Founded in 2007, Hi Plains Feed is a livestock feed manufacturer that primarily serves the commercial cattle feeding industry in southwest Kansas, including the High Plains region and surrounding border states.
It operates two feed mills that serve beef and dairy producers in the region. From its headquarters and main site in Garden City, Hi Plains Feed manufactures liquid supplement products. Another facility, an hour away in Dodge City, is a traditional feed mill that produces dry supplements, including pellets, range cubes, and minerals, as well as textured complete feeds.
Hi Plains Feed has been using Datacor’s Pennent Mill Manager (PMM) since December 2017 and the business now relies on PMM, Feed Ration Balancer, and Brill to provide complete oversight of its operations, enhance efficiencies, and support business growth.
“Before we were using Pennent Mill software, we were using a pretty primitive system that didn't give a lot of visibility, especially throughout the month for costs, margins, production volume, and sales figures,” says Andy Linscott, General Manager of Hi Plains Feed, LLC. “Nothing was real-time, and everything was step by step, user entry dependent.”
“Now I can, pretty much in real time, monitor and catch any issues related to pricing, cost, margins – any kind of production or inventory issues that may come up, we are able to jump on much faster,” he says.
“As somebody trying to grow the business, it's been really beneficial to be able to have that depth of visibility in everything we do.”
“I manage the business and lead our operations teams, formulation, pricing, customer service, and finance,” says Linscott. “To be able to do that, I've got to know where the business is headed and I've got to know the health of our Profit & Loss, of our ownership positions and commodities, what our production volume looks like and where it's headed. Being able to pull all that information together with data that I can trust – and dial down to a certain ingredient in a certain shipment to a specific customer with just a few clicks, is extremely valuable.”
“It allows me to keep a close eye on operations, sales, pricing, and formulation without spending a day getting in the weeds in each of those. It allows me to sit back and have a vision for the business,” he continues.
“What our business is really built around is those relationships with the folks in our industry that we serve in commercial cattle feeding and adjacent business partners like ingredient suppliers and nutrition consultants – and being able to confidently answer any questions they've got about what we do, where I see ingredient markets headed, what our ownership looks like in some of those commodities, and what we can do formula wise.
“[The software has] allowed me to more confidently answer their questions and really partner in the success for everybody in our industry.”
“A lot of people have a platform and say it’s for agriculture, and then you find out that it's basically a grain accounting software,” says Linscott. “This was something tailored to feed, with people that can speak our language. That was attractive to me, coupled with the depth of information we could pull together quickly and the visibility we would have of everything.”
“Everyone on the management team, customer service, manufacturing, and sales is using Pennent Mill Manager. We also have two employees who work regularly in Brill to set ingredient prices and do formulations.”
“With Pennent Mill Manager, everything is in one place. I can see everything from manufacturing, orders, and also the sales, costs, and margins. I can get around in just a few clicks and get the information I need pretty readily,” he says.
“Seeing exact layers of inventory and what those costs are in relation to pricing and inventory levels of certain cost layers, that's information we just simply couldn't pull before, and it gives me real visibility of what's going on in the business. I can keep a finger on the pulse of everything throughout the month.”
“Being able to just look at that, along with purchase order contracts and being able to see the cost of those major ingredients coming up, how they're going to change, and how I need to relay some of that to our customers has helped me as we've worked to grow this business and has deepened those relationships with our customers. I can answer those questions now, whereas before I wasn't always able to.”
“Following order to invoice without repeated manual entry of data, pricing, and volume, and using those multiple shipments on a single sales order has been helpful for high-volume customers,” says Linscott. “The set price populating – the flow through of that process has become less cumbersome and really helped us make that more efficient.”
“Being able to follow a manufacturing order through from order entry to execution to inventory, Pennent communicates well with our automation systems in the plants to get accurate inventory relief for each ingredient in real time,” he adds. “Being able to have all that without manually entering each of those from a batch sheet has really reduced a lot of the entry time and the amount of physical paperwork that we've got to file. It's just really a verification step, which we'll always need to do for quality and feed safety reasons, but the accuracy has really improved inventory tracking and goes back to relieving the right amounts of inventory of the right cost in the right order – helping that First-In, First-Out inventory flow the way it should.”
“Going back to tracking costs at each layer with the perpetual inventory system has really helped, knowing exactly what each load of feed that goes out the door truly costs us. And with the way we do some of our pricing with certain affiliated customers, a different pricing arrangement has really cleaned up that process and made it much more transparent. When that needs to be reviewed with the customer, they're impressed with the data that I can pull and prove exactly how we arrive at those prices.”
“Being able to pull together the information that I want to look at every day, order by order, I would say it saves an hour a day conservatively,” says Linscott.
“A pretty valuable function of this is having some customized data that fits how my mind works and how my eyes see it and being able to make that fit into how I like to operate, goes hand in hand with making that more efficient. So, I'm not spending time pulling information and then entering it into a spreadsheet and then slicing and dicing that and making it look like I want it to look. I can have help getting those reports and lists built the way I like to look at them.”
“The support has been great from the very beginning,” he says. “There are still folks that helped us go live nearly eight years ago that are still offering support when we need it.”
“They're people that speak our language and understand the feed business – and they're there in a pinch if we need them. When we ask for something, if it's not a solution that's built in that we're not offered yet, they help us to design and implement something.”
“Being able to have a conversation and trust somebody that knows the complexities of this business and what we're dealing with gives me, as a business leader, an awful lot of confidence in who we're working with and the products we're using.”
“Anytime you go through a change in a system like this, you run into challenges. But [with Datacor] there's a team that has stuck with us since day one that is committed to our success,” says Linscott.
“Coupled with the depth of information that I'm able to pull together to make business decisions, knowing that I've got somebody in my corner to help me do that if I run up against something, that's extremely valuable.”