Socrates Says

Friday Filosophy #20

July 13, 2012/in Filosophy/by learningwithoutscars

When men speak of the future, the gods laugh.

Chinese proverb

Borrow money from pessimists. They don’t expect it back.

Steven Wright

The world is but a canvas to the imagination.

Henry David Thoreau

TESTIMONIALS

Grow Your Own

This week brings our third guest post from Don Shilling. Now it is time to talk about how to "grow your own" workforce.

I grew up in a construction family and worked for my Dad several summers during and after high school. Then while working on my degree at North Dakota State University I was hired by a construction equipment dealership. I started in their service department part time until I finished college. Then full-time service employment for a couple of years then transitioned into sales management. During the recession of the early 1980’s myself and three other managers started General Equipment & Supplies, Inc.

First as Sales Manager and eventually as President we grew our business from one location and 20 employees to 10 locations in four states and two Canadian Provinces and over 250 employees. Along the way we developed relationships with area Technical Colleges and created a College Tuition Reimbursement Program where today we Recruit a handful of new technicians annually into that program. Our company has also developed two Department of Labor Certified Apprenticeship Programs to fill hard to find skilled positions. I am currently semi-retired as Chairman of the Board.

In my previous blog I talked about “High Demand Jobs” and the need to Grow Our Own by recruiting for skilled positions we need filled. It is possible to use the Local, State and Federal Programs that exist today to help underwrite part of the cost of educating our new workforce and/or developing our workforce. . .. That is quite a mouthful but if you break it down it is fairly simple.

Our Federal, State and Local governments are really beginning to understand how the shortages of skilled workforce is impacting our economy. They are all scrambling to help find solutions and frankly they are also looking for your guidance and input.

Because of Covid 19 we are hearing a lot of talk about “re-tooling” our workforce so that people who were employed found themselves suddenly unemployed by what became an unstable and perhaps unskilled career path. These workers are looking to make a change and find a new career that will add stability to their families and futures. Our Adult Learning Centers are going to become busy places as these programs expand and flourish.

Business and Industry are being called on to help support these expanding programs and if you think your business can benefit then you better be seeking out these opportunities. In many cases State or Local dollars are being matched with private sector dollars to bring these programs to life.

What does that mean for you and your organization? It means you might end up hiring or supporting an older than average person(s) who wants and needs a new career. You will help develop this person, first with initial training and inevitably additional continuous training until you have a strong and highly competent employee. That is: Growing Your Own.

This initial Education coupled with Continuous Training builds your staff in a very positive way. The training starts with a comprehensive On Boarding process as they first report to work. Then things like safety training and specific work center orientation. These new employees don’t know what they don’t know so don’t skip steps. These Employees that you have Grown on Your Own will recognize their new skill sets which creates positive attitudes for all and at the end of the day the customers you serve will see this positive influence. There is no real down side to Growing Your Own!

For help in growing your own workforce, please visit us at Learning Without Scars.

October 19, 2020

Empowering The Technician

In his guest post for this week, Ross Atkinson brings us into the loop of empowering the technician in your business.

Your technicians are valuable, skilled workers and many of them use highly sophisticated equipment beyond the traditional toolbox wrenches. Many manufacturers have mandated diagnostic monitoring systems plugged directly into the engine from a laptop to check the machine for issues. There is no doubt that the technical requirements of the service technician have changed dramatically in the last 20 years! Yes, they still need to take the machine apart and put it back together, however, considering the sophistication of today’s equipment, any assistance diagnosing the problems is welcomed - most certainly a process improvement!

Now let’s talk about another opportunity to save your technician time - business system integration. This multifaceted topic begins with how your technicians record the time they work on equipment. Are they still using punch cards, writing the time manually, or even barcode scanning at a central scanning station? Or do they have access to the business system through a computer to clock in/out of repair orders? It should be obvious that having the technician clock directly into the business system saves time. No need to have a service writer spending hours the next morning keypunching every technician’s time into the respective repair orders.

Beyond the improvement in recording technician time, have you ever taken a moment to analyze your technicians’ footsteps in a day? Everyone knows how important it is to keep the technician in the work bay, otherwise, the time away negatively affects the technician’s efficiency and reduces the amount of throughput you can handle in your shop.

This analysis can help you identify why they left their bay and shed some light on where gains could possibly be recognized by eliminating the footsteps and replacing them with some form of system integration. You can do a similar analysis of the post-repair tasks and determine if it can be done by the technician at the time of repair using the same system integration being offered. Let’s look at some ideas:

Clocking time at their bay eliminates the need to walk to a central punch clock system.

Access to machine history eliminates the need to stand at the shop foreman’s door to ask questions about the service or rental history of the machine.

Visibility to the dealership parts inventory to know whether parts are in stock or need to be ordered eliminates the need to walk to the requisition counter.

Seeing the machine’s configuration including serial numbers with a direct tie into manufacturer systems to check for outstanding product improvements/recalls and parts availability. Again, eliminates the need to go and ask someone else to do the research.

Allow the technician to update the machine hours immediately so that it doesn’t get forgotten about. As we know from my previous blog on Service Agreements, hours are such a critical component so why chance having someone else do it many days later.

Ability to upload before and after images directly to the repair order for historical and warranty purposes. The payback on this could be huge if the customer questions the repair or you get into a warranty audit.

Visibility to job code hours so the technician knows what the expectation is for job completion and the repair time remaining. An updated benchmark helps the technician stay focused so that the job gets done on time.

Having a tracking system for technician breaks whether the company or the customer is paying for it. Keeping your technician honest and eliminating the “water cooler effect” is important in time management.

Ability to key technician stories and comments for the customer or for historical purposes and eliminate the need for another dealership employee to decipher and rekey what has been written by hand.

The ability to electronically request parts from the parts department eliminates the need to walk to the requisition counter. The parts can be delivered directly to the bay.

These are just some ideas on where gains could be obtained by empowering your technicians via business system integration. Maybe you already have some or all of these in place or maybe you can add to this list.

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April 6, 2021

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