In this episode of On the Record, brought to you by Weasler Engineering, we take a first look at the major line results from the North American Equipment Dealers Assn. 2024 Dealer-Manufacturer Relations survey. Also in this episode: CDK Global's cyber attack puts IntelliDealer customers offline and Stotz Equipment and Premier Equipment announce an industry-first cross border partnership. In the Technology Corner, Noah Newman provides an inside look at Sentera's Aerial WeedScout product.

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Claas Leads Way Among U.S. Full-Line OEMs

Ag Equipment Intelligence analyzed the North American Dealers Assn.’s annual Dealer-Manufacturer Relations Survey results released earlier this month. In this annual NAEDA survey, dealers rank their suppliers in 12 categories on a scale of 1-7, including:

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The association’s rankings of Full-Line Manufacturers includes AGCO, Case IH, Claas, John Deere, Kubota U.S., Kubota Canada and New Holland. NAEDA continues to evaluate Claas as a full-line manufacturer, despite holes in most industry definitions of a full-line manufacturer. 

Meanwhile, NAEDA evaluates Kubota Canada separately from Kubota U.S. 

Overall, mainline manufacturers dealers average mean scores were slightly lower than 2023, meaning less satisfied mainline dealers. 

In the 2024 survey, Kubota’s Canadian operations continued to earn the highest marks of the survey in every category but product availability – a ranking held by Claas. Kubota Canada performed significantly higher than its U.S. counterpart, which generally performs in the middle of the 7 manufacturers examined.

Outside of Kubota Canada, Claas had the highest scores in 8 of the 12 categories. 

The average mean scores by OEM are shown below.

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For the first time, Ag Equipment Intelligence editors conducted additional data analysis, grouping the 12 individual categories into 3 larger headings of Availability, Quality and Administration. As seen in here graphic, Kubota Canada and Class again came out on top. 

At the bottom of this analysis were the CNH Brands. Case IH had the lowest Quality composite score, while New Holland scored lowest in Availability and Administration’s composite scores. New Holland had the lowest average mean score of 4.19 on a scale of 1-7.

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New Holland scored particularly low in this year’s survey, finishing the lowest of all majors in every category except product quality, in which its brethren, Case IH took the lowest position. This score is consistent with other recent surveys and comments shared with AEI.

New Holland’s score of 3.71 in the category of communications with management was the worst score by any OEM in any category. Next was Case IH’s score of 3.7 out of 7.0 in product quality. 

The full report is available for sale through NAEDA. AEI’s own evaluations and analyses of dealers’ rankings of the suppliers in tractors, shortlines and outdoor power equipment will be available to subscribers in future editions of the AEI monthly newsletter. 

Dealers on the Move

This week’s Dealer on the Move is Martin Equipment. 

John Deere dealer Martin Equipment broke ground on a brand new facility in Cedar Rapids, Iowa on June 13. Equipped with advanced technology and expanded service capabilities, the new Cedar Rapids facility will feature extensive parts inventory, a state-of-the-art service center and a spacious showroom and customer reception area stocked with refreshments.

Sentera Launches Precision Weed Management Solution

Precision ag startup Sentera launched an Early Access Program to preview its Aerial WeedScout product. The company says the program will provide valuable feedback and build momentum for the 2025 commercial release of Aerial WeedScout. 

Select input companies, equipment providers, retailers and farmers will be able to test the product through the program.

Aerial WeedScout is a selective herbicide application service that aims to lower the total use of herbicides for farmers by up to 70%. It uses aerial imaging from a drone and artificial intelligence to detect weeds and ultimately create prescriptions within 24 hours that can be executed through any precision sprayer.

“We’re fortunate at Sentera, we’ve got a fantastic machine learning, data science group, but we’re also one of the largest producers of sensors. We actually design and build them in the U.S. On more than 80 acres per hour of flight, we’re capturing one-and-a-half-millimeter imagery of that field. Every pixel is 1 and a half millimeter. To see a 6-millimeter weed, you’ve got to have more than one pixel of green. This is really phenomenal. We have a direct georeferencing technology that allows us to dramatically increase the rate of coverage where we can go and map a whole field and on an hour-by-hour basis, we can stay ahead of that sprayer.”

 Shane Thomas did an in-depth breakdown of the technology in his Upstream Ag Insights newsletter. He says Aerial WeedScout will generate interest from customers because it addresses the shortcomings of other precision sprayers, like pricing, speed and uncertainty of herbicide volumes needed, but it also might face an uphill battle because of the 24-hour delay between sensing and action.

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Check out this table Thomas put together, comparing the other commercially available precision spraying products. You’ll see Sentera in the middle there, checking the sense and diagnose boxes, but not the action boxes.  

