PROJECT TITLE:  Exposing the  Hidden Cost of Disconnected Systems

Q1 — About the Team

150 word limit

[Tell us about the team involved in this research!]

This project was completed by the research team at John Deere. The team brought together expertise in qualitative and quantitative research methods.

Q2 — One Sentence Summary

50 word limit

We researched how John Deere equipment rental dealership staff actually operate across sales, dispatch, service, finance, and yard operations, and used those findings to define what a new rental platform must do to replace the disconnected systems and manual workarounds currently holding operations back.

Q3 — The Situation Before

200 word limit

John Deere equipment rental dealerships were operating across a fragmented landscape of disconnected systems with no unified platform. The assumption driving a new rental platform initiative was that a modern system would improve on what existed, but there was no clear evidence of what dealership staff were actually doing and why.

Rental operations had accumulated extensive work-around behaviours: Google Sheets and Excel in place of scheduling systems, phone calls replacing automated status updates, manual Excel calculations to handle mid-cycle returns, and email chains doing the work that system workflows should be doing. Equipment availability status was unreliable and required extensive manual verification, and a single rental request required coordination across five to ten people before equipment could be delivered.

Without research, the platform team risked building a system that just formalised those same issues into new architecture, or stripped away the workarounds without replacing the underlying capability that the teams required. The real operational complexity, spanning billing, service, credit, insurance, yard operations, and field sales simultaneously, could not be assembled from any single source; the team needed this research to create visibility.

Q4 — What the Research Revealed, and How It Was Communicated

250 word limit

The research surfaced operational realities across five areas that were not visible in any prior documentation efforts.

Rental requests required touching five to ten people before equipment could be delivered. This was not a people problem but a systems problem: no platform connected sales, dispatch, service, trucking, finance, and yard operations. Email and phone calls filled every gap, creating information loss at each handoff. It also showcased that equipment availability was structurally unreliable. Staff could not trust system data, so they ran manual checks and maintained parallel spreadsheets on every transaction. Service and rental systems failed to synchronise equipment status in real time. In addition, mobile access was a critical operational gap, not a preference. Field representatives were making real-time customer commitments from job sites with no ability to verify availability, credit status, or contract details, relying on phone access because laptops were not viable in the field. The team also identified that billing was manually unsustainable. Non-standard billing cycles required editing individual contracts every month. Proration calculations were done in Excel. Preliminary billing reports required extensive manual review to catch system disconnects.

Most importantly, the research identified that in response to the above, dealerships had built sophisticated custom workarounds, including custom technology solutions that any new platform would need to match before staff would trust it enough to change behaviour.

The outcome of the research were findings structured around specific operational failure points, with each gap paired directly with a platform capability requirement, giving decision-makers a clear line from research insight to product decision.

Q5 — What Changed

[To be completed by submitter — Please review and adjust to reflect what actually happened: which features moved, which were deprioritised, and what the timeline looked like.]

The research findings were presented to the leadership team and directly informed the next quarterly roadmap prioritisation session. The finding that sales and rental teams were operating from separate inventory views, and that this was causing customer-facing errors and duplicated effort, elevated it to a near-term priority.

The research gave the team the specific use cases they needed to write detailed requirements: which status changes mattered most to which roles, and what communication channel each team preferred to receive them through.

Q6 — Navigating Resistance

200 word limit

[To be completed by submitter — the research document does not contain information about organisational resistance or how findings were navigated internally. If the team encountered pushback, for example around scope, timeline, or the validity of particular findings, that story should be told here.]

The most significant pushback came from concerns about whether the rental team's feedback represented genuine product gaps or simply resistance to process change. There was a desire to understand which issues participants could work around with better training, and issues where the system itself was the constraint.

The team addressed this by tiering findings by frequency of mention and severity of impact, as well as identifying which clearly fell into product issues vs training issues, which gave the team a defensible basis for recommendations as well as clear sequencing for future product decisions.

Q7 — Supporting Materials

[Add link if applicable.]

Q8 — Anything Else

250 word limit

Equipment rental is a category where the gap between how work looks on paper and how it actually happens is wide. Our teams had adapted so thoroughly to system limitations that many workarounds were no longer even visible as workarounds, they had just become a part of the teams' jobs. This was a clear situation where our research carried real value and played a role no one else could. The full picture across billing, service, trucking, credit, insurance, yard operations, and field sales couldn't come from any single source or role. The research team had to talk to all of them and bring clarity to the situation for future decisions to be made effectively.

What we created for the team wasn't a feature list, it was a systems map: a coherent picture of how rental operations actually flow, where they break, and what the platform needs to do to support rather than disrupt them.