Farmers in the Easter Townships are still feeling the effects of the global supply chain disruption regarding machinery parts because of the pandemic.
As a result, many local producers are struggling to cope with broken machinery and long wait times on orders, causing problems and delays in their harvests and daily routines. The Record spoke with an experienced worker in the industry to try to understand the root cause of this issue.
Sébastien Landry is the branch manager for John Deere’s Coaticook dealership. When asked about how long the wait time was for their parts, he said John Deere has a good system in place to get parts as quickly as possible. “We have a system that’s called local inventory pool, which lets us pull parts from neighboring dealerships and centers so we can have quick access to the parts our customer’s need,” Landry said. “John Deere has a very good logistics department and that has helped us a lot over the period as we can receive parts a couple of days if it is in the local group or a couple weeks at most if it needs to be ordered from our overseas manufacturing plants.”
Even so, having access to machinery is a necessity for farms across the Townships. For some farmers, having a two-week wait time, or even just a few days, on equipment can be detrimental to their harvest. Unhappy customers has been tough for the dealership, but while they sympathize with customers, their hands are tied.
“Some customers aren’t happy, which I get, but no matter how much we get yelled at, it doesn’t make the parts come any faster. All dealerships, whether green, blue, red, orange, are experiencing these problems and we want our customers to understand that we are trying the best we can to get the parts to them and their equipment running again.”
