also owned by farmers, making us a cooperative of cooperatives. Um, and that model for us really changes the resilience equation. Supply chain disruptions, they don't just hurt service levels or our quarterly earnings, although those things are really important, they directly impact the livelihoods of individual farmer owners, their communities, their families, and their businesses' profitability. And so when we have missteps, those ripple effects are significant and it it's difficult for us to afford them. A lot of supply chains talk about wanting to be end-to-end and thinking more end-to-end with their view. You know, our enterprise is actually founded and built upon that principle. We are involved in every step of the food system from providing agronomic insights and crop inputs at the farm all the way through to animal feed and animal nutrition um and eventually to consumer products, things that you know and love and buy on the grocery store shelf. We truly operate all the way from farmer to fork. And when disruption occurs in our enterprise, it has the potential to ripple across that entire food chain. It impacts every aspect of our business. And so our strategy must be to connect supply chain signals, make those tradeoffs visible, and coordinate decisions across that entire network, not just within individual functional silos or within individual business units. One more thing that you should know is that we support iconic value-added brands. Hopefully you've heard of a number of these. Um but we also, being an ag collaborative, we operate a number of commodity-based businesses as well. Of our roughly $16 billion in annual revenue, in many product lines pre-tax margins are measured in pennies. Um so that means predictable, reliable execution again simply isn't a nice to have. A single supply chain hiccup can wipe out the profitability of an entire product line or business pretty quickly. And so resilience for us isn't just reacting faster or better to what happens, it's about streamlining our decision-making, making fewer, better decisions as early in the process as possible aligned to the key results and business tradeoffs that we have with our leadership teams. Thank you, Erica. Uh so, I'll continue the story here uh and I will introduce a little bit more into the details the three uh business units that we have at Land O'Lakes. Um so, I would say we, you know, we operate three very different businesses and each of them have their own volatility profile. So, first one, WinField, uh in which we distribute seed and crop protection products, uh we deal with extreme demand seasonality. Uh so, growing season is only once per year and growers are making product decisions pretty much last minute. So, our product placement need to be pretty much perfect. If we miss the order, there is no reorder. We miss the sale and we miss the season. And then, you know, maybe we get the next opportunity again next year. In dairy food supply chain, uh where we process milk into dairy products, uh that supply chain is in a big part uh push driven. The milk supply never stops. And there can be a lot of volatility with the different processing assets uh going offline and that can be ours or our milk customers and that's creating a lot of disruption. Last but not least, uh our animal nutrition, where we manufacture and distribute animal feed, uh we face constant formulation variability. So, unlike in human food, animal feed is formulated to hit — [snorts] — uh nutrition targets, but the ingredients themselves can fluctuate. So, we regularly reformulate uh our products based on commodity markets, seasonality, local inventories, and other things uh to optimize the overall cost. ### [10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBEpXUaYgi4&t=600s) Segment 3 (10:00 - 15:00) So, there are three very unique businesses with very unique challenges, but there has been a lot of similarity in our transformation approach. Simplifying decisions, centrali- centralizing what must be coordinated, and building end-to-end planning visibility. Now, I will go a little bit deeper in uh each of these, and uh I will start with uh dairy foods first. Uh I would say that, you know, our dairy food supply chain is at the heart of our orchestration challenge. In a dairy co-op, which we are, we can't adjust supply based on the demand. Cows are not a very good listeners. They tend to produce milk if we need it or not. Our job isn't just to meet the demand, it's also to balance milk. In fact, our main purpose as a dairy co-op is to find marketplace for the milk that our member farms produce. Every drop has to go somewhere, and ideally to the most valuable combination of products possible. The challenge is that supply and demand rarely align. Seasonality is often the opposite. For an example, milk supply peaks in the spring, while butter sales peak in Q4. In addition, milk processing creates byproducts. For an example, for each pound of butter that we produce, we get 2 lbs of milk powders. And each of these products have their own markets with their own behavior. And that applies to the customer demand, as well as the commodity markets that are kind of underlying for each of these products. So, in this environment, resilience doesn't come from reacting faster. It actually comes from understanding where and how much supply and demand are disconnected across time horizons, and then orchestrating decisions across processing, inventory, and sales channels. Implementation of OMP and providing