Global Production at John Deere

Recently I toured a John Deere production facility in Mannheim, Germany. John Deere is an excellent company – great brand, great products, good growth and profitability. They have used Lean Management techniques for years and have been able to reduce their hierarchy levels down to four (!). Production workers work in teams without supervisors and are directly responsible for improving their key metrics.

The tour was great. It started off at their new welcome center which houses a selection of their products (from small to very large), a bit of their history and a small shop. The facility was clean, full of posters with Lean Management statistics (Visual Scoreboard) and high-tech machines and robots. The Mannheim facility produces a type of transmission and assembles a range of tractors.

Our tour guide explained the John Deere philosophy towards global production. They have factories throughout the world and each facility focuses on a product or range of products. If the transmission built in Mannheim needs to be assembled into the tractor built in Brazil, it gets shipped there. Experience has shown that it is more effective to focus one plant on doing something well and ship from there than to set-up multiple plants which do more or less than the same thing.

For those companies trying to figure out Low Cost Country (LCC) production, this is good advice.

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