Reducing the Manufacturing and Management Costs of Tractors and Agricultural Equipment

In his plenar presentation to the Club of Bologna in 1989, Professor Renius introduced the “Project Foundation Matrix” (Figure 1) representation of the processes the agricultural industries use in the development of new products (Renius, 1989). This matrix provides a linkage between the new concepts for products that come from Product Planners or Advance Engineering groups and results in identification of a product development timeline including the influence of R&D, manufacturing, sales, service and finance. New concepts inputs to the process are heavily influenced by the state of the manufacturer in providing the capabilities to be found in new products. The output of the process is products that meet customer needs. This leads to consideration of product families (e.g, tractor series), re-use of well-developed subsystems (e.g., transmission and engine components), and manufacturing capabilities of the organizations. Strong supplier relationships have been used to provide those components that do not differentiate the manufacturer from their competition (e.g. hydraulic components). Over the years, these processes have interacted to result in a highly efficient organization for the production of agricultural equipment.