Feb/March 2020

Skills & Training
OPERATORS: GET INTO TRAINING!
With the spotlight on skills, Wayne Hunter, service and operations manager at Emmegi
(UK), explains why investing in training your machine operators pays dividends.
T
he fenestration industry has finally woken
up to the looming skills shortage. The
combination of an ageing workforce, a post
Brexit migrant labour market and competition
from sectors which are perceived as being a bit
more exciting has definitely focused minds and
already triggered some impressive responses.
Worthwhile apprenticeship schemes are
becoming a reality across lots of businesses
now as they face the challenge of bringing in and
training their own youngsters, and campaigns
like Building Our Skills are doing a pretty good job
promoting the need for training and upskilling of
the existing workforce.
As a machinery supplier, we are 100% supportive
of this renewed focus on training in our industry
“Cutting corners on
training is very much a
false economy”
because we see the benefits, particularly on the
factory floor, that a better trained workforce can
deliver in terms of efficiency and payback.
The majority of machinery investment is
obviously driven by a desire for increased
capacity and greater productivity, and
advances by the likes of Emmegi are
increasingly focused around reducing the
manpower required in a factory. However,
while most machines can now be operated by
fewer, generally less skilled operators, I would
argue that the single most important factor in
maximising the performance of those machines
remains the level of training provided.
We see all the time how much more quickly
fabricators see payback on their new machine if
their team are able to operate it to its maximum
potential. That means understanding all the
features which prompted fabricators to choose
that model in the first place and learning how to
optimise its speed and capacity.
Training and advice at TWR
An excellent example of that recently was at TWR
Group in County Durham, where we had installed
a new Quadra L1 machining centre in July 2019.
When TWR contacted Emmegi (UK) with a series
of queries on the machine, we despatched two of
our engineers to review how it was being operated
and to provide training and advice.
They instructed the team at TWR on positioning of
the gripper height and clamp setting adjustment
to avoid lengths from being cut incorrectly and
discussed how to maximise the infeed magazine
capacity so that batching and sub-batching of
jobs is more efficient. As a result, TWR is happy
that its Quadra is now running ‘faster and better’
and delivering an improved return on investment.
It’s not just about customers getting the best
value that they can from their machinery though,
it is also about training to prevent unnecessary
machine breakdowns. Certainly, I’ve known
cases where our engineers have gone into a
customer to fix a problem only to discover that
what the customer is reporting as an alarm on the
machine is actually an error message because it
hasn’t been set up correctly. I’ve also known of
occasions where engineers have gone in to find
38 T F FEB/MAR 2020 CONNECTING THE WINDOW, DOOR & ROOF FABRICATION SUPPLY CHAIN