“We have plans to grow our international business over the next few years, so we really wanted to up our global trade management game and create a platform that was more efficient and eliminated all that time-consuming paper shuffling.” When it came to global trade management, Land O'Lakes previously used a combination of Access databases, spreadsheets, and SharePoint sites, "and it was not consistent across our businesses,” says Erika Johnson, the IT director in the company’s supply chain group who led that implementation. It also replaced a number of other legacy systems and processes with Oracle Global Trade Management Cloud.Įrika Johnson, IT director for Land O'Lakes supply chain. Land O’Lakes had used the on-premises Oracle Transportation Management for about 15 years but in 2018, the company decided it was time to upgrade to Oracle Transportation Management Cloud. ![]() ![]() When COVID-19 hit hard early this year, the co-op was just finishing implementation of new cloud-based logistics applications. And that’s something we’ve had to keep going as demand has continued to be variable.” We didn’t have time to dwell on whether we were making the wrong decision or think through the repercussions. “The thing was we didn’t have a choice to be anything but collaborative in order to make fast decisions. “We did a postmortem in our dairy food business, and we focused on why we were more agile during the initial stages of COVID than we ever had been before,” Braun says. ![]() The experience has taught Land O’Lakes some valuable lessons. That Etch A Sketch is still in play as the virus spreads to other parts of the country and the world, he says, at the same time as tropical storms, fires, and other natural disasters disrupt business as well. “Once we aligned on our best estimates-an optimistic scenario, a pessimistic scenario-we built supply chain strategies around those.” The supply chain teams worked closely with other parts of the business to “figure out what's going to stick in the long run and what is maybe temporary,” Braun says. And that’s something we’ve had to keep going as demand has continued to be variable.ĭustin Braun, senior director of logistics for Land O’Lakes ![]() The thing was we didn’t have a choice to be anything but collaborative in order to make fast decisions. “You’re looking at what the demand is today, where are the constraints, and what can we do to move supply to the right places.”įor example, when the northeastern states were a COVID hotspot, the co-op took half of the volume out of its distribution center in that region because of labor constraints and moved it to another distribution center in the Midwest, then shipped product from there into the Northeast. “It was like an Etch A Sketch every day: You come in, someone had shaken it up, and it’s just a blank slate once again,” Braun says. If there was a disruption in a plant or a partner warehouse, the principals had to decide quickly whether to take the plant offline or reduce the labor force and then shift product around, while finding new ways to transport product if necessary. It was all hands on deck for Land O’Lakes’ entire supply chain organization, with virtually everyone in planning, manufacturing, warehousing, and transportation revising plans daily and working long hours, including nights and weekends. Despite all those obstacles, the co-op found ways to distribute its farmers’ milk so that they didn’t have to see the results of their hard work thrown away.
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