Deere & Co., the manufacturer of John Deere brand tractors and other equipment used in the construction and agricultural industries as well as in home lawn care, is forging further ahead into B2B e-commerce. It’s expanding its use of mobile apps and working on an e-marketplace projected to have hundreds of millions of dollars in gross transaction value within a few years.

Deere added to its collection of mobile apps for customers last week with the launch of John Deere MyMaintenance, an app designed to let construction equipment maintenance managers view and document maintenance schedules by calendar date or by number of hours a particular machine has operated. As they view a list of the equipment they manage, including images of where they’re currently located on a map, they can also view how many days or operating hours until the next scheduled service and view a history of maintenance costs; they can also view lists of available parts.

With an electronic link, called JDLink, from the app to their John Deere equipment dealers, customers can also arrange to have alerts automatically sent to dealers when particular machine components need to be replaced. An order for the part is automatically sent to the dealer, who sends a technician to deliver and install the part.

“The MyMaintenance app gives users a plethora of information at their fingertips, including the ability to view equipment on a map, look at machines nearby, bar code scan a machine to see maintenance plans, access a parts list for maintenance and the ability to keep track of maintenance costs,” says Paul Garcia, product manager, John Deere WorkSight, Deere’s suite of products and services designed to let customers manage their equipment from the field.

Deere is also working with Apttus Corp., a provider of B2B e-commerce technology, to deploy a new e-marketplace as mentioned at the Apttus Accelerate conference. The new marketplace will serve as a multifaceted portal for end-customers and dealers to purchase products from Deere factories as well as from other suppliers of agricultural equipment. Deere has not directly commented on its plans for the marketplace.

Additional features of the marketplace include the calculation of sales tax across each state with a sales tax; the ability of resellers on the marketplace to manage pricing and bundling of products for sale. Deere is No. 35 in the B2B E-Commerce 300.

Sign up for a free subscription to B2BecNews, a twice-weekly newsletter that covers technology and business trends in the growing B2B e-commerce industry. B2BecNews is published by Vertical Web— Media LLC, which also publishes the monthly business magazine Internet Retailer. Follow Paul Demery, editor for B2B e-commerce, on Twitter @pdemery.

Follow us on LinkedIn and be the first to know when new B2BecNews publishes new content.