Spanning 2.2 million square feet and employing a workforce of more than 1,000 people, John Deere’s Davenport, Iowa smart factory manufactures construction and forestry equipment. The advanced facility uses 400 IP addresses daily, a number it expects to increase 20x in the coming years.

John Deere “didn’t want to be dependent on a third-party for the design, deployment, and operation of its cellular network,” so it chose to operate its own by bidding for CBRS licenses in an FCC auction, winning the licenses to cover the five counties that generate most of its U.S. manufacturing.

John Deere than built its own CBRS-powered 5G network that gives John Deere a closed network and increased security – in addition to delivering better coverage and doing it more efficiently. And with 5%–30% of factory processes changing each year, the flexible and reliable CBRS network and internal team of network engineers also deliver updates faster, reducing production cycle times from weeks to hours. The company also developed the John Deere Assembly Assist Tool (JDAAT), a Manufacturing Execution System (MES) that now feeds into its Overall Equipment Efficiency (OEE) system, and is investing $1.7 million in smart tooling across the factory this year.

There’s still a lot of runway on John Deere’s CBRS network, but the company doesn’t rule out purchasing more in the future. Eventually, John Deere plans to have 80% of the factory connected via its CBRS-powered network, which supports data and analytics, automation and industrial controls, industrial robotics, mechatronics engineering, and more.

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