Brian Rao, Senior Vice President of Engineering for John Deere's Construction and Forest Equipment division, walks through the company's Tianjin, China factory. The facility manufactures equipment to the same global quality standards as John Deere's other plants and distributes products worldwide.
My name is Brian Rao I'm the Senior Vice President of Engineering, Manufacturing and Supply Management for John Deere's Construction and Forest Equipment division and I'd like to tell you a little bit about our Tianjin China operation the history, its capability and the products it produces and give you the confidence that the quality that comes out of that factory every day is the same as any place inside John Deere. In 2011 we approved the construction of a construction equipment factory at the Tianjin campus John Deere owns 40 hectares of land there where we have multiple operations and orient infrastructure we designed a factory to produce wheel loaders and excavators and we just recently started production of backhoe loaders to be produced and sold globally we built the factory with the same facility standards as any operation we put in machining centers, welding operations and assembly with the exact same suppliers and capabilities that we would in any other factory it's been a great journey We've got a great team of people there that have learned how to put together our products and have a passion for quality. We use the same tools to go down the assembly line we use smart connected tools at the end of the assembly line we black light looking for leaks and we check out the machine extremely rigorously Matter of fact, we measure something called initial product quality we call it IPQ and it's really the first 30 days that a product is on a job and it gives you a very good feel for how good a job did the factory do in assembling that product and the reliability that comes out of our Teta factory Teta being the Tianjin Economic Development area is as good as any we've got. It's sold into multiple markets where it's going alongside products produced in the US or Brazil and there's no differentiation in quality Our China factory has done exceedingly well they are a complete part of our operations they continue to produce and refine their capabilities every day It's a great operation I'm happy to have those products in customers hands everywhere in the world we design to the same standards we measure the quality that comes out the factory the same way and we've got a team that just has continued to excel Our Tianjin China factory is in a great position to continue to produce high quality products for the decades to come.
