During the four-day training session, conducted by machine vision vendor DVT Corp. (www.dvtsensors.com), Gaut got the chance to go one-on-one with a DVT applications engineer. The two worked together on Gaut’s inspection application. When it was over, Gaut, a staff engineer at the Cardinal Health Medical Products and Services Group, in Jacksonville, Texas, went home happy; he had a plan for a quicker, more efficient way to use his company’s DVT vision systems to inspect the float-and-gasket assemblies.
“We were stopping the part and inspecting it, but the DVT engineer showed me some changes we could make so we can now acquire that image on a moving conveyor,” Gaut relates.
As Gaut’s experience shows, hands-on, classroom industrial training is still alive, well and worthwhile, despite the growing use of Web-based and computer-based training (CBT) technologies. Indeed, according to Bob Settle, DVT marketing director, the company provided more than 10,000 person-days of training last year at four facilities worldwide, including an expanded global training center at its newly opened Duluth, Ga. headquarters.
DVT, like other automation product vendors, is also pushing further into CBT and Web-based training. The company has distributed more than 300,000 copies of its interactive, CD-ROM training disk since April 2001, says Settle, and also conducts live, online training on selected topics weekly via the Internet.
DVT provides all of its training at no charge, a rarity among vendors. More typical is ABB University, a division of automation systems vendor ABB Inc. (www.abb.com). The going rate for three- and five-day classroom training covering ABB motors, variable frequency drives and controls is about $1,400 and $2,200 per person, respectively, says Dave Polka, ABB University training center team leader for the drives division, in New Berlin, Wisc. Those rates are about average for the drives industry, Polka says.
The ABB classroom courses include lecture time, but also feature hands-on work. For training involving physical products such as motors and drives, the hands-on instruction is a necessity, Polka notes. But he has also noticed a greater interest from customers lately in CBT and Web-based training that can be delivered remotely, and at a lower price—for skills that don’t require hands-on interaction with equipment and instructors.
During the past two to three years, more large manufacturers have begun making training a formal part of the automation buying process, Polka says. Customers might write into the system specification that a certain percentage of training be interactive and self-paced, for example. Polka attributes this trend in part to more cost sensitivity among manufacturing automation buyers, as well as a desire for more flexibility. “Customers aren’t necessarily cutting their training budgets,” he says. “But they’re asking for more combinations of how to get training.”
In response, ABB and other vendors are developing more training alternatives. ABB offers various CD-ROM-packaged courses for self-paced, interactive computer-based learning, priced at an average of $250 per course, Polka says. The company is also developing self-paced Web-based training modules, he adds, and offers live, Internet training using voice-over-IP technology.
ABB also provides on-site training–at a customer’s plant or at a nearby hotel, for example. In part because of the shipping costs involved in getting up to 1,000 pounds or more of drives and motors training equipment to the customer site, however, the price can range from $12,000 to $14,000 for a three-day course, and from $16,000 to $20,000 for a five-day program, Polka says. “Typically, we look for a minimum of six students. It wouldn’t pay for anybody to have us come out for less than that.”
