| Headquartered | Carthage, Illinois, US |
| Locations | 16 |
| Industries | Agricultural equipment sales, service, and parts |
| OEMs | AGCO, plus shortline brands |
| VitalEdge Solution | IntelliDealer DMS |
A Dealership Built Through Growth
Parallel Ag is a 16-store agricultural equipment dealership serving farmers across seven states, from West Texas through northern Illinois. The company is primarily an AGCO dealership, with shortline dealerships in Iowa and Minnesota, and it did not start as a single unified operation. Parallel Ag is the product of several mergers and acquisitions, beginning with Livingston Machinery Company in Oklahoma and West Texas, expanding through Ag Solutions Group across Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota, and growing again with the addition of AC McCartney Company in Illinois.
That growth has always been driven by a mission Shawn Skaggs, CEO, puts simply: helping farmers feed the world. But keeping that mission intact across 16 stores and seven states requires more than good intentions. It requires infrastructure.
Parallel Ag’s defining commitment to customers is a 24/7 service and support promise. Parts, service, and support are available around the clock, every day of the year, because farming does not follow a Monday through Friday schedule.
“When you’re farming, you’ve only got a very small window to do the things that you have to do. Whenever you have to plant, you have to plant. You’ve got a small window when the weather is going to allow you to do that. Whenever you have to harvest, it’s the same way. Preventing that downtime, making sure we’ve got maximum uptime for our farmers is the thing that drives everything.”
— Shawn Skaggs, CEO, Parallel Ag
The Cost of Running Two Systems
When Parallel Ag merged with AC McCartney Company, the Illinois locations came in on a different business system. For roughly a year, Parallel Ag operated across two platforms that did not communicate with each other. The consequences touched every department.
Parts availability at stores in Illinois was invisible to teams in Texas and vice versa. Accounting could not close a period cleanly or produce financial reports with any confidence. For Nicholas Mitchell, Director of IT, the day-to-day reality meant fielding constant calls from employees who could not access data that lived in the other system. Every routine task required an extra step of communication that should not have been necessary. And technicians could not be easily shared across state lines, because the system that would make that coordination possible simply was not there.
From the finance side, the fragmentation made clean reporting almost impossible. Stefanie Hemeyer, who serves as Corporate Controller and oversees financial reporting across all 16 locations, describes what it meant to manage books without the ability to lock a period.
“With our previous system, we didn’t have the ability to close months, so we had to go back and continually redo financials in order to get accurate up-to-date reports. When you’re having to combine data from multiple different business systems with multiple different policies and procedures and practices, it gets extremely difficult to put together reports that you can have faith in.”
— Stefanie Hemeyer, Corporate Controller, Parallel Ag
Jeremiah Johnson, Vice President of Operations and a 24-year veteran of the company, saw the same problem from the field level. Without a shared system, visibility that should have been instant required a phone call or an email instead.
One System, One Future
When Parallel Ag evaluated its options, IntelliDealer was not a new name. The company had been on the platform since 2015. The question was whether to bring the AC McCartney locations onto the same system and how to do it without repeating the painful transitions the company had experienced before.
Previous system migrations at Parallel Ag had been difficult enough that Shawn Skaggs describes them as horror stories. Nearly every merger had produced one. The decision to consolidate on IntelliDealer DMS was straightforward. The execution was the part that required a different approach.
“IntelliDealer was honestly, I think, the easy choice for us. When we looked at the whole breadth of services that were offered, the reporting that was there, all the different things that just make our life a little bit easier, we felt like IntelliDealer was where our future was at.”
— Shawn Skaggs, CEO, Parallel Ag
For Jeremiah Johnson, Vice President of Operations, the reasoning was equally clear. Parallel Ag needed a system that could serve as the backbone of a multi-state operation and scale alongside it. IntelliDealer had the depth to do that, and the team knew it going in.
A Rollout Built to Stick
Rather than approaching the transition the way previous migrations had been handled, Parallel Ag’s internal team came to IntelliDealer with a plan of their own design. Nicholas Mitchell and his IT team proposed a phased approach over six to eight months: backend infrastructure first, then a structured multi-week training program, then go-live. The goal was to give employees time to know the platform before they ever touched live data. IntelliDealer paired the team with project lead Rex Brady, who Mitchell credits as a critical part of making the training plan work in practice.