end-to-end visibility has changed our decisions' quality. We gained visibility from cow to customer, made push-pull disconnects explicit, and turned firefighting into deliberate orchestration. The results include better milk balancing. Um I would say in general, we dump less milk than our peers. Second, more profitable decisions in our cream balancing. That's another input into the process. And also on the back end, much healthier product inventories. Uh we made the great progress you're reducing HT inventory. I'll talk a little bit about WinField United, which is our crop inputs business. And this is the second example that we're going to share today about how we managed complexity and volatility and created value. So, you heard Tomasz mention a few minutes ago that in crop inputs, we deal with extreme seasonality. This complexity is inherent in how this business operates. You get one, maybe two chances plant per year, and that's it. Um and those decisions are last minute made by farmers based upon the weather, market conditions, what's available, what's on discount, which suppliers are they most loyal to. And that drives a tremendous amount of working capital, fixed costs, um and sometimes chaos in the overall system, but it also provided us an opportunity to improve and differentiate how we show up in this market. So, 10 years ago, uh WinField United answered complexity with more complexity. We had an incredibly complex system. We had over 100 service center locations. We had 16,000 SKUs. We offered same day, next day service levels to every item at every location. Our planning processes or lack thereof were buried deep within the ERP itself. Um we had decentralized inventory decision-making with not a lot ### [15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBEpXUaYgi4&t=900s) Segment 4 (15:00 - 20:00) of governance on top of it. Now, you probably are not surprised to hear me say that our inventory levels were ballooning and our fixed costs were uh unsustainable during that phase of our history. And over time, we gradually simplified the network. We made service and cost trade-offs more and more explicit. Um and we centralized many of those inventory and stocking decisions. But, this didn't happen overnight for us. It progressed in several very clear phases. The first step was we needed to get control over that mountain of inventory that we continued to create. We did that by consolidating the tail of the portfolio into fewer hub locations, which then could rapidly redeploy that those lower turning items to the local service centers more quickly what without spreading inventory everywhere. After we did that, we consolidated many of our network locations in order to reduce our oval overall fixed cost footprint. And throughout that time, we adopted better and better inventory controls around how much should we carry, where should we carry it, and who has the authority to increase inventory levels? Is it every time there's a good deal, and so you buy 3 years worth of inventory all at once because it's on discount, or should we have more stringent controls in order to ensure that we can turn through that inventory in the given year? We also implemented planning technology to support our teams in facilitating those trade-off decisions and serving our customers. Essentially, we stopped trying to do everything everywhere all at once. In this complex, volatile environment, we had to reduce the number of variables. And by doing that and reducing the number of possible combinations of variables and therefore reducing the number of decisions that we had to think through every day, results followed. We reduced our inventory essentially by almost half. Uh, we have far fewer assets in our system than we did before. We have much better cost control. And we accomplished a reset of customer service expectations. It's not same-day, next-day everywhere all of the time, but it's a more structured delivery schedule that can still be responsive in the height of the season when needed, but also be efficient when that high level of responsiveness isn't necessary. And this is a service level that we can more reliably deliver against. And the irony of that we're serving our customers better today by deliberately reducing our commitment to responsiveness because we are actually signing up for something that we can reliably meet. I'm going to close with three learnings that made this transformation work for us and be really real. Um the first one is the importance of having leadership alignment up front. So when you're making changes in the supply chain, it can sometimes feel like you're pushing a rope uphill. You have great ideas to reduce costs or improve service or improve uh working capital, but you can't get anyone to buy in to making the go-to-market or business tradeoffs that are needed in order to do that. Commercial teams often have to make explicit changes in how we serve customers or how the business functions in order to make real transformational change in the supply chain. And so that progress requires leadership alignment and an understanding of the business strategy up front. The second one is collaboration the entire time. You know, one of the things that I have learned throughout my career, even early on when I was a shift supervisor in a manufacturing environment, is that when you're trying to drive change, big or small, there's always going to be critics. And it can sometimes be helpful to actually invite your toughest critics into the