A tour of John Deere's East Moline, Illinois factory shows how the company builds combines. The facility uses continuous improvement and employee craftsmanship alongside technological systems to maintain quality control and ensure customer satisfaction.
From the minute you turn the key until the final cart is filled, you won't tolerate downtime. You want quality from start to finish. We get that. It's why we're constantly improving the quality process at our East Moline, Illinois factory. To do that, we combine the best tools, the best processes and the best people. Right from the start, every combine is built to order. Take a journey with us to see how we strive every day. Each department, all 54 of them, as a continuous improvement team. A team totally focused on improving quality. Many departments have never missed a continuous improvement goal. The people at harvester works are very important to the overall process. If it wasn't for them, the machine could not get put together. And if it wasn't for their craftsmanship and workmanology and over 100 years plus of engineering understanding of the harvesting process. We do everything we can, including ongoing employee training to Even our familiar green paint has a focus on quality. Our E coat process has 13 tanks and three inspection stations after the E coat and topcoat to ensure paint quality. The quality check after painting is not a checklist. It's dynamic. Based on what our inspectors see, Smart tools count and tell us that the correct number of nuts have been put on, which means no missing pieces. They also shut off when the proper torque is achieved, which eliminates loose nuts that can fall off in the first few hours of operation. Our automatically guided vehicle system keeps the parts assembly from moving to the next station until all parts of the process are completed. And our scan to scan system doesn't let us put the wrong parts together. It helps us ensure the options you ordered on your combine are correct. When your combine is delivered to you, you'll notice the hour meter isn't at zero. Why? Because every combine we build leaves the factory floor and goes to the test track. For A minimum of 45 minutes, each combine undergoes a 74 point inspection. Sensors detect abnormal vibration and sounds. A hydraulic filtration unit is connected to the combine to filter impurities from the hydraulic system. The result, increased customer satisfaction and a combine that works just as hard as you do issue that gets in a customer's hands one too many. So for us, it's a matter of what can we do here to take that information back, drive it back into the process and mistake proof it so that we can't do it wrong. And make sure that we induced any of those low hour failures here. And then put the firewall inspection in based John Deere because nothing runs like a deer.
