The following guest blog is courtesy of Jan Rodenburg, Penner Farm Services, Alberta, Canada.
Penner Farm Services was established in 1956 as the leading provider of a complete line of livestock equipment and supplies. Today we are located in Manitoba, Alberta and Ontario. Penner Farm Services, Alberta became a Certified Lely Center in 2008 and, since then, has sold many Lely products all over Alberta.
Becoming a Lely Center came with a steep learning curve. From selling to installing and, more importantly, servicing the equipment we all had a lot to learn. Lely has a strict policy on certified service technicians being available when the Lely equipment is serviced so we sent all of our sales representatives and service technicians to the mandatory Lely courses. The training helped a lot and, soon after taking the courses, we sold our very first robotic milking unit.
The robots arrived soon after and the installation began. This was very exciting but also a bit nerve wracking at times. The two robots that needed to be installed were used A3 robotic milking machines. It went very well. Our customer is still very pleased and continues to learn more about robotic milking every day.
We now have over 25 Lely robotic milking machines running in Alberta and have hired multiple team members to better service our customers. Most of our service technicians are located around Red Deer, which gives us easy access to the majority of our customers. To service our Northern Alberta customers better we also have a certified service technician located in Edmonton. Penner Farm Service, Alberta, tries to visit each customer every 15 weeks to service their machines and install any updates for the robotic milking machine. We also recently started to run a parts truck that stops once a month to deliver any parts, supplies and chemicals that our customers might need.
To further assist our customers, we recommend the Lely Benchmark program and Lely webinars. Benchmark is a social networking tool that Lely customers can use to communicate with each other and compare individual results and goals. It also allows us to monitor customer performance and get in touch if we see anything out of the ordinary. The webinars are hosted by a representative from Lely Industries and allows customers to log into a web room and learn more about the T4C program (Time 4 Cows) and exchange individual results. Penner Farm Services, Alberta, also logs into their customers’ T4C (Time 4 Cows) program about two to four times a month. We like to do this so we can analyze results and reports more closely to ensure customers are getting the maximum results from their Lely robotic milking systems and T4C program.
Last, but not least, we have a great amount of Lely parts readily available. We have our own parts department where we store the critical parts but also the replaceable parts such as inflations, milk line, teat cleaning brushes etc. Being a part of Penner Farm Services we also can ship parts that we don’t have in stock from our warehouse in Manitoba within 24 hours. This provides our dealership, and our customers, great peace of mind.
We hope that this will give you more of an insight on what it is like to be a Certified Lely Center.