conversation up front because first of all, you then know what they're going to say when you try to roll it out, and you can anticipate some of that feedback and adjust your plan accordingly. But also, if you can at the beginning convince those critics to embrace the change, they then become your most compelling advocates because as people watch that change unfold, people know that if you can convince that person to buy in, well, there must be some there must be something working. You know, the third piece that is maybe unique to us, but I'm sure there's elements of this everywhere. We've talked a couple of points in this presentation about the importance of managed risk, right? With in some places when you have thin margins, when there's a lot at stake, um you have to take really measured risks. bite-size pieces of your strategy off at a time, especially when you know you can't necessarily absorb big failures. And so, everything that we do, when it comes from traditional supply chain transformation or something that involves data digital change as well, we are always working in small, short ### [20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBEpXUaYgi4&t=1200s) Segment 5 (20:00 - 25:00) phases, proving results as we go, and ensuring that we have stability and that we've earned the right to continue. So, if there's one takeaway that I can leave you from our presentation this morning, it's that in push-pull supply chains like ours, in highly volatile and complex environments, um you can't control every variable, which of course you all know. But, you can orchestrate it by focusing on the decisions that drive business outcomes and streamlining those decisions, making them simpler and more visible, in addition to implementing better tools and technology to enable those teams. And with that, I think we're going to start our panel discussion, and we're happy to start taking questions. Thank you so much. We're bringing Philip Dev Loes of OMP back into the discussion, as well. I have to say, folks, uh I am just so impressed by Land O'Lakes, a company of your size, your history, your brand awareness, and your supply chain complexity, how you're meeting these challenges of maintaining product consistency and supply in a hugely volatile marketplace. So, this is such an education for me to hear you speak this hour about how you're managing to do that. With that, I have the privilege of asking you experts some uh questions before we get to our audience question and answer session at the end of this presentation. And while we are having this chat, audience, please remember you are invited to submit your own questions at any time during this discussion by clicking on that Q& A icon at the bottom of your screen. So, let me start with you, Tomas. This question is you know, you If you talk about this idea for fewer, better decisions, what decisions do you deliberately take away from teams or planners? Yeah, thank you for the question, Bob. Uh you know, I would say you There's one thing uh that I would like to emphasize is that we intentionally reduced localized siloed decision-making. Because that always tends to sub-optimize uh the decisions. So, for an example, in Will WinField United, the inventory and replenishment decisions move moved from uh highly decentralized execution to more centralized government model. And then on the other hand, uh you know, in dairy foods, we stopped treating byproducts and core products as a separate decisions and started planning them together, acknowledging that they're all physically linked. Like, uh I mentioned earlier uh in the presentation, when we make butter, you get 2 lbs of powder. So, you can't make a decision about the butter without understanding the implications for the powder, right, in this case. Um but I would say, you know, the goal wasn't necessarily less accountability. It was fewer conflicting decisions and less sub-optimization. Okay. Interesting. I mean, you did talk about Did Philip Would you do you about to say something? — Yeah, I was thinking of because it's an important question and it's a hot topic today as well. What do you deliberately take away from Teams and planners? And I see in this you know growing up age of enabling the agentic planning, the enrichment of roles is important there as well. It's not just taking away tasks, but it's also enriching and augmenting them to do better planning basically. I see that as an evolution as well, an important one to mention. I see the word agentic has crept into our discussion rather early, so I'm not surprised to hear it. Okay, so Erica, why does Land O'Lakes emphasize this idea of leadership alignment and collaboration as key factors for a successful digital transformation? Yeah, well, I know I closed this with, so let me um expand on this a little bit further. Um our former Chief Supply Chain Officer used to tell us all the time that if you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there, right? And it's a way of say telling us like you got to have some semblance of your strategy before you get started. Um I think supply chains run into problems with any type of change, in particular digital transformation, if we think about it from an entirely separate thing from the overall work of the business and the transformation that the business itself may be going through. It should be viewed it as an enabler, not a standalone. And so therefore, if you're going to view it as an enabler, you have to have alignment early and an understanding of how that