Re: John Deere's superior quality

Posted by Guy Fay on April 12, 2000 at 16:23:11 from (169.207.193.7):

In Reply to: John Deere's superior quality posted by Cletus Hanson on April 12, 2000 at 15:07:21:

Ummm... hate to tell you this, but generally, John Deere had a lower price and lower cost of production. They generally used the same tooling for forever (one of the main reasons for the new generation tractors is that they needed new tooling, so they went ahead and designed a tractor at the same time). The marketing information I have seen (done by IH itself) credited Deere with a friendlier, better organized, more effective dealer organization, lower costs, and better quality.
IH's quality problems in the 1950s were mainly caused by management, not engineering. Management shortchanged engineering as far as testing budgets in the 1950s big time. IH was superior in performance, and was clearly intended to be a BETTER line than Deere, with more variety and performance. By the late 1950s, IH had the best draft control in the tractor business. IH had a fundamentally higher cost of production, again due to older factories, more variety of product, and some management problems. IH also started to suffer from capital shortages in getting new machines into production.
One of the big mistakes that people make is thinking that because IH is around by that name anymore, that IH was a continual string of disasters from the 1940s on. IH had some pretty serious problems from the start in 1902, that affected the company all the way to the end- but those problems didn't stop IH from having 70 per cent of the market in the late 1920s, or from nearly catching up to Deere in the late 1970s. Everybody points to the 460/560 as being the big disaster for IH, and its true that it was a major problem, but Deere had some problems in the 1970s that were just as bad, just less advertised (five hour axles on some for wheel dirve tractors, neighbor went through three!).

Follow Ups:

• Re: Re: John Deere's superior quality Wardner 09:01:32 04/13/00 (0)
• Re: Re: John Deere's superior quality The Red 07:12:14 04/13/00 (0)

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