The Aerial WeedScout Early Access Program will cover over 10,000 acres across Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota in 2024. 

Stotz & Premier Form International Partnership

The number of dealers — particularly Deere dealers — who have expanded their footprint non-contiguously is on the rise. 

On June 20, Arizona-based Stotz Equipment and Ontario-based Premier Equipment announced the two firms were partnering to strengthen and position both companies for growth. The combined group will have 33 stores."

Tom Rosztoczy, president of Stotz Equipment, says Premiere is constantly one of the top 5 Deere dealers in Canada. The group currently has 4 owners, but one is looking to exit the business and another has health issues. Rosztoczy says in order for Premier to grow it was going to need help with ownership succession.

"Ultimately, what they were looking for was a capital partner that could help them solve their ownership succession problems and then prepare them for the growth that they and Deere would like to see."

"So that would be their motivation. Stotz's motivation would be we've been interested in growing in the John Deere business pretty much forever, and that's why we've already grown in the John Deere business. We've just been waiting for the right opportunity."

"And I think the first choice for growth for anybody is to grow contiguously, but we just haven't had a chance to do that. And I think long-term in the John Deere world, it looks like anyway that the long-term players are probably going to have two footprints that are both DOT size footprints in John Deere's eyes, and so this gives us the opportunity to create a second footprint, which we don't have today. Number one."

"And number two, I think the challenges of going so far away and the challenges of going to a different country are all significant challenges. And to be honest, a year ago if you would've asked me, I would've told you, "No, we're not going to do that." I think the reasons that we are doing it is because we've just found a significant amount of alignment between how we think about the business and how Premier thinks about the business."

"In our minds, I think that helps us overcome the fears or challenges of the distance and the border, that there's just so much alignment in how we think about the business, that it'll make those... That's ultimately the biggest challenge in something like this, is culture. If the culture's already really, really well-aligned, then I think the rest won't be that difficult to overcome."

The partnership marks an industry-first common ownership of Deere dealerships on both sides of the U.S./Canadian border. The partnership is expected to be finalized in September 2024 pending all necessary approvals and due diligence. 

Currently, Stotz is No. 24 on the Farm Equipment Dealer 100 list. With the addition of the Premier stores will bump the new group up to No. 10,  tied with Sydenstricker Nobbe Partners, which also recently announced non-contiguous expansion with its acquisition of Cazenovia Equipment in New York. 

CDK Cyber Attack Freezes Dealer Access to IntelliDealer

On June 18, software company CDK Global was hit by a cyber attack causing a system-side outage that left dealers unable to access their business system and carry out day-to-day activities. 

While CDK Global Heavy Equipment merged with E-Emphasys Technologies in May 2023 and is now part of VitalEdge, dealers using IntelliDealer have been locked out. 

While the VitalEdge servers are separate from the CDK servers, CDK Global restricted access to them all as a safety precaution. 

On June 22, CDK Global announced it had initiated the restoration process and by June 26, systems were back up and running. 

VitalEdge Technologies president and CEO says VitalEdge’s application infrastructure and network were not impacted by the cyber attack. IntelliDealer mobile applications remain fully operational as they operate outside the CDK Global network, he says. 

While some dealers report needing to revert to pen and paper work orders and invoices, Stotz Equipment’s IT department maintains much of its data outside the VitalEdge system as well as what goes into the business system. 

We have a really awesome IT department, and so I think they've done a great job of... There's a lot of the data that we have in CDK we already download into our own databases to use for our own purposes, and so there's actually a lot of our data that we have access to independent of CDK. And so they've done a great job of building tools and making workarounds so that we can still function.

"So as an example, I think within the first 24 hours that we were down, they built a tool that gave our parts departments access to bin locations for all of our parts inventory. So our parts departments can't actually, if they can figure out that the customer wants this particular part, they can know where to go look for it in the warehouse, which without access to CDK, I'm guessing most dealerships would struggle with that."

Despite the tools Stotz was able to use during the outage, Rosztoczy said it would still take time to get all the data gathered during that period into IntelliDealer. 

DataPoint: Tillage Tools Top Product Farmers Buy Outside Major Brand

This week’s DataPoint is brought to you courtesy of the Dealership Minds Summit, coming to Madison, Wis. Aug. 6-7. 

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According to Ag Equipment Intelligence’s latest Brand Loyalty survey, 62.3% of farmers consider themselves brand loyal. When it comes to buying a piece of equipment not manufactured by their primary brand, tillage tools have been the most common piece of equipment farmers bought that wasn’t their primary brand. The full Brand Loyalty Report will be released in July. 

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