“John Deere dealers—like everyone in the construction-equipment industry—are in the process of understanding how to maximize the massive amounts of data that telematics systems enable for improving uptime and productivity for the customer,” says Jena Holtberg-Benge, director, John Deere WorkSight. “Based on our research, adoption rates for telematics among our customers vary from 20 to 50 percent, depending on the market segment. The larger the customer, the more likely they are to use telematics.”
All John Deere dealers have technology specialists and JDLink [John Deere telematics system] administrators on staff, says Holtberg-Benge, and many have machine-monitoring people and processes in place to identify machine issues before they cause downtime—complementing the Deere dealer’s capability to perform remote diagnostics and update software remotely. Dealers also provide periodic reports to customers, mostly addressing idle time and fuel burn, she says, although some now ask to identify operator-training issues.
