Bond: My day as a lift truck technician in training

I poured my first cup of coffee, sat at the conference table, and suppressed a groan. It was the day after ProMat earlier this year, and I was pretty exhausted. I had spent the week walking however many miles through McCormick Place and filling my brain with the products, concepts and conversations that make this industry so exciting. Crown Equipment had invited me to one of its six regional training facilities in Joliet, Ill., about an hour outside Chicago. The plan was to spend the Thursday and Friday after the show going through some of Crown’s Demonstrated Performance operator and technician training programs. In hindsight, I might have picked up on the word “demonstrated” and packed more than my Sunday best.

I still think my assumptions were fair as every equipment training course I had ever experienced involved VHS tapes with cheesy actors doing unsafe things, and thick, unwieldy folders of documentation. I expected the folks at Crown to give me a steady supply of coffee as we spent hours poring over the material, with an occasional stretch break. Surely they had not planned to bring a soft-handed journalist out into the workshop and leave him alone to disassemble a lift truck. And then put it back together.

After introductions, we started into some slides, which explained why Crown has spent a lot of time and resources developing a comprehensive suite of training programs for the education of operators, technicians and supervisors. The idea is to give all workers in a given facility the same understanding of optimal safety practices. After all, the safest operator in the world can be undone by one careless pedestrian or uninformed supervisor.

With the fundamentals covered, the real fun started. We left the conference room and entered the technician training area, where I was introduced to a new lift truck, a laptop and a neatly organized assortment of tools. Justin Moore, regional training manager and himself a former field technician, told me I had until the end of the day to demonstrate a complete, 14-step planned maintenance (PM) workup. Suddenly, I found myself longing for some corny videos.

Crown’s technician training is designed to support self-directed education and hands-on learning. Although technically a pass/fail system, in practice it feels more like pass or try again until you pass. Slow or fast learners can move through the program at their own pace, pursue extra credit and have all their progress logged in a personal profile. The experience is devoid of red marks on quizzes or other familiar conventions of “normative assessment” as opposed to demonstrated performance.

“For instance, if you miss one of the 10 steps required to make coffee, a normative result would be 90%,” Moore says. “That’s a passing grade, right? But if there are no grinds in the machine, you don’t have 90% of coffee. You have no coffee.”

There are some subtle differences between making coffee and fully servicing a 4-ton lift truck, but I soon found my way around the Web-based training tools and set about learning by trial and error. After removing my blazer, I tightened the chains, adjusted the mast, removed drive tires and steering tires to examine brakes and alignment, lubricated three dozen moving parts, changed the oil and, of course, clumsily dropped the plug in the pan. There’s a reason I don’t work on my own car. My trainers observed from a distance, roaming around us and issuing timely reinforcement of safety principles and helpful advice.

After a few hours of tinkering, while occasionally navigating the interactive training manual and supporting instructional videos, I told Moore I was ready for my assessment. He asked me to wait in a nearby room while he introduced a number of problems for me to troubleshoot. In the bathroom mirror, I saw that my tradeshow clothes had been destroyed by a lively smearing of grease and grime. I also found myself smiling as widely as I had at any point that week, and I felt no shortage of excitement despite the day’s uncharacteristically small caffeine intake.

As I circled the lift truck, reciting and executing the dozens of items covered in a PM, I was amazed by the amount of information I had absorbed in half a day. Safety procedures and protective equipment had already become second nature, I had learned to retrieve detailed information from the vehicle’s onboard diagnostic system, and I quickly located tools in a cabinet that had become as familiar as my own.

But something was wrong. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why the mast would not extend beyond a certain height. Gene Hoffman, Crown Equipment’s regional service trainer, asked if I had checked the tilt controls. As he silently looked on, I located the linkages and troubleshot them by memory. At least I hope I did. Sealed, tight, lubricated, aligned with sensor—wait, what is this washer stuck to the sensor magnet?

“How’d that get there?” Hoffman asked with a sly grin.

I plucked out the washer and the mast’s full range was restored. I wondered how many panicked service calls over the years could have been so easily repaired. Even if Hoffman hadn’t come along, my laptop would have quickly guided me to the fix. No one could expect every operator to know this handy washer trick, but Crown’s system leaves little room for that washer to lead to downtime, dispatch and disappointment.

I was able to complete only a small part of the five-week technician training, but my profile will stay in Crown’s database for the foreseeable future, informing analysis of the program’s effectiveness as Moore, Hoffman and the team seek continuous improvement. The story contained in each person’s online profile is the story of costs, operators, technicians and supervisors coming together to become as effective as possible. Analyzing data about each person’s response to a rogue washer, for instance, enables a lift truck user’s operations to continuously improve as well.

Given how engaging and effective this training can be, it’s a shame that one of the training bays in the Crown facility was empty. If high school students were exposed to this same one-day experience, I suspect there would be many more knocks on Crown’s door. The company is not alone in the increasingly desperate hunt for quality applicants, who are needed to support the industry’s pressing need for uptime and cost-effective maintenance programs. Saving thousands of dollars in parts, labor and production is sometimes as simple as knowing where to look for a small piece of metal on a magnet. Imagine what a well-staffed workforce—connected to an ever-growing database of wisdom—could achieve.