DecisionNext has announced the appointment of Hal Sankey and Mike Farrand as Advisors. As Advisors, Sankey and Farrand will provide value chain experience, commercial insights, and product-steering advice across the various functions of DecisionNext. During these unprecedented times, Hal and Mike will draw on their decades of experience to help DecisionNext’s customers navigate the meat value chain.

Sankey is a meat industry veteran who was raised on his family’s ranch before serving 32 years across Cargill’s Beef and Food Distribution businesses with roles in boxed beef sales, product management, and pricing. His 20 plus years in pricing included 12 years leading the beef pricing team as well as other senior commercial roles. His responsibilities over his career included box and ground beef pricing, customer satisfaction, managing sold positions, and maximizing cutouts.

“I’m excited about advising DecisionNext as companies can use the platform to grow their businesses,” said Sankey. “From basic price projections to adjusting forecasts based on assumptions, companies can look back at how well those assumptions played out. These powerful analytics help explain decisions for strategic leaders in the trenches.”

“DecisionNext has always believed that combining machine learning with human expertise leads to the best decisions and no one has more expertise around pricing beef than Hal Sankey,” noted Arden Arnold, President of DecisionNext.

Farrand is a food industry veteran, with 30 years of sales leadership, marketing, business development, and strategy roles at Hormel Foods Corporation. Today, he operates Farrand Consulting Group which helps manufacturers and retailers in the protein space achieve their goals in the areas of M&A, category management, supply chain optimization, and business development.

“There is a cost to the many market decisions we make, every day. Being able to quickly analyze an array of options, with the help of DecisonNext’s powerful analytics tool, provides the confidence needed to make the right ones,” noted Farrand. “I am excited to be working with the talented DecisionNext team to help bring this tool to our clients in the industry.“

“Mike is going to help DecisionNext refine our models, build DecisionDesks that seamlessly integrate with business workflows, and better connect with our clients to ensure they get maximum value out of our software,” said Arnold.

DecisionNext’s team of meat industry experts and data scientists understand the unique challenges facing the meat industry today. By being able to model, compare, and measure projections versus actual outcomes, DecisionNext tools and services can keep meat companies closer to the markets during volatile times, and position customers to accelerate into any ‘new normal’ that comes after.

Powered by proprietary machine learning algorithms, DecisionNext allows market experts to bring together the best of human and machine intelligence to improve market visibility and forecast accuracy through transparent, interactive software. By having the ability to not just forecast markets, but simulate market outcomes, decision-makers can more effectively evaluate options in high value, high frequency decisions across sourcing, operations, and sales.