World Grain - October 2015 - 28

FEATURE: ARDENT MILLS COMING INTO ITS OWN

Ardent Mills as a success.
"I think anytime you start something new there are always a lot of
unknowns and uncertainties," he said.
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some challenges, some things we wish
would have gone differently. But if you
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met or exceeded expectations across
the board, and it's because of the great
people who have come together."
VALUES AND VISION
Key to handling the challenges and
bringing the company together has
been a commitment to the values and
vision established for Ardent Mills at
the outset, Dye said.
"It helped to have the values, the vision that we set as really foundational
at the beginning," he said.
Four touchstone values cited by Dye
were trust, serving, simplicity and
safety.
"The values became something the
Ardent Mills team could own," he said.
"They became ours. They were consistent. It didn't matter what parent company you came from. What your background was. If you were new to Ardent
Mills all together. We all operated under the same values.
"Think about trust as a value. Here
we are competing in 2014 on May 28,
and now we're operating as one team
on May 29. That value of trust right
from the beginning - to build trust
with each other, to build trust with our
customers, to build trust with our communities as a new organization. The
value of serving - serving our customers, serving each other as we build
the organization and learn as we go.
The value of simplicity, simplifying
processes and creating the Ardent Mills
way of doing things. And the value of
safety - personal safety and food safety have been core to our identity since
we started. These values have become
real, they aren't just words. These
values, combined with our vision and
brand essence of, 'nourishing what's
28

Ardent Mills' Chief Operating Officer Bill Stoufer, left, and Chief Executive Officer Dan Dye refelect on
the company's first year.

next,' have provided a strong foundation for Ardent Mills to build a great
and enduring organization."
Stoufer added, "When you make
your decisions through the lens of the
values, it makes decision making easy.
Choosing whatever process you are
working on or system. I also think it's a
good rallying point about how you take
care of your customers. It's how we
behave internally, and how we behave
externally. Even though we had very
successful companies prior, you still
have to earn trust from day one with
the customer."
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the company was one Stoufer said
management knew was coming - putting Ardent Mills on a single enterprise
resource planning system.
"We knew we were heading into
challenges with two operating systems," he said. "What we found is
that the only thing similar between the
systems was the three-letter acronym.
That moved up in the priority of how
fast we wanted to get to one system. It
presented some challenges internally
and externally. It was cumbersome for
everybody.

"Overall our integration is on schedule. Some things are ahead. Some are
probably a little slower. We have begun
our work to get on one operating platIRUP:HKDYHJRQHOLYHZLWKWKH¿UVW
of four phases."
Against the backdrop of internal integration, Stoufer said Ardent Mills unwaveringly is keeping its "eye on the
ball" of meeting customers' ongoing
needs.
"We have a mantra, 'ELEMEDS,'
which stands for 'Every load, every
mill, every day, safely,'" he said. "A
year into it, we are a 'heckuva' lot
smarter. We understand our footprint
better and our capabilities better. We
are aligning customers against the right
capabilities to help deliver a lower
landed cost to the customer that really
KHOSVGULYHWKHHI¿FLHQFLHVLQWKHEXVLness by utilizing the supply chain network we have."
BEING BIG ISN'T ENOUGH
Large milling companies discuss the
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and Ardent Mills executives are acutely
aware of the challenges that come with
October 2015 / World Grain / www.World-Grain.com

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World Grain - October 2015

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