digital transformation is going to drive an outcome that the business cares about. As we were plotting through proportions and phases of that WinField United journey that I talked about, feedback that we would get often from ### [25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBEpXUaYgi4&t=1500s) Segment 6 (25:00 - 30:00) the president of that business unit would be very blunt saying, "Stop talking to me about supply chain. Talk to me about how you're going to help my business. " And that feedback, while it hurts, right? Um, you know, it was important to us because we realized we were not framing this conversation in the right context. You also asked about collaboration. Um, and I think what I would say to that is, you know, I'd remind everyone here that digital tools like don't necessarily resolve tradeoffs within your supply chain. They simply expose them and give you more data and visibility to where those tradeoffs are happening and what impacts them. And so, if you give teams more insights, more data on all of the tradeoffs between cost, service, environment, capital, without clarity on how to navigate those things and who actually has decision rights to resolve them, you actually end up creating more confliction because you're adding more variables and more decision points, but you're not actually driving different outcomes. Right? So, that early alignment and collaboration along the way ensures that we're not only arming our teams with data and technology and tools, but we're actually giving them the ability to navigate those things in the context of enterprise priorities. And I think that is far more empowering um than just giving teams more information. Yeah, and I love the idea that you're emphasizing the fact you're not turning over human responsibilities to a machine or to an automated system. That's enabling the human responsibilities. Still have to be in the picture. Yeah. Okay, so Philip, you know, you were talking here about how you've transformed Land O'Lakes over multiple business units with Unison planning as the single solution of reference. Right. — What are some of the learnings that have emerged from this initiative on how to approach this given the very different modeling horizons, constraints, dynamics of all these sub segments? Yeah, indeed. And Erica and Tomasz already indicated that during their presentation, right? How diverse the different segments are. I would summarize it in three big learnings. The first one is that you know, when transforming Land O'Lakes across the multiple business units, is that the differences of course between those segments matter, but the way you approach them must be also, I would say, consistently disciplined and standardized as well because each business, whether it's crop inputs or animal nutrition, dairy and so forth, has its own uh emphasis on planning horizons, on constraints, on season- seasonality and so forth. So, instead of trying to standardize all the business, we standardized the framework, meaning the single unison planning backbone, a unified data model, and shared then the governance structure. Um so, that's that allowed us also to preserve what made each business unique while moving towards one, I would say, enterprise way of planning. That's the first learning. The second one is that, you know, value sequencing matters, meaning from a readiness point of view, some units, some business units, I think Tomasz and Erica realized that very well from the beginning. Some were more ready than others. And being able to do these readiness checks um for the ones that were then most mature and then starting with that, whether it's forecasting or master planning and so forth, was another realization that was, uh I would say, bound to be more successful, drive more success as well. And finally, the third one, I would say, as a joint team, we learned that the cross-unit adoption accelerates when you create also a common decision framework that's supported by one planning platform. And that I wanted to piggyback on one answer that Erica gave linked to the collaboration and linked to what I would call the um uh making sure that there's a good leadership incentive as well. This week I was at a conference in Phoenix and one of the CSEOs of a food large food and beverage company said, "Well, success in transformation happens on all levels. A consensus is important, but leadership inspiration is mandatory and making that very pragmatic and practical is extremely important for the success. " Great. Again, inspiring message about the importance of human beings in a complex supply chain. So, thank you so much for that. Okay. So, Tomas, if we're talking about, as we are, a push-driven environment, what are some tools or some processes that can help organizations balance supply and demand? Because this is one of your big challenge we're talking about here when the two of those things rarely, if ever, line up. Yeah. Um you know, if there's one word I would say, it's uh visibility. ### [30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBEpXUaYgi4&t=1800s) Segment 7 (30:00 - 35:00) That's probably the most important capability uh to manage and orchestrate that. Uh and there are probably at least kind of two type of visibilities here. One would be the vertical visibility. You know, what I called earlier, you know, from the customer. But then also uh horizontal visibility. So, vis- visibility across different product lines. Um so, products and byproducts and so forth. Um and really, you