John Deere Forestry Oy has won the Technical Creativity award from the City of Tampere for the design of TimberLinkTM, a system for measuring the performance and condition of forest machines. The John Deere team comprised Arto Peltomaa, Kari Lehmusvaara and Aki Putkonen was granted the award in recognition of their work in developing the performance monitoring system, which can help ensure the sustainable performance and operating conditions of forest machines throughout their service life.

“The system is an internationally significant technological breakthrough that increases the productivity and uptime of forest machines and decreases operating costs,” John Deere said. “The invention considerably increases the competitiveness of the forest industry and machine manufacture clusters in Finland and the Pirkanmaa region in particular, and is a perfect example of successful, long-term research.” The system is based on monitoring messages that are produced during the diversified operation of the forest machine’s control system, and making use of “measurement and event data”. Raw data is used to create key figures as to the machine’s performance and condition. These key figures help the forest machine operator and maintenance personnel to optimise the machine’s operation and maintenance. “The invention also makes it possible to efficiently supervise the condition of the machines remotely. The easily obtainable performance and condition data have also become important tools in product development.”