How Captios and FMA Help Feed Mills Turn Vision into Results
As innovation in feed mill digital technology continues to accelerate, especially with the rise of AI, we believe technology should support business outcomes rather than dictate them. This belief is at the core of our work and makes our partnership with Feed Marketing Advisors (FMA) such a strong fit. Although this announcement is a bit overdue, we’re excited to officially share the collaboration. FMA brings deep feed industry expertise, and together we align that insight with the technology needed to execute and scale meaningful improvements. We are especially grateful to Randy Schwalke and Mark Stephens for welcoming us into the FMA group and sharing their industry knowledge.
Feed Marketing Advisors is a trusted consulting group with extensive feed industry experience. Randy and Mark alone account for nearly 100 years of feed experience. Guided by this experience, FMA provides strategic insight and peer networking opportunities to help feed companies succeed. Captios is proud to be part of the FMA advisor network, working closely to support customers by pairing business expertise with the technology that drives results, including software, data, and AI.
This raises an important question: How do we actually work together? What does it look like when deep industry expertise and technology execution are aligned from the start?
Business Strategy and Technology Must Be Aligned
Every engagement begins with a shared understanding of the client’s key performance indicators (KPIs). In feed mill operations, these often include metrics such as cost per ton, throughput, downtime, and shrink. Industry specific consultants typically bring this operational insight, while our role is to ensure the client’s systems are structured to support those processes and outcomes.
Using this foundation, we align business processes with software applications, aggregate operational and financial data securely, and then build customized KPI-driven dashboards. These dashboards serve as an actionable scoreboard, providing clear, measurable visibility into feed mill operations against strategic goals.
Operational Improvement Starts With Financial Transparency
Reliable data is essential for any operational improvement. When systems are not integrated, or staff are inconsistent in entering information, the result is fragmented and inaccurate data. This leads to manual reporting work, delayed financial reviews, and decisions based on assumptions rather than facts.
Unfortunately, these data issues are common across the industry.
Before a business can make meaningful improvements, it must first establish financial transparency in feed mills. That means data that is clean, complete, and connected. This is particularly important in feed production, where even small errors in tracking ingredients, energy use, or batch cycle times can distort performance metrics.
Building that foundation often involves integrating systems, streamlining data flows, and setting up tools that give leadership real-time, reliable visibility into operations. That’s where we focus our efforts in working with feed mills and other agribusinesses.
Technology Should Evolve With Process
Business processes and technology must evolve together. Just as you would not rebuild a plant without involving your engineering team, you should not revise business processes without involving your tech team.
One common pitfall is improving a process without considering whether current technology can support it. This often results in the need to reverse changes or quickly modify systems, leading to extra costs, delays, and confusion.
Many legacy systems cannot adapt easily to new workflows. Making process changes without accounting for the digital implications leads to patchwork solutions, data inconsistencies, and the need for repeated staff retraining. Captios addresses this by working closely with both business and technology leaders to ensure that any process improvements are strategically aligned and technically feasible.
Enabling Consultants to Scale Their Impact
In addition to supporting clients directly, we also work with consultants like those at FMA to enhance and scale their impact. We help transform manual tasks into repeatable, tech-enabled workflows that automatically pull live data, standardize reporting, and reduce the burden of spreadsheet-driven analysis.
This approach allows consultants to spend less time managing data and more time delivering insights. Whether the focus is on financial reporting, inventory forecasting, or KPI benchmarking for feed mills, our solutions help consultants operate more efficiently and with greater accuracy.
Strategy and Execution Should Never Be Separate
At Captios, we believe that strategy and execution belong in the same conversation. Business consultants offer the vision and insight, and we provide the technology that makes those ideas actionable.
The most effective engagements are those where business goals inform the technology choices from the outset. In return, the right digital tools reinforce and accelerate goal attainment. This alignment creates a closed loop of clarity, accountability, and continuous improvement.
Our advice is simple: Never consider business process improvement without also considering the technology that will support it.
By working with both Captios and Feed Marketing Advisors, feed and agribusiness organizations get practical guidance and the tools to turn ideas into action. It’s a collaborative approach focused on real, lasting improvement.
Ready to align your tech with your strategy? Let’s talk.
Recent Comments