know, the more specifically, visibility to the disconnect, right? It's not just uh demand or supply individually or only individual products uh because everything is connected. The decision in one part of supply chain or one product line impact other parts of supply chain and other product lines. So, for us, you know, in Dairy Foods, where this push driven supply chain is the most prominent. Um understanding where and how much supply and demand were misaligned across different time horizons allowed us to orchestrate decisions across processing, inventory, and sales channels. So, processes like structured S& OP and S& OE combined with end-to-end planning visibility that truly enabled coordinated decisions instead of just reactive firefighting. And I would say especially, you know, when the perfect alignment was impossible. Mhm. So, sales and operations planning, sales and operations execution both still figure very heavily into the mix. They're not new by any means, but they're certainly still critical tools that you're that you're using for that reason. Okay, so Erica, you know, let's admit we can't do everything, right? I mean, you're trying to improve on all fronts and but it's not always going to be possible. So, what is the hardest trade-off that your supply chain leaders had to make during this transformation? Yeah. Um I think if I go back if I speak again to our WinField United transformation, um I think the hardest trade-off that we as a as an enterprise as a business, not just the supply chain, had to make was realizing that in order to deliver the cost structure that we needed to in order to ensure that our organization was sustainable, we had to ask our customers to change. Um and that's hard on any day for any business. Um, but for us, when our customers are actually our owners, they are our board of directors, it is especially tricky. Um, you know, I'll go back to again my the theme of leadership alignment, which um, you know, will probably be prevalent through the entire conversation. You know, we had conviction at the leadership level that what we were doing was not sustainable. Not just for us as an enterprise, but actually the system in which we operate. Um, and those member owners that ultimately we serve and status quo wasn't acceptable. And so when you have that clarity at the top of the house, um, it invited us to come back to leadership to say, "Okay, if you want to take a significant portion of supply chain spend out, these are the tradeoffs that we must agree to do. " Um, and it became very clear that was going to be the path forward. And I guess I would come full circle, when your customers are also your owners, they view cost to serve tradeoffs fundamentally differently, too, right? Because it is their cash, it is their capital that is investing in our business. And so, once we had clarity and conviction on the path that we needed to go down, we made a bet that most of those customers and owners would go on that journey with us. Um, and we were very fortunate um, that we were right and we were able to get them there. Um, and we got to the end. Fantastic. All right. So, Tomas, you know, we're talking here about planning, becoming more data-driven, more AI-driven. Remember that word agentic sneaked into our conversation a few minutes ago. What new skills or mindsets are most important for planners to develop in light of these changes. Uh you know actually I think Eric I know one of the previous answers already talked quite a bit about this. Um you know on a high level I would call this or say that the planners need to shift from being reactive problem solvers to decision orchestrators. And what that means to me is number one, they need to be able to interpret the ### [35:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBEpXUaYgi4&t=2100s) Segment 8 (35:00 - 40:00) trade-offs, not just the outputs. Number two, they need to understand uncertainty, not just chasing the precision. And number three, uh they need to be able to communicate decisions and implications clearly across different functions, you know, in their language so that they understand it. Just overall, you know, I would say technology can generate options, but us humans we still own the our own judgment. Uh so I think in the future the most successful planners will be those who can combine analytic analytical insight with enterprise thinking. Yeah, I wanted to be piggyback off the what Tomas was saying because I think this is a very important topic, right? What do we expect from the talent of the future as well, right? And you mentioned Tomas the orchestrators. I think that's an important word to combine, let's say, the analytics and insights with the right actions. I often call it like um how they can translate choices that were made and presented to them from like whether it's AI engines or uh whatever is proposed as a solution um to actions and also the explainability on why certain choices were made to go to alternative sources, uh assets, and so forth. And that ability, that analytical ability will become extremely important in hiring and upskilling the current um let's say group of planners and other stakeholders as well, yeah. Head and heart, left brain, right brain, all of that is going to be is needed in tomorrow's supply chain planner. It's a tall order, but very interesting to see how that individual is changing as we go forward and yet still continues to be valuable not being shoved out the door by AI. So that's great to hear. So let me ask you