Agriculture Total Cost of Ownership

by Shell

In agriculture, there are two fundamental ways to help reduce your total cost of equipment ownership. The first is ensuring that you use the most appropriate lubricant for every vehicle and piece of equipment, while the second is implementing effective lubrication management.

Our technical specialists are always on hand to supply you with the right training, maintenance solutions and support in lubrication handling and analysis. With the help of Shell’s expertise, our agricultural customers extended their ODIs by as much as 160%, and reduced their hydraulic oil consumption by up to 25%.

It is estimated that by 2050, the world’s population will surpass 9 billion. The ever growing demand for safe, nutritious foods pushes continuous growth in the agriculture sector, and this combined with stricter requirements and relegations for CO2 emissions creates new opportunities and challenges for farming operations. The world is adopting cleaner and non-conventional fuels such as bio, sewage gas, hydrogen and electricity. Such change demands new compatibility and performance challenges for lubrication, which Shell is at the forefront of developing.

It is not only the fuel requirements that develop; more and more operations are relying on machinery that can operate for longer, with larger horsepower vehicles and in environments that require less people to manage them. Shell’s experts are working alongside OEMs to develop and refine products that are suitable, highly dependable and capable of ensuring machinery works at maximum efficiency on their own.

Competition within the agriculture sector is driven by small achievements in productivity. Driving growth demands that every element of the operation is optimised, yet despite this, only 44% of the industry places importance on product performance when purchasing lubricants. Over half of agriculture customers have experienced unplanned downtime owing to errors in equipment lubrication, and considering that all agriculture operations rely on strict timescales in order to succeed – it is vital that agricultural operations are using the right lubricants, in the right way, in order to prevent loss.

Working with customers and OEMs, Shell’s expertise in product development and good lubrication management has delivered $1.9 million in savings to agriculture customers alone.

_{‘Based on research commissioned by Shell Lubricants, conducted by Edelman Intelligence (Nov - Dec 2015.)}

1. _{Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is defined by Shell Lubricants as the total amount spent on the equipment, incl. cost of acquisition and operation over its entire working life, and costs from lost production during downtime.}
2. _{Based on savings delivered to Shell Lubricants customers.’}