Training: Then and Now
As recently as ten years ago, PBC Linear enjoyed a full lineup of employees that had accumulated twenty or even thirty years each of machining and manufacturing experience. This breadth of experience allowed us to bring in new hires and match them with an experienced mentor for training. Typically, the training on a machine would require four to six weeks to reach an acceptable proficiency. As this experienced workforce has retired and potential young recruits have chosen other career paths, a shortage of seasoned employees has ensued, making our training process much more difficult.
Manifest software from Taqtile has begun to solve two prongs of the machinist talent drain. The first is its ability to use a gaming type platform that many young recruits can relate to. They are not versed in the pen and notebook, but rather the digital world at their fingertips. This not only makes their training methods more engaging, but also more attractive as a career.
The second remedy is the ability to extract on-the-job knowledge from experienced operators, and then create a program that can be indefinitely reused or tweaked for maximum effect. As Tim Lecrone, Director of Manufacturing Engineering explains, “After being introduced to Taqtile we were able to grasp the concept that we could take this tribal knowledge, make an instruction on it, and duplicate it when needed.” These complicated processes are broken down into simple tasks, allowing the new hire to observe focused and specific instructions in a document at their pace. This helps the student avoid a potential botched translation from the mentor, or know that they can always revisit the program if they forget a particular step in the sequence.