this to Maz, you know, how can organizations use external signals, you know, like commodity prices or forecast uncertainty, which we talked a lot about here today, to improve decision quality? Uh you know, Bob, [clears throat] we used to we used to have kind of separate processes, one for planning, kind of supply chain planning, right? One for risk management, one for kind of you know, sales planning. Uh but in reality, all these processes and decisions are highly linked together. And really I think the this all these external signals and data is the most valuable when it's integrated into the decision context, uh not layered on top as a separate analysis, right? So for example, in dairy foods, um you know, commodity markets directly influence our supply uh and demand and the economics of the whole supply chain or business really. And more often than not, it's impacted in the opposing ways. Um so for example, if commodity markets swing in one direction, you know, that might reduce the milk supply. And on the other hand, might the product demand, right? So, we need to be able to manage all of that. Uh and so, bringing all those signals into planning conversations uh really help leaders understand the trade-offs earlier and act more intentionally at the end of the day. Um you know, I would lie if I would say we kind of figured all this out already. Uh you know, so we we're still working with we still have our own map uh in front of us uh to incorporate some of this uncertainty explicitly uh into our uh tools and processes and it's just a you know, a natural evolution of improving decision quality in environment we operate. Yeah, that last maybe quick one, that last part that Tomasz was mentioning about yeah, we haven't figured out everything completely yet because it's to me the one of the most dynamic areas in supply chain planning, it's to really determine what signals outside-in signals are most valuable for you to really turn planning more accurate because there's a lot of noise, so you got to take the right signals in and that's one of our core innovation tracks as well where um inspiring companies like Land O'Lakes help to also pinpoint what is what are important outside-in signals, right? Yeah, and not the north ones that are important, yeah. Excellent. All right. Well, guys, thank you so much for first of all that excellent presentation introduction to Land O'Lakes as well as tolerating my questions for the panel part of this presentation. We now are ### [40:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBEpXUaYgi4&t=2400s) Segment 9 (40:00 - 45:00) going to move into the audience question and answer portion of our presentation, inviting the audience to come in and ask some questions of our very distinguished panel and even as we are answering the questions that have already come in, audience members are encouraged to continue to submit your questions by clicking on that Q& A icon at the bottom of your screen and we will get to as many of your questions today as we can time permitting. So let's start with this one and I'll kind of judge as to who gets which question but anybody who wants to chime in on those questions of course is free to do so. Uh the question is what is the single most impactful simplification that any supply chain leader could make this week? Okay, to reduce complexity and improve resilience. Erica, let me throw that one at you. Yeah, I feel like you must be trolling me or like this person's always like way up here. Like what's the whole strategy? But I love the question and I think it is important that we can find ways where you could just take a first step cuz sometimes it can be overwhelming. Um so I guess here's what I'd say. Um Stop doing something. Anything. Like pick something, right? Find a report, a meeting, a weekly communication, a dashboard that nobody's looking at. Like something that your team is generating that isn't driving an explicit decision that you can point to a business outcome, right? And simply turn it off. Like see what happens. Like don't get in trouble, right? Like follow your processes, okay? But like observe what happens and observe the reaction to that. Does something break? Does anybody ask you where's that monthly report? No? Great. Like turn something else off, right? Complexity is inherent but complexity is also something sometimes something that we do to ourselves because we think we're adding value and then we forget to make sure that it is. Um and so by going through that exercise, you'll learn one of two things. Like you'll either learn that there is something that you're generating and something that is taking up time, head space, resources that is completely self-inflicted. Or, you will learn something about how others in the business are relying on your team for input that you actually didn't understand because you weren't The reason you turned it off is because you weren't aware of the business decision it was driving. And there's value in there that you can uncover, too, by understanding how the signals that you're sending are impacting somebody else's decision-making and maybe now you have an opportunity to collaborate and work on how to make that simpler. Okay. Good one. Sorry about the trolling. — All I'm doing is reporting what the audience is asking. All right. Okay, so here's a question. Across your journey, what were the biggest challenges in moving from decentralized to centralized planning, which we really hit on this hour, and what drove successful