John Deere Harvests Savings with DFMA

Overview

To accommodate a new engine family, John Deere needed to re-platform a combine harvester and redesign a swingout landing deck with an integrated pull-out ladder. The goals: preserve structural integrity, improve serviceability, minimize weight, and hit aggressive cost targets despite a larger assembly envelope.

Why DFMA®

Deere applied DFMA to analyze assembly effort, reveal consolidation opportunities, and structure cross-functional workshops. Design and manufacturing engineers, supply management, and key suppliers generated dozens of improvement concepts and aligned around quantified trade-offs.

Key Design Moves

• Shorten the deck sheet: Optimized the perforated steel flooring length to nest efficiently on a standard sheet, cutting raw material cost and scrap—delivering a step-change reduction in $/lb.
• Strengthen support, reduce weight: Replaced fabricated C-channel with rectangular steel tube members to eliminate a forming step and increase rigidity at lower weight, improving ladder pull-out effort and overall energy use.
• Redesign ladder rails: Switched from round to rectangular tube siderails to enhance stiffness, simplify mating operations, and reduce cost. Trimming tube length enabled three cuts per standard 20-ft stick for better buy-to-use yield.

Supplier Collaboration

DFMA workshops were used to solicit cost-reduction ideas from suppliers and tie suggestions directly to design changes. Deere’s cost-conscious supplier program rewarded practical ideas that reduced both piece price and total manufacturing minutes.

Results

• Ladder assembly: streamlined from 17 parts to 10.
• Landing deck total cost: beat target by ~7%.
• Rigidity & handling: improved with lower weight and fewer forming steps.

Takeaways You Can Apply

• Use DFMA early to expose material nesting, buy-to-use, and forming-step eliminations.
• Co-develop with suppliers to uncover geometry choices that boost stiffness and reduce operations.
• Quantify both piece-part and assembly-minute impacts to align decisions across teams.

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