Training Pushes Dozer Profits

At the end of training, VISTA carefully evaluates the operators performance. We will rate the operators on their deficiencies ? where they need to improve, says Longstaff. This is a critical step in creating a plan for further improvements.

VISTA also polls all of its students after they have completed the training, many of whom already have 20 years of experience under their belts. Almost everyone says, I have been doing this for a long time and I still learned something,  Longstaff states.

While the results of the training are immediate, they can be a little hard to quantify; assigning values to their true benefits can be difficult. We actually get quite a bit of feedback, says Sims. In Marion, IL, we received a call back from a customer that claimed they had a 15% to 18% improvement in production after a four-day visit.

The largest gains come in the form of improvements in production. They are not working harder, they are working smarter, Sims emphasizes. Actually, at the end of the day, they can be more relaxed because we show them the right way [to accomplish the task]. Instead of fighting the machine, we teach them to make the machine do what it was designed to do. If they are more comfortable in the cab, they will move more material at the end of the shift than they did before.