adoption? Tamas, you're up. I would say the biggest challenge was not really technical, you know, it was really more on the human side. Uh it was behavioral. Um So, for example, moving from decentralized to centralized planning meant taking decisions that people were used to do and uh used to own locally. Uh and you know, then making them part of the coordinated enterprise decision process. Um So, you know, in Win United, for an example, uh the planners and commercial teams were accustomed to optimizing locally for speed and service. Uh that was the number one priority and then long uh you know, long time nothing else. And centralization required accepting that some uh local optimizations had to give way to enterprise trade-offs. Um, so I would maybe call out three things that really drove successful adoption. Um, and we talked about this, you know, earlier already. So, one is the leadership alignment on what decisions needed to be centralized and why. Uh, number two is the phased execution. So, the teams could build trust in the new model over time. Uh, and then last but not least is the transparency, you know, so where centralized decisions were clearly explained in terms of the trade-offs. Uh, they're not mandates. Uh, and once people saw that centralization improved decision quality, uh, the adoption then followed. Mhm. Yeah, that's a really good piece of ### [45:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBEpXUaYgi4&t=2700s) Segment 10 (45:00 - 50:00) advice on change management for sure. Uh, getting people to accept that kind of a shift. Yeah. I think overall I see that cross our industries that we're active in that the attention to change management and uh, providing enough uh, you know, time and effort into driving adoption is uh, is a key one for success, right? And that's why both from a um, process and human point of view as well as the solution framework could help in monitoring that is at least, right? To understand a is the solution being used? Is the process adhered to? Um, are planners, for example, still touching the plan although it's already delivering a good quality? Those kind of um, measure and monitoring help also to understand how good the adoption is going and to re-steer where needed, right? Right. This question wants to know how you define and measure decision quality. And can you share an example where simplifying decisions improved resilience? Tomas, what about you? What do you think? Yeah, that's uh that's a great question. Um you know, I and I think as I said earlier, um the decision quality really was our real objective. Uh not better forecast or more sophisticated tools. It was really about making better decisions. Um you know, again, I would maybe uh characterize the decision quality in three very practical ways. Uh first, consistency. So, are there similar situations uh that are producing similar decisions? Or are we kind of re-litigating the same trade-offs, you know, every week? Uh the second would be the clarity of the trade-offs. You know, do decision-makers understand what they're optimizing for? You know, service, cost, inventory, margin. Or uh or and what are they consciously trading off, right? Uh and then third, it's stability of the outcomes. Um I would argue that uh high-quality decisions reduce firefighting. Uh they don't eliminate volatility, right? But they do prevent volatility from cascading into a constant last-minute escalations. So, you know, a good example of this uh it would be in WinField United. Um historically, we had a very decentralized network with broad portfolios and aggressive service promises everywhere. And that created a huge volume of reactive inventory and replenishment decisions. A lot of noise, but not necessarily a lot of value. So, by simplifying the network, centralizing some of those inventory decisions, uh and making the service trade service trade-offs explicit, we dramatically reduce the number of decisions that planners had to make. And the decisions that remained were clear, more intentional, and also better aligned to enterprise priorities. This next question, I think, bounces off of the mention of the word noise early on and simplify, which seems to be our theme for today in a complex supply chain. But this question is, in your experience, where does complexity create noise rather than value in modern supply chains? And how can organizations intentionally simplify to enable higher-quality decisions? Erica, what do you think on that one? Well, first I want to applaud the premise of this question, right? That assumes that complexity can create value. Cuz I think that that's really important. So, complexity is inherent. Um complicatedness is a choice. Um and what I mean by that is that complexity is all around us. It's in the operating environment. It's often part of our businesses. Right? We focus a lot on as supply chain leaders like how complexity creates waste, but often complexity is the very thing that differentiates and drives value for a business if it's managed well. Um and so it's too easy for supply chain leaders to kind of do the Henry Ford thing, right? Like you can have any Model T you want as long as it's black. I used to work in yogurt and I used to tell people you can have any flavor as long as it's strawberry, right? That was my version of the same oversimplification, but the reality is that we all have to be much more sophisticated than that. We have to be able to delineate what is the complexity that actually is the value ### [50:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBEpXUaYgi4&t=3000s) Segment 11 (50:00 - 55:00) driver for the business versus the complications that doesn't. Those complications happen, we've talked about this, right? When we create optionality and choices where neither option creates differential value, and so why are we adding that as a step? Um we talk about when our business, you know, when we commit more to our customers than we can reliably deliver or more than what they actually value, that's a complication. I think the example for us, Tomasz, you just talked about this in your last answer, right? Of like this belief that we had to be hyper-responsive, same-day next-day service to all of our owners and be no more than 100 miles from them at any point of time created immense complication in our network. Um but the complexity that we preserved through all of this, which we haven't talked about, is the breadth of our portfolio, right? As an agricultural distributor who both manufactures and distributes other manufacturers' products, having 16,000 items is what makes us great. Our ability to offer that full-line service is what differentiates us, and so we couldn't lose that, but we could root out the complication that wasn't driving differential value, and I think that was key for us is knowing the difference. Okay, great. Uh this question says what part of your OMP implementation delivered real value fastest in a milk-driven environment, and what had to change in your organization or data to make that success actually stick? Tomasz, you want to tackle that one? Yeah. You know, I talked earlier about um what really delivered the greatest value to dairy foods um transformation and that was really this end-to-end visibility. Um so vertical and horizontal, right? So I don't know that I can actually point to you know a specific part of the uh implementation or module. So we did choose to go with the OPR modules operational planning module first because I do think that's kind of fundamental for everything else. Uh but it was really you know implementing that across the whole supply chain. And then the system providing that visibility again vertically, you know, from milk to the customer and horizontally so across different product lines especially when we have the core products and byproducts, right? And understanding uh again how the decisions in one part of the supply chain then impact decisions in the other supply chain. So um you know, rather than saying you know, the a particular part of the implementation delivered most value, I would say really kind of this end-to-end visibility was really the most impactful. Okay. This has been a fantastic presentation. I could listen to it for another hour or two, but unfortunately we are just about out of time. Audience members any of your questions that we did not get to during this presentation, I'm sure that our speakers our experts would be only too happy to answer offline. But for that final question of the presentation, I'm going to tag Erica to answer it and here it is. From your perspective, where should companies start if they want to shift from firefighting to a more resilient orchestrated supply chain? Yeah. Well, let me tie together a couple things that I've said throughout the Q& A here. So, it does start with strategy. getting clarity and understanding from your business on what is important to them and how is the supply chain today both enabling some of those outcomes and also getting in the way. Um again, if you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there. But once you're tethered to the destination, don't be afraid to simply start. Right? One of the illusions that a presentation that like ours has today is we have the gift of hindsight, which means we can go back in time and put everything into neat and tidy phases and make you believe that we had this 10-year journey planned out from the beginning. That's not reality and you know that that's not reality. Um but what we knew is that we needed to start somewhere. In WinField, we started with inventory. Right? In Dairy Foods, we started with some basic end-to-end visibility because we know those were the things that was going to give us momentum and give us a platform to keep going. Um so, I think the important thing is know the mountain that you need to climb. Um and then simply start. 105 years old almost Land O Lakes and going to continue for another century if you keep up this creativity and ### [55:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBEpXUaYgi4&t=3300s) Segment 12 (55:00 - 55:00) innovation and paying attention to the complexities of your supply chain. Thank you so much to Maz and Erica and Philip for that fantastic presentation and audience, thank you also for your participation and your very intelligent questions of this panel. We do have an asset for you here because your transformation playbook does not end here. Here is a QR code that will access two ebooks to help you unlock the guides to your next chapter. You can take a quick shot of that QR code with your phone right now, but if you don't have time in these final few seconds, don't worry about it. It will be provided to all attendees of this webinar upon conclusion. Once again, I want to thank our very distinguished panel. It was a great education for me and for our audience. I want to thank our audience, too, for sitting in on this great presentation. Everybody, have a great day. Bye-bye now. --- *Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/50728*