In-house training - the bottling hall under control!

ASIA PACIFIC Breweries PTE Ltd one of the leading brewery groups in the Asian/Pacific area uses its site in Singapore to test new products on the market there. The bottling lines are constantly being modernized in order to produce new products of the very best quality. In the course of the current modernization of a bottling line HEUFT SYSTEMTECHNIK GMBH was able to impress the company with its range of quality control and checking systems. After further talks devices to increase the efficiency and output as well as a case inspector and an empty bottle sorting unit were also included.

The employees were to be optimally prepared before the commissioning of the line in order to achieve the best possible start to production. For this ASIA PACIFIC made use of our in-house training program. The HEUFT Training Center has been carrying out such training courses for bottling lines for many years now. The trend towards on-site training has been growing rapidly especially with customers in the Asian area due to the fact that a budget is quickly exceeded if a whole team has to travel to the Training Center in Germany. This was also the case in Singapore where on-site training made it possible to train considerably more employees and prepare them for their new tasks than it would have been possible in Germany for reasons of costs. Furthermore the trainer only has to carry out training for one customer and he/she is therefore even better able to deal with the special requirements and circumstances of the equipment and can break down the fear of contact with the new devices. The necessary infrastructure of lecture room, presentation media and the opportunity to use the assembled devices to train on was available at ASIA Breweries so that the training could be carried out just as efficiently as at the HEUFT Training Center.

Of course training at the manufacturer´s head office has advantages which are not available on-site. Undisturbed learning on-site is quickly made impossible if employees are called away to remedy faults. An aspect not to be underestimated is the exchange of experiences amongst employees from other bottling plants. Many "aha" responses are the result of incidental conversations during the training course when participants discuss their problems and solutions.

Even if ASIA PACIFIC had to forego these positive side-effects the success of the foresighted planned training course was nevertheless quickly evident in the operation of the equipment - operators as well as maintenance staff are familiar with their equipment and have everything "under control" right from the beginning.