As the new European head of John Deere, Deanna Kovar is to lead the agricultural machinery manufacturer into the future. She has made her way in a male-dominated world and knows how to deal with farmers.
For the engineers at the agricultural machinery manufacturer John Deere in Mannheim, it was a mystery: How can it be that the transmissions of a small fleet of tractors on a dairy farm in the USA keep breaking down? This is a type of vehicle that runs smoothly everywhere else in the world. In the operations center on the company premises, experts get to the bottom of such defects. John Deere’s European headquarters receives data and error messages from agricultural machinery around the world, 24 hours a day, almost in real time. The analysis shows that instead of changing gears, farm workers let the clutch slip to adjust the speed – poison for any clutch.