A sandbox environment gave employees weeks of hands-on practice before any real data was at stake. A six-week training schedule offered morning and afternoon sessions for parts, service, and sales teams, so no one was left without a chance to learn on their schedule. Stefanie Hemeyer led the data migration work, collaborating with the IntelliDealer team to identify and resolve duplicate customers and vendors before implementation so those problems did not carry over into the new system. Her assessment of the IntelliDealer team throughout that process was straightforward: they knew what they were doing, and they were with Parallel Ag every step of the way.
Jeremiah Johnson added a cultural layer to the transition that became one of its most distinctive elements. He developed a program called Intelli-Buddies, pairing employees who were already experienced IntelliDealer users with team members coming onto the system for the first time. For a company that had just merged teams from different states and different company backgrounds, the pairing did more than teach software.
“We married the IntelliDealer name with the buddy system. Before, during, and after the transition, you had a partner, a buddy that could work with you during training, during the onboarding process, and afterwards, side by side with you. It worked really well. It really created that comradery across the company and built some long-lasting relationships in Parallel Ag.”
— Jeremiah Johnson, Vice President of Operations, Parallel Ag
The result was a transition that looked nothing like the ones before it.
“We had been through some transitions before with business systems that had been a nightmare. Almost every one of those transitions would end up being a horror story. And this one was not. This one actually went fantastic. The transition was way smoother than what I’ve ever seen before in a dealer business system transition.”
— Shawn Skaggs, CEO, Parallel Ag
Operating with Visibility Across Seven States
With IntelliDealer running across all 16 locations, the operational picture changed in ways that were immediately visible to everyone from the CEO to the parts counter.
Parts inventory that had been invisible across state lines was now searchable in real time. If a customer in Illinois needed a part that was sitting in a Texas warehouse, the team could find it and fulfill it without a phone call. Technician sharing across locations, something that had been logistically difficult under two systems, became a natural extension of how the company operates. Combine specialists in Illinois now travel south for the Oklahoma wheat harvest. Hay equipment technicians move north when the season calls for it.
“If a customer’s looking for a part in Illinois and we’ve got that part sitting in Texas, we know that we’ve got it in Texas and we can get it to that customer that much faster. We’ve been able to give customers the availability and the expertise we’ve got across our entire seven-state footprint.”
— Shawn Skaggs, CEO, Parallel Ag
For employees, the change was equally immediate. Nicholas Mitchell describes it simply: one login, one platform, full visibility across parts, service, and sales for every location in the company. The extra steps and workarounds that had defined the previous year were gone.
For Stefanie and the finance team, the ability to close a period and trust the numbers had been missing for years.
“With IntelliDealer, we can close off the month, we can have a clear cutoff. We know that once we close a month, the data is solid and that nothing’s gonna change. Having IntelliDealer makes my job easier. It makes our reporting more accurate, it makes everything more consistent, and it makes our business better.”
— Stefanie Hemeyer, Corporate Controller, Parallel Ag
Across the organization, employees moved from frustration to enthusiasm. Jeremiah Johnson heard it directly from frontline staff: when everyone is on the same system and that system is as robust as IntelliDealer, getting a customer back to the field faster becomes the focus again, not navigating the software to do it.
Built to Keep Growing
Parallel Ag is not done growing. Shawn Skaggs says so directly, and the infrastructure the company has now built is designed with that in mind. The transition process the team developed is repeatable. The people who went through it are now the ones who will guide new teams through it when the next acquisition comes.
There was, however, a concern Shawn carried into the partnership about whether IntelliDealer could keep pace with where technology was heading, particularly around AI. Attending the VitalEdge conference answered it.
“A year ago, one of the things I was really worried about was as we continue to scale, whether IntelliDealer would be able to keep up, because there’s so much AI being integrated and there’s so much opportunity to use that inside the dealership. I was honestly a little bit concerned until I went to the VitalEdge conference just a couple of months ago and learned about everything they’re starting to incorporate. I was highly encouraged. IntelliDealer is now set to grow with us. They’re not just focused on maintaining what we’ve done in the past. They’re focused on where do we need to go in the future.”
— Shawn Skaggs, CEO, Parallel Ag
That roadmap, including the AI capabilities being developed through VitalityAI, is part of what gives the Parallel Ag team confidence not just in the platform today but in the partnership long term. Stefanie Hemeyer puts it in operational terms: the framework, the policies, and the procedures are in place, and when the next acquisition comes, they will be ready for it. Across finance, IT, and operations, the sentiment is the same. IntelliDealer has proven itself as a partner they can rely on and trust to be there when they need it.
