The Rethus family walks through John Deere's operation centre technology for farming. Real-time equipment tracking, remote troubleshooting, and digital record keeping cut paperwork and make compliance easier than the old paper system.
One of the key things we've found with the operation centre is just real time visibility. We can see, you know, straight away, click of a button, where all our equipment is at one point in time and what it's up to, if it's moving, at what speed it's moving, or if it's stopped.
When you're looking at operation centre and it's got the live feed coming in off the tractors and where they are, it'll actually have a snail trail like a ribbon. So for the entire day, you can see where they've been, you can see where they've turned, you can see which roads they took to get to which paddock. So if you're trying to find out where somebody is, it's quite easy to track to where they've gone. If they've been having trouble in the field and they've been in a lot of circles, then you can see that as well. Remote display access is a really useful little tool. It allows a technician or an owner or any other partner with allowed access in our system to actually log into the screen that you're looking at in the tractor at that time and help you talk through it. Either we can use it for monitoring to see what they're doing. So maybe I want to see how Dad's harvest is set up and he seems to be going a little quicker than me, so I might want to steal his settings. I can do that or to help coach somebody through some changes. Another benefit of digital tools is record keeping. Record keeping is an important part of any business and it's not something farmers particularly enjoy. That's a well known fact. So it's great that you've got the operations centre to do a lot of that book working, tedious stuff, and it's sort of doing it live. So as we're doing a field application, it's recording that information it's stored. I don't have to go back home and transfer paper records to digital records for compliance. It's all done once, which makes it quicker. You're doing it in the paddock when you've got time, rather than at home when you wanted to have time with your kids.
One of the great things of the platform that does help is for auditing and documentation. We need to meet certain specifications and certain standards in these tools are a great thing to help us actually achieve that.
Big contrast for me is in the early days we recorded information. It was on a sheet of paper and a notepad. You wanted to go back and find something you couldn't find it. You're going through pages and pages trying to find a record. Now, being digital, you can just go back and search for any of this information that's there.
