For John Deere the key to a successful future is creating a web of smart connected factories where upskilled humans work alongside machines to leverage intelligence in ways that will better serve the company, its customers and its workers.
That’s according to Deere & Co.’s Shawn Phillips. He delivered a keynote address at the Corridor Media Group’s Manufacturing Conference on Thursday, Sept. 5, at the Bend XPO in East Moline. The event was the first one hosted in the Quad Cities by the QCBJ.
Mr. Phillips is John Deere’s Ag & Turf, U.S. and Mexico Smart Connected Factory manager. He shared an array of ways the Moline-based global equipment maker is working to advance manufacturing through those smart connected factories and empowered workers.
Manufacturing has been experiencing a rapid and ongoing evolution of technology since the Industrial Revolution in the 1760s, or Industry 1.0, Mr. Phillips said.
In the decades that followed, it has seen a constant progression of inventions to help workers make more and better things faster and more safely.
By 2011, that evolution progressed to Industry 4.0, when manufacturers began to see the introduction of robotics and an increasing focus on interconnection and data collection.
“Now, we’re on the doorsteps of what is being called Industry 5.0,” Mr. Phillips told the conference crowd of more than 200.
“The focus today is beginning to change to human and robotic interaction, machine learning and artificial intelligence” and “how do we really start combining optimization into the human element that is necessary for manufacturing,” he added.
At Deere, Mr. Phillips said, “Our efforts in smart-connected factories are truly aimed at how do we start taking all of these factories and start entwining them into what is more of that next generation of manufacturing.”
Upskilling workers
For workers, he said, the question is “How do we bring them along on that technology curve?”
Mr. Phillips anticipates Deere “really moving into this Industry 5.0 space in the future where we see humans working alongside their collaborative robots; where robots are taking on more of the repetitive, dangerous, physically demanding work allowing humans to do things that are more fit for their capabilities in leveraging intelligence.”
AI (artificial intelligence) also will allow Deere and others to drive the quick processing of information that will help workers make more timely and educated decisions, thus “really driving efficiency back into our process,” Mr. Phillips added.
In turn, that allows Deere “to be more effective and more capable of protecting our workforce and our factories and our customers,” he said.
“We see people really being employed to be the problem solvers; to leverage their cognitive abilities, leaning into new roles that require us to be able to provide more intensive training and educational opportunities for our workers.”
That evolution is not without its challenges. Chief among them is taking 150 years of innovative knowledge and sharing it all across 70 factories worldwide. That starts, he said, “with creating more of a one-team, one-mission culture.”
In the past all of Deere’s factories have faced obstacles and “oftentimes they all were trying to solve the same problem in different ways.” As a result he said each factory had to learn how to do it on its own so there were multiple solutions to solving that same problem.
“It created what is really an incredibly inefficient use of resources,” Mr. Phillips said.
To attack that Deere is working to centralize responsibilities to create solutions and develop technologies with practical applications for the entire Deere system.
Goal is collaboration
“That doesn’t mean that we don’t want our factories to innovate,” Mr. Phillips said. Those workers have the experience to see the problem and can better generate ways to fix them. “So what we’re asking them to do is ideate, to collaborate, to share what their experiences are.”
That will help Deere avoid unnecessary future investments, create more efficiency and determine what a broad solution needs to look like.
Data connection has also been a critical part of Deere core strategy for smart connected tractors since 2015-2016.
“So far the results have been encouraging enough to allow us to really double down on those efforts rather than turn our focus to different strategies.”
Implementing that strategy begins with interconnectivity. And in the future, Mr. Phillips said the game changer for manufacturing will be data. “We need to be more agile in how we use data in order to drive insights into how we adapt to greater speeds of change with technology and environment.”
That starts, he said, with industrial IIOT, which is short for Industrial Internet of Things, or a system of devices, sensors, applications, and other networking equipment that work together to collect, monitor, and analyze data from industrial operations.
Deere has been connecting devices for years and been investing in smart systems and equipment, Mr. Phillips said. By connecting those things within its factories Deere has been able to connect its processes together and use data from machines to understand their behavior.
That data collected is “truly the foundation for our manufacturing.”
In addition, he said OEE, or Overall Equipment Effectiveness, has allowed Deere to get a better understanding of whether it is truly using its equipment effectively and see if it can do better.
Self-repairing machines
“Imagine a space where you can not only monitor the behavior of a machine so it can recognize when it needs to be repaired or use real-time machine-learning so that machine can repair itself,” he said.
Connectivity does bring challenges. “As we start connecting devices, we’re going to see the number of devices we have on the shop floor grow exponentially in the next 10 years,” he said.
That will require the hardware and networks to make them go.
In 2020, John Deere successfully obtained 5G licenses in five counties in Iowa and Illinois as part of a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) broadband auction. It allowed Deere to accelerate availability of 5G in its largest manufacturing facilities in North America.
Deere is using 5G in the Quad Cities and Waterloo, “and we’re seeing some very early wins coming from being able to do that,” Mr. Phillips said. That connectivity also “gives our customers the ability to move from product to product and have a similar feel, a similar experience which is important for them in training some of their new employees that come into their business.”
Deere also is continuing its efforts to create a common tech stack to provides value, scaling solutions and a more consistent experience. And the Fortune 100 company remains focused on linking all the different data sets it’s collecting. That will avoid duplication and increase its speed to market because it will allow factories to create solutions to new problems faster.
“Our strategy is to utilize our company’s best asset, our people, much more effectively,” Mr. Phillips said. “Instead of asking them to solve problems that others have solved in the past, we’re allowing them to work on new solutions, to work on new problems that they have had.”
Ending the hodgepodge
Connectivity won’t be easy with the current “hodgepodge” of operations and unique solutions across Deere locations to solve a site’s individual problems.
The focus now, he said, is “how do we eliminate the things that are different because they can be and take care of the things that are different because they have to be.”
Another critical smart connectivity component is upskilling workers at Deere’s smart connected production factories. “You can’t drop things in place and walk away,” Mr. Phillips said. “People have to understand how to run support technology so there is a huge focus on making sure that they have a minimum level of understanding of the technology that’s in place.
Other technology 5.0 things that Deere is implementing or working on are sensors that monitor employees to improve quality control and worker safety. It also wants to take advantage of the “proliferation of industrial robotics” that are focused on the most challenging work that has to be done. For example, he said, robots can put more than 100 cap screws on the “giant tanks” on its combines. It is safer for workers, eliminates non-value-added tasks and allows employees to be more productive.
Other examples include using robotic vehicles with visual inspection cameras and downloaded site data to move products in outside areas to track inventory and locate items.
Connectivity and robotics can also help Deere and other manufacturers deal with extreme labor shortages such as those the industry experienced during COVID-19.
Sensors and smart machine learning algorithms also can help Deere “move from chasing problems to predicting them.”
Worker development key
Workforce development also is a key component of a Deere smart-connected strategy that includes helping prepare its current workers for Manufacturing 5.0.
“It is our job to help them by putting things in place that are a safe environment to learn and to fail,” Mr. Phillips said.
He pointed to events called Hackathons which give employees a set of real problems to solve and a set of technologies to play with to come up with their own solution. Recently, Deere hosted a Smart Manufacturing Expo for workers at its Waterloo, Iowa, plant. Experts led demonstrations and gave hands-on learning opportunities to attendees to help them “understand what’s possible,” Mr. Phillips said.
“We’re not coming from a culture in manufacturing that failing is OK. We’re trying to make them a much better environment where they are not afraid to fail, where they are not afraid to try new things.”
