Land O'Lakes playbook for supply chain transformation
Turning volatility into an advantage
As a farmer-owned cooperative, Land O'Lakes cannot turn the supply off. Milk arrives every day in volumes and compositions nobody controls, and it starts losing value immediately. That makes dairy a push-driven supply chain, where the real question is never how much to produce, but which product stream deserves the milk you already have. Get that allocation wrong, and you are wiping out an entire product line's profitability overnight.
The difficulty plays across three fronts:
- Shelf-life windows are short, so there is almost no inventory buffer to absorb a planning error.
- Product streams are interdependent, so a decision about cheese is also a decision about whey and cream.
- And commodity pricing moves faster than most planning cycles, so a plan that was profitable on Monday can be underwater by Thursday.
Planning each of these separately produces six locally sensible answers that do not add up.
Land O'Lakes supply chain leaders Tomaz Vrabec, Director of Digital Supply Chain, and Erica Westenbroek, Vice President - Logistics and Planning, share how they rebuilt planning across three fundamentally different businesses, each with its own volatility profile, using OMP's AI-powered Unison Planning™.
What you'll take away
- Orchestrate, don't react. Resilience comes from end-to-end visibility and deliberate orchestration, not firefighting.
- Start with the constraint you cannot move. Continuous milk intake sets the terms. Plan the allocation decision first, everything else follows.
- People make transformation stick. Leadership alignment, cross-functional buy-in, and phased execution drive lasting adoption.
- Fewer, better decisions win. Consolidating networks and centralizing inventory decisions reduced complexity and delivered measurable results.
- See the trade-off before you commit. Simplifying the network made push-pull disconnects explicit instead of invisible.