DecisionNext Announces Hal Sankey & Mike Farrand as Advisors

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.

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.