Rockwell Automation Gets On-Line Training
The company's director of operations, Robert Murphy, who has been with the Rockwell corporation for 23 years, explains that the caliber of the Ouick Start team's expertise and its ability to quickly pick up Rockwell's internal processes, lingo, and level of operation is gratifying.
Rockwell Automation produces 3.5 million automation products per year at the Dublin facility. Just about anything that can be automated from car manufacturing to making disposable diapers-uses the technology Rockwell makes feasible with its programmable logic controllers, the brains behind manufacturing robotics. The plant employs approximately 365 people from Dublin and five surrounding counties.
"It's been exciting to watch Quick Start take the work our engineers have done and link it up with a system that makes it accessible to our people on the production lines," explains Joe Thomas, one of the company's manufacturing unit leaders. "This way, learning can continue and is not limited to the classroom. It's out on the floor in an integrated environment and accessible at all times. It's extremely user-friendly and reflects a tremendous amount of work and skill on the part of the Quick Start team who made it possible. I'd like to know where the state gets these people!" he adds, smiling.
In addition to devising the training program, Quick Start also has helped with pre-employment assessment, examining the interpersonal and technical skills of 350 to 400 job applicants.
The Quick Start team, Murphy says, was not afraid of difficult concepts. "They developed acumen quickly on how we do what we do. They were extremely flexible, and I really appreciated their sense of urgency."
"The caliber of associates we're looking for is higher than usual, in my opinion," says Bob Dixon, the company's manager of human resources. "We need people who pay attention to minute details and have technological backgrounds, as well as a good work ethic. Georgia Quick Start has been very helpful to us in the streamlining of our hiring process, which has allowed us to identify the right people for the job."
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Rockwell Automation has benefited from Quick Start's services four times, the most recent training plan being its most sophisticated and challenging. As a world-class manufacturer of printed circuit board assemblies, Rockwell Automation is always at the crest of the next wave of automation. Quick Start currently is providing an on-line training system that ties all of Rockwell Automation's information systems together and puts it on the manufacturing floor via computer terminals. At the fingertips of the employees and available anytime, this training information allows for a smoother, easier, and more efficient production line.
Rockwell Automation is one of the few industries that uses its own products to manufacture the products it sells, but this way, they know in intricate detail what is needed in terms of workforce training. The manufacturing floor at the 162,000-squarefoot facility is a humming beehive of human and robotic activity. On the surface mount technology line, circuit boards are inserted with chips the size of a pencil point at the rate of 28,000 per hour-the machines a blur of efficiency and high-tech kinetics.