Getting organised with Brandt

With so many operations to consider and each day bringing new tasks, it can be hard to stay organised. Brandt is here to help.

Brandt is committed to helping farmers stay organised.

This is an Ag Gear special advertising feature brought to The Weekly Times readers by Brandt.

At Brandt, we understand that farming is a busy profession. With so many operations to consider and each day bringing new and different tasks, it can be hard to stay organised.

This is where John Deere Operations Center can lend a hand.

John Deere Operations Center is a free online farm management platform available to anyone who creates an account – what John Deere refers to as an ‘organisation’. Ops Center, as it is more widely known, has a suite of tools to help you set up, manage and analyse your operation.

The Ops Center’s Equipment tool can build a list of all farm equipment from machine VIN numbers and manually enterred machine-implement information.

John Deere’s Ops Center can help you manage and analyse your farm easily.

It doesn’t matter whether you have a connected machine, Precision Ag technology or whether you even own a John Deere machine – Ops Center and Brandt’s experts have the tools and the expertise to set you up and keep your farm organised.

Something as simple as having a list of equipment that is owned and kept on the farm seems an obvious thing for farms to have, but most lists are rarely comprehensive. Imagine being able to have a digital list of all your machines, implements and precision technology hardware (Connected Displays and modems only). Imagine how beneficial this system would be when it comes to updating fleet information and to producing it for insurance purposes.

The simple becomes possible with the ‘Equipment’ tool in Ops Center. Possibly one of the most underrated tools in the suite, a list can be built from machine VIN numbers and manually entering machine/implement information. If it isn’t a John Deere machine, you can even choose icons and colours to suit. As a bonus feature, if your machine or implement profile is set up in Equipment, they can be sent out to a John Deere Display so they don’t need to be set up in the cab.

Purchased more land? Taken on a new contracting customer and have more paddocks to add to your operation? Save time and add client, farm and field information to the existing information before you get in the cab.

The ‘Land’ tab in Operations Center can assist in keeping your geographical information organised. We’ve all seen the mud maps of paddock names and boundaries scrunched up in tractor cabs, now that information can be inputted before heading to the paddock and save time and confusion.

The Op Center’s Work Planner allows owners of connected machines and gen4 displays to create work plans and send them to their machines.

‘Land’ allows you to manage fields, boundaries, guidance lines and flags. You can hand draw a boundary purely for location purposes for drivers and edit guidance line names, so you know which one you need to pick in the paddock. The ‘Land’ tab even allows you to mark out power poles in paddocks so drivers can avoid them. All these small steps keep your operation running smoothly.

John Deere Operations Center Work Planner allows the owners of Connected Machines and Gen4 Displays to create work plans and send them to their machines. So when an operator drives over the boundary of a field, a note pops up on the display telling them what paddock they’re in and what operation needs to be carried out, such as spraying a product at a specific rate. It also includes any notes on that specific operation. This takes the guess work out of the operation and saves time. Once the field work is complete, the recorded data is sent back to Operations Center so it can be viewed and analysed at any time.

A little-known tool within Operations Center is ‘Maintenance’. As well as having the ability to set up factory maintenance plans for machines, this tool allows custom plans to be established. A light-bulb moment for us here at Brandt was when a customer asked if he could use this tool to set up daily checks for his machines. The answer was yes! This opened the door to greater opportunities for customers to use this tool in the daily, weekly or monthly maintenance of their machines that may not need the full services of a technician. Being able to produce the solid maintenance history of a machine is always useful, but is invaluable when you are looking to on-sell or trade-in a machine.

To make sure all our customers have access to these tools, Brandt is currently focusing on setting up as many customers as possible with an Organisation in John Deere Operations Center. Keep an eye on your inbox for invites from John Deere and the Brandt team to get started with your own Organisation soon!

To find out more, visit Brandt here.