The Pilot Day 2

After the initial day's setup had gone so well it was nice to go into the plant on day 2 with a little time to spare in the morning. Training was not planned until the afternoon so that the operators from the morning shift I would be training would have finished most of their normal day to day work.

In planning shop floor training one has to be mindful that whatever training it is that is given has to fit in and around operator's usual duties so as not to disrupt production.

I received the final updates for the last procedure which the client had requested and had time to run through these myself and made sure I was happy with how they ran and that the associated reports ran as expected. I added a couple of reports based on conversations I had had with the supervisors so that they could more easily monitor the data being collected.

The training for the afternoon was split into 2 sessions.

Session 1 - Handheld Operator Training

This session was purely aimed at the two operators who would be using the devices to actually capture the data. Their supervisors were also sitting in on the training. We only had one and a half hours available for this training session so it had to be brief yet informative.

One of the operators being trained did not speak very much English and my Polish was not too brilliant either! But thankfully he could understand more English than I could Polish so it wasn't too much of a problem.

I ran through some basic course notes which are available here.

The training went very well and within the hour, both operators were conversant enough with using the devices to run the procedures from start to finish on their own. This included:

• Turning the device on.
• Loggin In.
• Running a procedure.
• Understanding the different function keys and their purpose.
• Entering different types of data.
• Storing the procedure.
• Correcting errors.
• Recognising and reacting to alerts.
• Synchronising the data when needed.
• Care of the Unit.
• What to do for support.

At the end of the session the new users were pleased as punch. They were excited to be chosen to be the ones running the data capture for the new pilot and pleased that they could see it was not going to be difficult or interfere with their current jobs. They even made comments about how they could see it making their lives easier. This is unusual and nice to hear. So often it is the case that there is strong resistance.

Session 2 - Desktop Application Users Training (Group 1 of 2)

This session was geared toward those members of the management who were going to be using the central applications for:

• Synchronising data.
• Viewing the captured data.
• Viewing any non-conformances.
• Filtering those results for analysis.
• Running the reports provided against the data collected.
• Running the standard reports.
• Running auditing reports.
• Amending product specifications
• Entering daily targets.

This session went well and users could immediately see how easy it was to see the data being captured. This was something they were not used to, even so, as the interface was a windows explrer styled approach, and the trainees were all conversant with many windows applications the training required was minimal.

The session laster for about an hour and a half with each user having a go and looking at the resuolts for their own areas of interest.

The help file within the application provided all the notes that were needed for the training because they have been written in a way so as a new user might go through them step by step.

The tale continues.....