Why customers benefit from on-site training

Tony Saunders, sara LBS Sales Manager, explains how end-users can benefit from product training days.

At sara LBS we see it as our responsibility to ensure that we are able to offer our customers the best product, coupled with the best service, in order to deliver a solution that meets all of the requirements of the job in hand – not to mention relevant legislation and safety standards. Internally this requires us to make sure that all staff are kept up to date on the latest industry developments and are offered training where relevant.

For example, we require all of our engineering staff to carry CSCS qualifications to ensure safe on-site working practices at all time. We also offer training up to NVQ level on the 17th edition wiring regulations – particularly relevant in light of the 3rd amendments which are coming into place in January. It’s this level of training and excellence that allows end users to trust that we will deliver the most reliable and efficient solutions; and contractors and architects to know that the solutions will meet all current legislation.

So, if internal training can play such a major role during the specification and installation stages, we must ask ourselves how we can continue to deliver these advantages to our customers after the sale has been made. For us, the next logical step is to offer training to the end-user; allowing them to identify, and in some cases even fix, problems that may occur and in turn keeping all downtime to a bare minimum.

We appreciate that some of our customers have extremely tight schedules which may suffer thousands of pounds in lost production a minute in the event of unplanned downtime. With this kind of loss at stake it’s simply not feasible to shut down until a repair and maintenance service van arrives – no matter how local or efficient they are.

In these circumstances, after the equipment has been installed, we offer our customers the option of a bespoke training course which educates the onsite engineering teams in the essentials of the core production areas: covering maintenance, fault finding and repairs.

Of course not all customers are the same. In many cases employing an on-site engineering team with the relevant knowledge – and keeping spare parts readily available in storage – is simply not feasible for smaller clients. But that isn’t to say that speedy repair in the event of breakdown isn’t just as important for them. A basic level of training given to the warehouse manager or on-site engineer can allow fault codes to be read and understood; meaning that maintenance professionals can be properly briefed over the phones, enhancing the likelihood of a fault being fixed on the first visit.

As EU regulations push all of industry towards greener and more efficient practices, we are seeing more and more that it is loading bay areas that offer the greatest potential in terms of improving warehouse insulation and reducing energy costs for temperature regulation. However, there are still many architects, contractors and end users who view the loading bay as an area where the only possible cost savings come at the point of purchase - looking for the cheapest purchase price and forgetting the total cost of ownership. It’s only through a process of education from within the industry that we can change this perception and create a market where loading and elevating equipment is seen as problem solving rather than simply as commodity products.