Mona Tractor

Established for 40 years, Mona Tractor operates as an agricultural and turf equipment dealer, with three depots based in North Wales.

Learning points

• Greater reliability of the broadband connection can help to improve the speed and efficiency of key business processes such as sales and customer support.
• Mobile broadband connectivity is important to businesses operating off site in rural areas, and can complement fixed broadband provision at the businesses’ premises.

Overview of the business

As well as operating as the main dealer for John Deere tractors since 2000, Mona Tractor also holds a number of additional franchises, including Manitou Yamaha, McConnell and Kverneland. The family run business offers sales, delivery and continued maintenance for tractors, farm machinery, golf and turf equipment, and residential mowers. It sells primarily into the agricultural products market, but also to local authorities and individuals.

Mona Tractor prides itself in its longstanding ability to provide competitively priced agricultural and Turf equipment and ongoing full service backup and support for its agricultural and groundcare customers. This includes a commitment to exporting its tractors and equipment both locally and internationally.

Superfast broadband adoption

Prior to its adoption of superfast broadband, Mona Tractor was restricted in its business operations due to slow upload and download speeds. The firm adopted superfast broadband in late 2016 at its depot sites. The business benefits from download speeds of approximately 70 Mbps, far in excess of the one to two Mbps received prior to adoption.  To ensure remote access while out visiting clients, the business uses the compact dongles, known as Mi-Fi, to support its operations. Increasingly, these are gaining 4G capacity, speeding up the process.

Use of digital technologies

In the period following the adoption of superfast broadband, the business has seen an increase in its use of digital technologies. These encompass the sales and operations aspects of the business, and has allowed it to make full use of the advanced process control system (IBCOS Gold) which integrates a range of sales, promotion, HR and finance processes into one central platform. When necessary, these facilities can be accessed remotely by employees. Often specific functions of the system are made available to relevant employees based on their employment needs.

Instead of wasting time and resources searching franchises for multiple quotes located on numerous databases, these are now processed instantaneously through the business’ cloud-based devices and processed through electronic payments. The file sharing and storage functions then allow these sales to be securely stored and tracked, producing a quicker and more reliable sales process.

The system also provides access to a range of cloud-based technologies that support business processes. These include utilisation of accounting and bookkeeping software. Email and telephone-based communication also remain important in supporting the sales process, providing the client with a bespoke customer experience. Linked to these developments, the business has been able to make better use of a VoIP telephone system which was introduced prior to its adoption of superfast broadband. This is expected to reduce costs further and support interaction both with partners and integration within the three depots.

A large part of Mona Tractor’s work is undertaken remotely at agricultural events. This requires remote connectivity to access sales documentation. To this end the organisation utilises applications, such as the Salesman App for tablet devices. Again, these tools augment the practices and processes available to Mona Tractor employees.

IT skills capacity

Mona Tractor does not employ dedicated IT personnel, but is able to benefit from dealer technical assistance provided by its franchise partners. The John Deere Dealer Technical Assistance Centre, for example, is open worldwide, 24 hours a day. Members of the John Deere product support team provide technical support, ICT assistance, and training through this external platform.

While in the past employees would previously wait for technical and ICT support to arrive, the centralised approach offered by the Pathway system allows for an instant response to queries and continued support to address firm based ICT difficulties. Despite the outsourcing of ICT support, Mona Tractor and John Deere continue to promote employee training and development. Indeed, before changing over to an integrated advanced process control system, John Deere provided training and workshops to ease the transition for the team.

Business performance

The adoption of superfast broadband has helped the business to improve the efficiency of its business operations. It believes that this was an essential step in keeping pace with an integrated and instant world. To ensure customer satisfaction, improvements to the speed and reliability of the connection were pivotal. It is no longer deemed acceptable to keep customers waiting with lags in the business processes, from the quotation stage right through to the service and maintenance functions.

Being a franchise partner to a range of agricultural and turf equipment suppliers benefits the business in many ways. These benefits extend beyond the international reputation and quality of the products to include access to multiple digital tools explored throughout the case study. Prior to the installation of superfast broadband the firm struggled to benefit from these digital tools:

The access to high speed and reliable Internet connectivity has enabled Mona Tractor to overcome these hurdles and fully integrate their partner’s digital systems. This is realised in terms of the speed of providing client quotes, keeping up-to-date and secure client records, and allowing employees access to a shared and integrated digital platform. Together, Mona Tractor sees these features as benefiting the likelihood of continued success for the company. While this is difficult to quantify, it is realised in terms of customer satisfaction and efficiency.

The firm has also seen benefits realised internally, removing stress from employees and improving ability for staff to work efficiently to a high quality.

Implementing superfast broadband has advanced data security, with the financial and personal details of customers and firm being stored safely on the cloud, as opposed to manually in the office environment.