Robin Shafer, a South Australian farm manager, shows how John Deere's remote diagnostics let technicians troubleshoot equipment problems without visiting the farm. Downtime drops when issues get caught and fixed before they become breakdowns.
My name is Robin Shafer. I'm general manager of Bulla Burra, which is a rain fed cropping farm in the northern valley of South Australia. My son will be the fifth generation farming in our district. Here we grow all sorts of crops, so we grow wheat, barley, canola, legumes as well. In 2008, my now business partner, John Gladigo approached our family to come and join him in a collaborative venture and take us up to around 8,000 hectares. We have all sorts of John Deere equipment, a real smorgasbord right down from a little old L110 lawnmower, right up to S670 harvesters. For us, timeliness is really critical. We need to know that a machine's not going to break down or that if it does break down, that it is repaired quickly so we can get it back out working again. During seeding time, we were having some issues with one of the seeder tractors. The tractor was quite a long distance away from myself and also from the local dealer. So through JDLink they logged on and could see the codes that were coming up and from that he could tell where the problem was. In the Isobus they said, go and have a look at these wires in behind the cab. And sure enough, exactly where they said it was, these wires were rubbed through. We were really impressed with that diagnostics at a distance, even if I was going to call a dealer out to come and help, it might have been an hour or two later, whereas we were up and going again within 15, 20 minutes.
@ John Deere, we understand there's a critical nature of farming. Growers want to be able to maximise their operational efficiencies and timing can be most critical. Connected support enables a connectivity between the machine and the web. A dealer can dial into a customer's machine, view their display, talk them through a diagnosis and even allow them to remotely reprogram machines. Another capabilities built off that is we're able to look at patterns on machines around the world and understand smaller problems before they become bigger problems, and give dealers information to work with customers on rectification proactively before they actually become an element of downtime.
It can be a big cost saving for us. Saving having to call a dealership out to have a look at the machine, but also knowing that we've got that backup support from our local dealer around the clock just about really is really good.
The benefit to the grower is allowing them to really focus on their production. That's going to really be the most impactful to their operation and benefit to their success of their businesses.
