Podcast: Inside John Deere’s Waterloo plant — A model for 5G in modern manufacturing

Key takeaways

John Deere built an in-house 5G network to support smarter, more flexible manufacturing operations.
5G offers lower latency and better device mobility than Wi-Fi in dense factory environments.
Technical storytelling helps bridge the IT/OT divide in advanced manufacturing systems.
Smart factories need both the right tech and the right talent to manage complex systems like 5G.

Dennis Scimeca is senior technology editor at IndustryWeek, where he covers the competitive advantages gained by manufacturers that deploy proven technologies. Dennis is a veteran technology journalist with particular experience in vision system technology, machine learning/artificial intelligence, and augmented/mixed/virtual reality (XR). Robert Schoenberger is the editor-in-chief at IndustryWeek and has been writing about manufacturing technology in one form or another since the late 1990s. In this episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast, Dennis and Robert sit down to discuss IndustryWeek’s new series of documentary-style videos and what manufacturers can learn from John Deere’s 5G rollout.

Watch the video

Below is an excerpt from the podcast:

IW: Dennis, why don’t you explain a little bit about what the series is, how you put it together, and talk about that first episode?

DS: Well, we’re calling it Smart Manufacturers. Obviously, it’s technology-focused, technology-centric. It’s just really an experiment to see what a small team could do. I actually have a background in broadcasting and film. So now, many decades later, I’m actually finally putting it to use.

I was just curious—what happens if we just bring a camera out to a plant, take a tour, do some interviews with the principals, and see what happens? The episode that’s out now is the pilot. I can definitely say that we learned a lot from this, and in the upcoming two episodes, you can definitely see the improvement. But really, it’s just an experiment to see what happens.

I was invited out to Deere’s plant—the Waterloo Works plant in Waterloo, Iowa—actually a historic plant, one of their earliest plants. And they wanted to show me their 5G network, and I thought, “Let’s bring a camera up and see what happens.” And they reviewed their chief architect, Jason Wallin. You know, it just kind of came together. I guess it was an experiment, and we’re looking forward to getting everybody’s feedback to tell us how you think the experiment’s going. But it was a lot of fun. It was interesting. It was different. I’ve never done anything like it before at IndustryWeek.

IW: So tell us a little bit about Waterloo. What’s going on at that Deere plant? What made it so interesting?

DS: Well, so 5G cellular—you know, it’s a technology that gets a lot of press, a lot of people talking about it—but it really hasn’t found its place in manufacturing quite yet. I think, you know, Ericsson and Nokia will talk a lot about what 5G can do, but when it comes to 5G in manufacturing specifically, generally speaking, if a manufacturer wants to tap into this technology, they’re depending upon a vendor like, you know, Bosch Rexroth or a Honeywell or a Siemens.

But what Deere did is they actually managed their private 5G cellular network entirely in-house. That’s one of the things we talked about in the episode. It was extremely difficult to do because the skill sets they were looking for were almost impossible to find. You need to have people who had experience in a manufacturing environment and had the experience to manage an entire cellular network—much less a 5G cellular network. But they developed that expertise in-house. So it’s really a gold standard showing what manufacturers can do with 5G.

Now, John Deere had a leg up. They’ve had 4G technology in their tractors for quite a while now. They have smart farming systems. So they had experience with cellular and with the economy of data transmission, capture, analysis. They’ve been working this technology for a while, so they definitely had a leg up. And their plants—the Waterloo plant specifically—is highly networked. So it gave them a really good kind of test bed for how to use 5G.

That’s also interesting to think about—why is 5G still finding its place in manufacturing? Because not only do you need the expertise, but also you need to have the right pilot plant. You need to have the right test case. So you really have to have a reason to use it. Everything kind of came together for Deere. Now we have this gold standard for what manufacturing can do with 5G—and why you should use it.

IW: Yeah. You mentioned their work with their tractors and their precision farming—something they’ve really been promoting for, you know, decades now. With the highly precise GPS signals and the data to know exactly where you’re going to be planting each seed and harvesting each plant, so you can maximize your efficiency on irrigation and everything else that you’re doing during the growing process. Fascinating stuff. They’ve been really pushing that for quite a while now.

DS: What’s great about Deere, too, is that now they’re making headway in autonomy. Just a really technology-savvy company as well. It’s fun—when I was covering vision systems in vehicles quite often, mostly the classics—looking at the vision systems, guidance systems—people always said that if there’s one industry where this will work, it’s farming. Because there aren’t people milling around these huge tractors all the time. You don’t have to worry about that.

Deere is kind of leading the way on autonomy as well. So it’s a very interesting kind of test case for 5G.

IW: So, for the people who want to get a sense of what we’re seeing here, I’m going to do my best Stephen Colbert impression and say: “Let’s see a clip from that first episode.”

Dennis Scimeca: In an Ethernet-based system, each one of those networked tools or machines might require its own Ethernet cable. Imagine the chaos of trying to reposition a dozen or more of these tools—with all of the cabling that may need to be disconnected.
A Wi-Fi system eliminates this particular problem, but still isn’t a perfect solution.

Jason Wallin: But there are some downsides to Wi-Fi as well—meaning that things that move around the shop floor do not transition from access point to access point very seamlessly. We see a big change in latency between devices there or instability. We also know that the density that Wi-Fi can support is not as great as what we can support with the Ethernet technologies.

Dennis Scimeca: By “access point,” we mean the physical hardware that accepts Wi-Fi signals from a device and transmits that data elsewhere. If a tool is attached to an access point and then the tool is moved across the plant, the tool might have to be paired to another access point that’s physically located closer to the tool than the first access point.

So now, instead of worrying about physical cables getting mixed up when connected devices move around the floor, we’re talking about wireless signals crisscrossing and potentially falling off the network until it’s reconfigured. And the more devices you want to connect to Wi-Fi, the more access points you have to install.

About the Podcast
Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast offers news and information for the people who make, store and move things and those who manage and maintain the facilities where that work gets done. Manufacturers from chemical producers to automakers to machine shops can listen for critical insights into the technologies, economic conditions and best practices that can influence how to best run facilities to reach operational excellence.