How Resolver Helps John Deere Improve Security Operations with Customizable Dashboards

For Benjamin J. Kuhl, Global Product Manager of Security Integrations for John Deere’s Enterprise Security & Preparedness division, aligning on technology solutions for regional, national, and global security teams means understanding what each stakeholder group needs — no simple task.

Acting as a center of security intelligence for the worldwide enterprise, John Deere’s Enterprise Security & Preparedness division was challenged with data capture in four main areas:

• Security operations: Tracking and responding to high-level incidents such as injuries, accidents, and fires by location and incident category was challenging without a central taxonomy and architecture for incident capture.
• Incident investigation: A global challenge, with different form fields, languages, and means of capturing incidents, depending on the region.
• Loss recovery: Financing and selling major agricultural equipment to industrial farms left John Deere vulnerable to fraud and theft, with gaps in visibility in terms of actual numbers, including recovery rates, depending on the data inputted by risk managers.
• Proving the value of security team programs: The team struggled to show a return on investment of security team activities and investments.

Resolver’s Corporate Security Product team worked closely with John Deere to understand what kind of risk intelligence reporting and visualizations would be most important to their use cases. Three main areas of data interpretation were identified and Resolver’s product team customized the following Security Insights Dashboards for John Deere:

1. Incident Investigation, which rapidly displays the number of incidents, identifies the incident investigators or owners, incidents by location, and duration of incidents, to name a few key areas of insight.
2. The Loss Recovery dashboard was built for the financing arm of the organization to track fraud and theft, understand recovery rates, and return on investment of the security team.
3. The Operation Center dashboard tracks high-level incidents for injuries, accidents, and damaging events like fires by location and incident category.

“The dashboards really give us one more layer to see data that we’ve never actually seen before.”

“And this is just a new way of looking at metrics and identifying the outliers like, ‘Why is that a big number? Why is that coming in? How do we explain that? It really identifies the problems and gets to the answers to those problems a little faster than what we’ve seen in the past.’”

Having easily accessible and digestible reports quickly identified that the data wasn’t always input correctly. “How do we get good dashboards? Well, we need to get the people to put in the right numbers, and then we can actually take a look and make the right decisions.” This led to an understanding of gaps in visibility and reporting that could now be with increased training and follow-up. John Deere’s security discipline also improved through the customization of fields in Resolver, which eliminated processes that had been manual and added detail into information on incidents collected that may have otherwise been missed in reporting.

“This is the kind of the first time that we’re actually seeing those numbers on a dashboard, and it all flows up versus manually calculating those. It’s a major change in how we’re looking at our data.”

As a publicly traded company, the ease of reporting to the board is of utmost importance to John Deere’s security leadership team. Showing progress in terms of reduction of incidents, loss prevention, and security program ROI is helped by Resolver’s simple visualizations. With the dashboards highlighting gaps in information, incident capture and incident data were also greatly improved. “It definitely helps fill those gaps and fill those numbers in,” says Kuhl.

“To me, it’s like this is a no-brainer. This is how we should be doing everything, honestly,” says Kuhl citing the clear metrics provided by Resolver’s improved dashboards. When John Deere’s investigations and insider risk teams began to use the dashboards, they began to see clear metrics in a more accessible way than a spreadsheet, Kuhl explains

With the addition of the new dashboards in Resolver, the John Deere team spends far less time producing outputs for executives in order to prove the value of their program, which is important to their security leadership as a globally recognized brand and publicly traded company.