Your equipment operators can make all the difference to your business, its overall performance, safety, and efficiency. Supporting and developing your operators at every skill level is therefore essential to increasing the productivity achieved throughout the operation.
With a continuing shortage of experienced operators and an aging operator community, investing time in their training is more crucial than ever. While training for new staff is commonplace, more experienced operators are often overlooked when it comes to training initiatives. That is a massively missed opportunity.
Realize full potential
Giving experienced operators the opportunity to train with a Müller Martini instructor can open a whole new world of performance potential. MMImprove Training focuses on helping operators optimize the way they run their equipment. It gives them a chance to get questions answered that have likely accumulated for years. Expert advice, right on the machine about specific, difficult products can make a world of difference.
Just hearsay is not enough
Experienced operators have often built their skills through hands-on experience over time, in many cases without formal equipment manufacturer training. It is quite common that they learned to operate a saddle stitcher or perfect binding line from their colleagues and predecessors. This type of learning by hearsay and by doing leaves a lot of room for improvement.
Ingrained behaviors
Operators are frequently put in a difficult position when they are asked to successfully operate an expensive piece of equipment without structured, formal training. That is a stressful situation for anyone and having to just figure it out with basic instructions from a predecessor or manuals goes only so far. In many such cases, we find a long list of engrained behaviors that are less than optimal that not only make an operator’s day unnecessarily challenging, but also drags down production efficiencies.
MMImprove Training
Fortunately, this can be easily remedied by investing in your most valuable asset, the people that operate your production equipment. High Performance training has many potential benefits even for your more experienced operators.
- Higher efficiency and productivity: With a solid understanding of the machines’ functionality and capabilities, operators are more in tune with their equipment. They work more efficiently and accomplish more with less. That in turn drives productivity as well as profitability.
- Reduced wear, reduced costs, and more uptime: Operators learn how to minimize wear and tear while producing at high rates, which directly reduces cost and helps avoid repairs. Operating a machine correctly helps to keep it in good condition and reduces the risk of unscheduled downtime. Well-operated equipment has a longer productive lifecycle and maintains its value better.
- Safer operation: Training enhances operator skills and operating practices, creating a safer work environment.
- Increased operator satisfaction: Training is a great way to increase job satisfaction, resulting in more content and more productive operators. A focus on employee development helps attract talented candidates.
- Training pays for itself: Spending money on operator development is a great investment. A trained operator not only works faster, safer, and more productively, but helps to save time, resources, and waste.
Please contact me to learn more about MMImprove Training. I look forward to helping you leverage your operators’ skills and your Müller Martini equipment.
Yours
Peter Wolfram
Müller Martini Region North America
This text is reproduced with kind permission of Müller Martini, you can read the original article first published here.