As many farms’ management practices go digital, growers increasingly ask for machine telematics and agronomic field data to be combined into one online interface — and it should be intuitive, streamlined, and maybe most importantly, fully mobile, according to Jacob Maurer, global product manager for CNH.
When the company decided to redesign its web portal and mobile app for New Holland’s PLM Connect and Case IH’s AFS Connect telematics, software engineers and designers sought out diverse input before nailing down a plan.
“We took inspiration from a wide variety of sources, from the auto industry as well as the farming simulators and video games,” he says.
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And, of course, farmers.
“The mobile app itself is a built-from-scratch application,” he continues. “We started work in December of 2022. It started as a handful of Post-it notes on a white board, as a hypothesis of what we thought our customers would want to be able to do. Before we started writing any code we went straight to the customer and dealer channel and started asking questions.”
That led to the creation of CNH’s newly designed FieldOps, which replaces the previous AFS Connect and PLM Connect websites, offering a whole new interface with a new look and an almost-identical appearance for the new companion mobile app.
Screen images and navigation icons will now look the same on a laptop, tablet or smartphone, and will be in similar places. The new interface also combines real-time machine data with all the agronomic information a farm manager uses, putting all the farm management tools together in one place.
“We bucket-listed three underlying themes our users asked for: where are my machines, what are they doing and how much time do they have remaining in that task?” Maurer says. “Those are consistent themes we’re always seeing pop up.
“The biggest thing we heard was ‘I don’t want to have to download a separate application to interact with my machine. I want it all embedded. I want to see my machines, where they’re going, what they’re doing, and I want to be able to remote into my display.’”
“Historically we had both a web version and a mobile version,” CNH’s precision segment lead for North America, Kendal Quandahl, says. “We had an app, but those two things had different user interfaces, they had a different feature set. Some of those really critical on-the-go features weren’t available in the mobile app. So we redesigned the entire FieldOps.”
Once the initial FieldOps version was developed, designers tried it out with a very large sampling of producers during the beta R&D phase.
“We (previously) had about 20 end users that were part of our beta program,” says Maurer. “We increased that tenfold to where we now have about 200 to 250 test users in our beta environment for our web and mobile apps, which showed us a lot of new ideas.”
Since going live on Aug. 20, FieldOps is now a single online location for both Case IH and New Holland telematics. It’s compatible with any Case IH machine with a Pro 1200 monitor, as well as any New Holland machine with their equivalent.
The app will look the same for both brands, but users can switch between displayed icon images of red or blue machines, whatever their preference.
“The web interface is essentially the next evolution, the next version of the current web interface we have,” Maurer says. “It’s essentially an overhaul or refresh of the user experience. We’ve changed where the icons live. Really, the biggest thing we’ve added is real-time functionality that will be available on our tractors.”
The upload time intervals of information coming from machines has been shortened significantly, from 60 seconds to just three to five. Detailed machine route paths now appear on screen along with speed, fuel use and engine r.p.m.
All the other machine data that was previously available will continue to be accessible. But now its location and priority can be customized to suit any preference and any machine type.
“We’ve adopted some of the feature set from our Raven partners, where they show kind of breadcrumb trails by duty status,” Maurer says. “It’s not really information we thought we’d ever really need to know until we started looking at it and learned a lot about how our customers utilize the machines.
“You can look at multiple fields at the exact same time. Everything is meant to bring current activities, machines, cropping systems, field conditions to the surface.”
Farmers already using the previous CNH brand-specific web portals will be able to sign in to the new site the same way and be redirected to the new page. All bookmarks, preferences and passwords remain unchanged.
To access the mobile site, users will have to download a new app from the Google Play or Apple Stores. It’s free and anyone can get it; there is no subscription fee for it either. Any costs will be linked to the telematics package on each machine, not the web interface.
“If they want to use the mobile app and currently have the old one, they will have to download a brand-new one,” says Maurer. “They don’t have to download it right away. But once they do, they use the same credentials they used before and it logs them right in. They can use existing Case IH or New Holland credentials to log into either the Case IH or New Holland app. And they don’t have to choose a brand preference either way. Today it’s all-inclusive.
“Case IH’s tag line is ‘Built by farmers.’ This application, at its heart, is truly built by our customer base. So we’re very excited about it.”
