Running a feed operation across five locations means the same ingredient might be tracked five different ways, and small inventory errors compound fast across sites. Dakotaland Feed had been running on Feed Mill Manager, a program the team had relied on for roughly twenty years, but it was no longer keeping pace with the business. Datacor's Pennant Mill, built as an evolution of that same lineage, gave Dakotaland a modern operation system for order entry, customer service, and, most critically, inventory control.
Choosing a new operation system is as much about who is building it as what it does today. For Dakotaland, the deciding factor wasn't just a feature list; it was Datacor's roadmap and the team behind it. Familiarity with Datacor staff and their background in the feed industry gave the team confidence that Pennant Mill would keep evolving alongside the business rather than becoming another system to outgrow.
"Dakotaland Feed uses Pennant Mill's operation system to do our customer service stuff, order entry, and the accuracy on the inventory side has been phenomenal compared to what we had before. We had basically no real inventory control. The system we had was just not functioning the way we wanted it to."
— Thad Olson, Director of Operations, Dakotaland Feed
A feed operation runs on more than inventory counts. It needs production totals, batching data, sales history, and, when something goes wrong, fast traceability. Pennant Mill's dashboard pulls all of it into one place, including an MRP system that predicts ingredient needs a week or more in advance based on live order data, then feeds that forecast back into the batching system. Hence, the numbers reflect actual usage rather than theoretical estimates.
"MRP system predicts which the ingredients we're going to use from the orders that are in the system, and gives us a week out or so of inventory forecasting, communicates back with our batching system. So we're very accurate. We're not deciding on theoreticals, we're considering actual usage."
— Thad Olson, Director of Operations, Dakotaland Feed
Migrating years of accumulated data can carry old errors straight into a new system. Rather than import everything from the legacy ERP, Dakotaland chose to enter clean information manually during onboarding, which began in late November and ran into December. The team also rolled out Pennant Mill at a single location first, working out any issues before extending it to the rest of the company's sites.
"We didn't want to bring corrupt information from our current ERP system, so we wanted to put good information in from the start. Formulas now transfer seamlessly from bill of materials and then into a manufacturing BOM, so that's all very easy to do."
— Thad Olson, Director of Operations, Dakotaland Feed
Inventory control had been a persistent pain point for Dakotaland before Pennant Mill Manager. With better visibility into where inventory actually stands, the company has cut down on the loss and shrink that used to eat into margins, a return the team feels justified the investment.
"The investment was very solid. I would say inventory control was a big issue before, and knowing that we've got better control on where we're at and not having loss and shrink like we did, it has started to pay for itself. And it's simpler to use, it's been pretty seamless."
— Thad Olson, Director of Operations, Dakotaland Feed