John Deere’s Digital Transformation 1 John Deere’s Digital Transformation Ahmed Mikky Bloomfield College John Deere’s Digital Transformation 2 John Deere is an agricultural company that was founded in 1837. Its main workforce consisted of farmers who would grow, nourish, and harvest plants to the best of their capabilities. This meant that the work would be done by humans, meaning that the work was not consistent everytime and not done in the most efficient way possible. As technology kept advancing, robots became smarter and able to integrate with agriculture. John Deere saw this opportunity to expand its company and introduce a new business model by undergoing a digital transformation. With this digital revolution, there is direct communication between the machines, the farmers, and external services. Along with the machine being able to follow specific procedures, they will also collect data that the farmer is able to break down. This data can potentially generate a better yield for the future. John Deere has added various applications in its digital transformation which I will highlight in this section. Firstly, Deere acquired NavCom technology and implanted gps devices onto tractors and combines. With this in place, they are able to see where these machines are moving and program them to drive in a specific route. This can help with avoiding overlapping, saving time, and making the machines drive in the most efficient way possible. This can also reduce the amount of fatigue a farmer may feel on the field. Along with this, Deere integrated the machinery with their own cloud computing platform. What this allowed the farmers to do was monitor the health of the crops, machines, and environment. What this meant was to predict any potential downtime on the machines, maintain the health of their crops to produce a positive yield, and create an environment that was specific to the crops. As well as using their own cloud computing platform, they allow their partners to also utilize this and integrate it with their own company. John Deere’s Digital Transformation 3 John Deere also purchased Blue River Technology which is a company that develops crop-spraying robots that are able to differentiate between crops and weeds. This allows for pesticides to not be sprayed on crops and to decrease the amount of pesticide spray that is potentially wasted. Although all of this sounds amazing, there are still negatives that come with it. Deere allows farms to purchase their equipment and utilize their extraordinary technology, but the problem happens when there needs to be a repair. In order for these farmers to repair the equipment, they can only get it done from John Deere and it costs $230 along with $130 per hour. The text mentions this can be quite costly and there is no way around it since “Deere sells their tractors to farmers and uses software to control every aspect of the tractors’ use after the sale.”(pg. 32). This can be unfortunate if a farmer’s tractor breaks down during harvest season. Many farmers may think about buying unlicensed software to avoid dealing with Deere when the time comes. John Deere’s Digital Transformation 4 References Dcvc. (2017, September 8). John Deere acquires Blue River Technology for $305 million, bringing full stack AI to Agriculture. Medium. Retrieved January 23, 2023, from https://medium.com/@dcvc/john-deere-acquires-blue-river-technology-for-305-million-bri nging-full-stack-ai-to-agriculture-7ca8c25a5fe1 Farm Equipment. (2023, January 18). Ongoing coverage: Right-to-repair impact on dealers, Deere, other oems. Farm Equipment. Retrieved January 23, 2023, from https://www.farm-equipment.com/articles/20002-deere-hit-with-class-action-lawsuit-overright-to-repair#:~:text=John%20Deere%20and%20the%20American%20Farm%20Burea u%20Federation%20(AFBF)%20have,purpose%20of%20repair%20and%20maintenanc e
