Empowerment improves quality and sustainability
Read time: 4.5 minutes
How the production plant in Racine improved its quality standards and won the CNH Quality Cup
CNH’s Racine tractor assembly plant in Wisconsin, USA, is riding high. Production challenges and out-of-date technology along with delivery delays had left staff, management, dealers and customers unfulfilled. Fast forward to June 2025, and the Racine plant was awarded CNH’s inaugural Quality Cup for the most improved plant in its region. It is also more profitable and more sustainable. So how did they do it?
We went from failing 50% in the drive-shaft line to a 90% pass rate
Inventing better ways to make tractors
“Back in 2022, we did a reality check on where the plant was. We found several issues and decided we had to start somewhere,” says Sriram Ashok, Operations Manufacturing Manager. Knowing that the drive shaft is critical to a tractor functioning correctly, Ashok and his team started by looking at how to improve the drive shaft’s manufacturing assembly line.
Over about seven months, they reviewed industry standards, the existing production line, available technology and tools. From this they wrote a scope and costed a machine engineering system for the drive-shaft line. The idea was to make a proof of concept.
“It was a lot of work. We had to change a lot of the backend data, the way information was fed into our systems and the way it comes out. There were lots of challenges,” he says.
One was weak Wi-Fi coverage across the plant. Another was the inability to adapt the new system to the existing tools and tech of both the plant and its suppliers.
One by one, the challenges were overcome. A new Wi-Fi system was installed and CNH engineers succeeded in getting the different elements to talk to each other as required. The Racine plant had a proof of concept for a new drive-shaft production line.
“We went from failing 50% in the drive-shaft line to a 90% pass rate,” Ashok remembers.
On the left: guests at the event. On the right: New Holland Construction machines.
Fault-free assembly enables design improvements
The next step was to expand the training to more engineers and transfer what they’d learned to the rest of the production line. Starting in 2023, they worked steadily and by the end of 2024 had upgraded the entire assembly line. This not only improved the work of the operators, but as the engineers came to know the technology better, they came up with ideas to improve the line, reducing faults and stoppages.
One idea was to replace hydraulic, dumb presses with smart presses. A dumb press is manual. If the operator doesn’t hold it down long enough or with the wrong force, at the wrong angle, it can cause a fault. A smart press gets it right every time. But the cost of upgrading was close to $1 million per press – there were seven.
“While we were contemplating the upgrades, one of the engineers created a circuit to convert the dumb presses into smart presses using parts found online,” says Ashok. The cost difference was extraordinary: just $20,000 to upgrade all seven.
The engineers felt empowered and were on a roll. They saw so many ways to improve the assembly line, from controls and programming equipment to camera monitoring — improvements that enabled quality control to identify the true root cause of any fault and fix it.
When a rattle became apparent on the roof of a tractor, for example, the torque of the bolts was checked and found to be correct. This made management dig deeper. Ashok explains: “We found that the bolts didn’t have enough clamp load, letting the bracket hit the roof. So the designers came up with a new solution.”
In April 2024, management also introduced the Customer Protection Inspection (CPI) for every completed vehicle. The inspection was designed to improve the dealer and customer experience by speeding up the feedback loop when identifying and reducing defects. “The inspectors check every single tractor and give feedback. For example, they might spot that a connection is not routed properly, so it rubs over time and wears out, causing a leak. The CPI spots that kind of thing,” says Paul Jarski, Machinery and Electronics Manufacturing and Quality Lead.
“All the feedback went straight into a review. We did daily reviews to see how things were shaping up and often inspections were recorded and photographed. This was a completely new approach that dynamically adjusted as we learned ways to improve the overall process. We gradually moved the CPI process further upstream in the manufacturing process, and as a result, that feedback loop became the shortest you can get,” says Jarski.
The benefits were profound: a big reduction in faults over a 12-month in-service period. “We went from something like 130 to 22.3,” says Jarski. “As a result, we saw a dramatic improvement in dealer sentiment and some of the lowest warranty rates in over a decade with our end customers.”
And this is how Racine climbed to the top of the podium, winning CNH’s inaugural Quality Cup for most improved plant.
In April 2024, management also introduced the Customer Protection Inspection (CPI) for every completed vehicle. The inspection was designed to improve the dealer and customer experience by speeding up the feedback loop when identifying and reducing defects.
Guests at the event.
Sharing quality improvements across the Company
But the story doesn’t end there. From January 2025, the CPI initiative from the Racine plant was rolled out to several other plants across the world.
“Through the CNH Business System Plus and strategic supplier partnerships, we’re expanding this culture of learning and excellence globally to deliver a 25% improvement in new product quality and significant margin growth,” says Stella Chieffo, Head of Manufacturing Quality.
Ashok, Jarski and the Racine teams are helping build a community of best practice at CNH plants from Basildon in the UK to Brazil. The CPI has proved a critical part of the overall quality strategy, and looking ahead they have a vision to implement it beyond final vehicle inspection by using it to evaluate and improve manufacturing processes. This holistic approach involves a cultural shift that strives for excellence. Ultimately, they expect to be so confident in the way they build the vehicles that they won’t need to worry about inspections or faults.
“We know we will have built every tractor correctly, to our customers’ expectations and needs,” says Jarski. “It’s a true one-team cross-functional approach.”
The recent experience of the Racine plant is typical of CNH’s approach to quality. And it’s a winner.
CNH is a world-class equipment, technology and services company that sustainably advances the noble work of agriculture and construction workers.
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