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.
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.