Anonymous Leading U.S. Pork Producer

The Maschhoffs, the largest family-owned pork producer in the United States with nearly $1 billion in annual sales and approximately 5 million live hogs sold yearly, faced a structural logistics challenge inherent to modern pork production: continuously moving pigs through 73 sow farms and hundreds of contracted weaning and finishing sites across the Midwest. Managing 700–800 trailer truckloads of live animals per week, the supply chain team relied on Excel spreadsheets that provided only a narrow snapshot of pig flow at any given time. Projecting space needs even one month out required a flow planner three days of manual work — making it impossible to model the scenario analysis needed for a planned reorganization from a national to a regional management structure.

The Maschhoffs evaluated dozens of supply-chain modeling platforms alongside graduate business students from Washington University in St. Louis before selecting Arena® Simulation Software, implemented by Rockwell Automation. The engagement began with an intensive on-site discovery phase at the company's Carlyle, Illinois headquarters, where the Rockwell Automation team spent weeks sampling pig flow by age cohort, tracking sow farm health status (which affects the quantity of pigs entering the system), and capturing yardage costs, facility capacity, and feed costs tied to proximity of feed mills. Arena's flowchart-based modeling engine matched pigs to appropriate site types by age and pen size, while disease containment logic tracked common-group movements across locations. After the initial strategic model was complete, the team connected it to live operational data — loading weekly digital snapshots of current pig locations and ages — transforming it from a one-time analysis tool into an ongoing operational decision system.

The simulation identified four optimal management regions, giving leadership data-backed confidence to execute their reorganization. The most significant operational shift was in forecasting: the model extended the planning horizon from one year to five years, while moving the update cadence from annual to weekly. Scenario runs that previously required three days of manual planner effort could now be completed rapidly using Arena's built-in scenario analysis feature.

• Forecasting horizon: extended from 1 year to 5 years
• Update cadence: flow and capacity data refreshed weekly instead of annually
• Scenario speed: multi-day manual projections reduced to near-real-time analysis
• Regional structure: modeling confirmed four optimal management divisions, balancing flow efficiency, transportation, and feed costs

• Invest in a discovery phase before modeling: Rockwell Automation's weeks-long on-site immersion was essential to capturing variables accurately — skipping this step would have produced an unreliable model.
• Spreadsheets cannot support scenario planning at scale: Excel-based tracking breaks down once an operation spans hundreds of contracted sites and requires multi-week projections.
• Transition from strategic to operational use: the model's value multiplied when connected to live weekly data, not used solely for the one-time reorganization analysis.
• Biological variables belong in logistics models: in livestock supply chains, age-based routing, pen-size constraints, and disease-group tracking are as critical as cost and capacity inputs.
• Simulation software can justify structural business decisions with data rather than intuition.