FLEET MANAGEMENT
Engineers at your service: Volvo gets technical
Volvo has opened a new technical training centre that will give the company more scope to increase its skills base and offer customers a better service for their fleets
Cambridgeshire, more than doubling training capacity. More than £200,000 has been spent on creating two training workshops, a component workshop and two interactive classrooms. “We have the capacity now to take a fresh look at training,” says engineering manager Martyn Brawn. “This year we will be looking to increase the amount of technical training given to all of our engineers, from 1.9 weeks a year to three weeks per person.”
V
The company will also be able to offer customers their own service engi- neers trained by Volvo trainers, provid- ing a technical resource for larger fleets. Volvo has always had a training centre at Duxford, previ- ously with a
olvo Construction Equipment has opened a technical training centre at its head office at Duxford in
single workshop and classroom. This meant that a maximum of eight engi- neers could attend courses each week. Even by offering courses 44 weeks of the year, that barely covered the neces- sary product updates required by Volvo’s 125 in-house service engineers. “We physically couldn’t do any more,” says training centre manager Graham Paflin. “We were simply concentrating on new product training.”
Core skills drive With the new centre, the addition of Mark Armsworth as a full-time trainer and the use of up to four part- time trainers, Volvo will be rapidly expanding the course content on offer. This should result in a significant improvement in the service team’s core skills, as well as keeping engi- neers up to date with changes in machine technology and legislation. Volvo is also expanding
the use of its Compass on-line training programme. This global system pro- vides engineers with the correct levels of basic information prior to attending a training course, ensuring that everyone starts the week at the same point. All of Volvo’s customer support centres have a Compass room where engineers can access the Compass learning system, though some prefer to use the system from home.
As well as training engineers and pro- viding specific courses for Volvo’s own growing team of apprentices, the com- pany will be putting some of its back office staff through basic mechanical terminology and parts training. It is hoped that this will help when cus- tomers call the depots, allowing rapid diagnosis and response to parts and service queries.
In addition, customers will be able to send their own service engineers to Duxford to take part in some of the training courses. It is hoped that in most cases these courses will be tai- lored to suit customer requirements, providing relevant machinery to meet the customers’ needs.
Continual assessment Volvo continually assesses its engi- neers’ core competences, designing courses to improve the standard across the board. However the centre will be looking at where training is required regionally. For instance there is little point in engineers attending a course that is specific to motor graders, from a depot that has no graders working in its area.
One of the workshops can house even the largest Volvo equipment
18 Local Authority Waste & Recycling October 2010
There is a secondary benefit to the increased scale of the centre, from a global perspective. At times some of the Volvo European training facilities can find it difficult to fill a training
22➧
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48