Industry

When the company care of its people, the people will care about the company.

But time is money, so having a machine unavailable to work in the middle of a job just isn’t an option. And according to a recent study by a leading OEM, machine downtime is caused by human error 70% of the time.

Indeed, better operator training will also reduce excessive machine wear and prevent the misuse of equipment that not only increases fuel costs, but also leads to accidents that damage equipment and cause injuries, increasing insurance costs.

Simulation for training? At Simlog, you’ll get the right kind of simulated tasks, the right kind of task progression, and the right way of evaluating simulated work in a way that comprehensively measures productivity and quality. And that documentation will help you increase accountability and reduce legal liability, if something happens later.

No “games”, no OEM sales tools, just professional operator training products. And after almost twenty-five years in business, we are the world-wide standard in cost-effective simulation.

How Simlog Can Help

According to research recently conducted by the CII about construction industry projects, investing just 1% of the total labour budget in training reaps multiple dividends:

  • injuries decrease 27% (OSHA reportable accidents)
  • re-work decreases 26% (including waste and work of poor quality)
  • absenteeism decreases 15% (employees who fail to report for work)
  • turnover decreases 14% (employees who just leave)
  • productivity improves 11% (as measured by the number of hours to complete a given task)

Regarding heavy equipment, properly trained people operate their machines more productively, and at reduced cost. And that’s why “getting” good operators is key to making your business better. Simlog can help!

Improve your recruiting efforts (and bring new visibility to your company)

Everyone knows that the best way to recruit in a competitive market is to meet people where they are already. And that’s why our customers bring their “training” simulators to job fairs, school open houses, and all kinds of other regional events. (Just watch the lineups form!) In this way, they also make themselves more “visible” in their local communities.

Make better hiring decisions: pre-employment skills assessment

When hiring a new employee, true qualifications are typically “discovered” when work begins at the first job site, at the controls of your real equipment. And that’s because Human Resources don’t have the necessary expertise to ask the right questions. Worse, CVs often contain misleading elements that exaggerate competencies or responsibilities.

Double checking operating skills, before hiring, is easy to do with our Personal Simulator, since Human Resources can simply compare simulation results with benchmarks (target values) established by your best operators. Since everyone does the very same simulated work, this really is a case of “apples and apples”.

Pre-screen for operator aptitude when promoting from within

Industrial psychologists have learned that operating heavy equipment requires a combination manual dexterity, eye/hand coordination, depth perception, and spatial “reasoning”. Unfortunately, up to 30% of training candidates don’t have enough and for that reason, will never become fully proficient.

Our Personal Simulators will let you evaluate this aptitude, something especially important when promoting from within to grow your own operators, to be sure that someone with the right attitude also has enough aptitude to make training worthwhile.

Better prepare new operators for real seat-time

Watching movies of equipment at work, or sitting beside an experienced operator in the cab, only goes so far. And that’s because acquiring skills is all about learning by doing.

But training at the controls of real equipment is dangerous, and expensive.  First, consider what you pay to own and operate that equipment, plus the time spent by your instructor to supervise the training. Then there are the costs associated with even small accidents due to inexperience, often thousands of dollars in replacement parts and downtime. There are merchandise costs too, because loads will inevitably be damaged or “lost”. Finally, there’s always the risk of injury (or worse).

Well at Simlog, our Personal Simulators are “generic” and teach core skills, making it easy to proceed to “hands-on” training on a variety of real heavy equipment.

And our Instructional Designs take into account best in class practices from leading training professionals from around the world, along with certification guidelines from key standards organizations such as the Canadian Standards Association, the NCCER for construction equipment, the NCCCO for cranes, and OSHA and the National Safety Council for forklifts.

That’s a “virtual seat” for the drill-and-practice needed to acquire the necessary muscle memory and gain the necessary self-confidence.

And by making sure that your new operators have learned good habits well enough before they “graduate” to the controls of your real equipment, the real seat-time training becomes

  • safer, because “accidents” now happen at the simulator
  • better, because students are learning to do things right, at the simulator
  • faster, because your students reach their performance targets sooner. That means less “wear and tear” on your equipment, leading to lower maintenance and repair costs.
  • cheaper, thanks to all of the above

In this way, training costs go down, training quality goes up, and your new operators are more “job ready”!

Help experienced operators refresh their skills

At many companies, people aren’t at the controls every day, so Simlog products can help them regain confidence in their operating skills in a “just in time” way.

Such skills “refreshing” is also important for people who are cross-training, or getting ready to step in when your regular operators are unavailable (on holiday, recovering from an illness, etc.).

Reveal bad operating habits (and help develop new right ones)

An experienced operator keeps doing the very same (wrong) thing until the day other things are different, and then all of a sudden there’s an “incident” or worse, a real accident.

Use your Personal Simulator to help reveal the bad habits of that experienced operator, and then develop new right ones, all according to best in class practices.

Monitor progress onsite and offsite

Larger companies typically have multiple site offices, and it becomes hard for Human Resources to keep track of what’s going in.

With our Simulation Manager, simulation results are saved in a database file, indexed by user, each with a unique login name. Where there are multiple Personal Simulators deployed together, just one Simulation Manager is needed because all of simulation results will be saved in the same database.

Simlog also offers a free Viewer so that people at other locations can review the same simulation results, using a local copy of that database file.

Join a world-wide community of leading industry professionals

Becoming a Simlog customer means joining a growing community of leading private sector and public sector equipment owner operators around the world, all dedicated to improving heavy equipment operator training.

Share simulation benchmarks, best practices, and suggestions to help Simlog make our Personal Simulators even better.