Kevin Krieg, welcoming dealers.
Develop with Deere has typically been a conference for software developers to come and learn how they can make programs that integrate with the John Deere system. Not so this year. This time around the conference took a new approach when Kevin Krieg and the team putting on the event decided to focus on helping dealers understand what is already at work in the John Deere Operations Center, rather than just how to add to it.
Training dealers in third-party software is a pretty innovative idea, but dealers were clear about their expectations for the event.”We don’t want smoke and mirrors. We want actual production solutions that we can take home from the conference and start applying to the problems in the field,” Krieg says he heard over and over. “So that’s what we’ve held our software developers to.”
Software companies committed to two things when they agreed to host a seminar at this year’s conference. They needed to explain what their software is capable of in the field today and how it works within the John Deere Operations Center. Being able to take information back to customers and make it work right now was important to Deere.
While John Deere dealers are learning from software companies, other team members are getting some good ideas as well. When Deere looks at what these companies are trying to offer they have to take a look at their equipment and make sure it’s capable of these goals. Krieg says sometimes Deere has to plan machines to accept and use software.
The field is still wide open in precision agriculture. Some software developers are attending this year’s conference to see and hear what they can build upon. Maybe next year they’ll be here with their own solutions, Krieg hypothesizes.
Learn more about what’s happening at the conference in Chuck Zimmerman’s full interview with Krieg here: [wpaudio url=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/zimmcomm/jd-develop-16-krieg.mp3″ text=”Kevin Krieg, John Deere”]
Photos from this year’s conference can be found here: Develop with Deere Photo Album