In 2001, Land O’Lakes acquired Purina Mills, making it the nation’s largest animal feeding company. (It already owned Land O’Lakes Feed and Farmland Feed.) That presented a real challenge. Sales and marketing managers needed easy access to information across all three feeding operations to properly analyze the sales of more than 40,000 feed products.

To address the challenge (and succeed), Land O’Lakes implemented a series of data-mining tools from Informatica—Informatica PowerCenter, Informatica PowerConnect, and Informatica Analytic Business Components. Land O’Lakes was indeed successful and was rewarded as follows.

• New effective trending and forecasting analyses have resulted in improved sales and manufacturing efficiency.
• Informatica’s integrated suite of data-mining tools has resulted in needing to write fewer business intelligence applications from scratch, saving the company valuable development resources.
• The software has enabled Land O’Lakes to reduce development cycles for new products and product revisions.
• The software has enabled Land O’Lakes to easily integrate the business operations of Purina Mills into its other operations.