The Benefits of Live Training

When you get a detailed quote for fully-customized GD&T training, the price might trigger some initial sticker shock. Live training, whether through online webinars or on-site sessions, could cost anywhere from 4-12 grand. That’s not even counting the “true costs” of pulling your team off the floor for 2-4 days, as we explained in our article on the ROI of GD&T Training, which could add $80,000 or more in lost productivity.

Customized GD&T training requires a serious investment. But once you understand the value of the benefits you unlock through live training, it’s much easier to justify this investment and even achieve an ROI that saves your company hundreds of thousands of dollars—not to mention time, which is even more precious, or your reputation, which is priceless.

If you’re reluctant to commit the funds for live instructor-led GD&T training, consider the enormous value you’ll gain through the four main benefits below.

Real-Time Expert Guidance

Live training gives your team direct access to an ASME-certified instructor with expert knowledge of Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing. The value of having a specialist guide you through these seemingly complex concepts can be tremendous because it saves you multitudes of time trying to figure it out yourself. Tapping into the wisdom of an expert can give your team a huge advantage in learning GD&T.

It’s one thing to hire an instructor who knows the ASME Y14.5-2018 standard inside and out, but memorizing hundreds of pages of rules won’t do your team much good on the production floor. Look for instructors whose expertise is backed by real-life experience in the field. Instructors who know what it’s like to design, manufacture, and inspect parts can provide practical, realistic advice for incorporating GD&T into your operation.

For example, our team combines 30+ years of engineering experience with a working knowledge of GD&T standards in action. This gives us a realistic approach to GD&T training because we know that the “proper” thing to do according to the rules isn’t always the “right” thing for your company to do. We know that throwing a bunch of unnecessary symbols onto your engineering prints will only confuse your suppliers. Based on this real industry know-how, we show companies the best practices as well as the pitfalls surrounding GD&T instead of just regurgitating the rules.

Customized for Your Production

If you’ve ever searched for GD&T books online, you might notice that most of the negative reviews gripe about the lack of real-life examples. Similarly, a common complaint about typical GD&T training is that most courses use oversimplified examples of basic geometric shapes. It can be tough to translate these lessons to the real world, since most engineers make parts more complex than a plain box.

That’s why customization is an invaluable advantage of live GD&T training. Training is much more meaningful when it’s relevant to the parts your team sees every day. Working with familiar prints from your own production line is the best way to give your team the confidence and competence to apply GD&T to their daily workflow.

While some companies charge extra to incorporate your drawings into their curriculum, we believe that GD&T lessons should be built around you—addressing your manufacturing challenges and illustrating solutions using your prints.

Our process starts with a pre-consultation call to learn about specific obstacles and opportunities in your operation, so we can design our live training to meet your needs. After signing an NDA, we customize our presentations using your prints, and modify our materials throughout the course as we gauge your team’s progress.

As a result of customized live training, you get tailored expertise that’s laser-focused on your needs, so you can focus on the aspects of GD&T that will make the biggest difference in your operation instead of wasting time learning obscure symbols you’ll never use.

More Value in Less Time

By customizing GD&T training around your needs, instructors can cut straight to the point and pack more meaningful lessons into a shorter timeframe. Instead of trying to cover every single rule and symbol over the span of three or four days, we condense our material to focus on the applications you’ll encounter most often in your operation. By doing this, we squeeze more value into two days than some companies deliver in four. That’s fewer days of juggling schedules to coordinate training, and more days of running your production line instead.

But this doesn’t mean you’re missing out on an extra day or two of training; quite the contrary. The only thing you’re missing out on is the time wasted by an instructor droning on about rare GD&T symbols you’ll probably never use. When GD&T training is highly customized to focus on the realities of your production process, you’ll be able to absorb and retain more practical knowledge in less time.

If you think about the true cost of pulling people off the production floor, an extra day of training could cost an additional $40,000 in lost productivity—assuming each employee generates about $250/hour on the line, and you put 20 people through 8 hours of training ($250 x 20 x 8). By streamlining the curriculum into two days of tightly focused training, you can recover that lost time, get your team back to work faster, and start seeing the benefits of GD&T on your production line sooner.

Targeted Problem-Solving

The underlying goal of GD&T training is not just learning how to use symbols correctly on your engineering prints—because you could “correctly” load a bunch of junk onto a drawing that, though technically right, will just confuse the next person who has to read it. Your ultimate objective should be learning to use this engineering language effectively to communicate clearly throughout every step of the production process.

In other words, there’s a big difference between just learning GD&T and learning how to use it to your advantage. Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing itself is not the solution, but you can leverage it to:

• Eliminate arguments and miscommunications about a print
• Minimize scrap parts and deviations by providing clear instructions
• Prevent production downtime by getting everyone on the same page
• Avoid expensive supplier disputes and litigation costs
• Protect your reputation by preventing unnecessary errors

When you invest in live, customized training that’s tailored to your company’s needs, you expect to get results that directly address your challenges—whether you’re facing a combination of the problems listed above or trying to prevent them altogether. You expect your team to leave the class equipped to apply GD&T in ways that noticeably improve your production.

While instructors can’t promise to deliver a certain dollar-value of savings as a direct result of GD&T training, they can certainly commit to helping you tackle real-world challenges instead of just reciting standards. The way we look at it, if our instructors aren’t actively engaged in helping your team solve specific manufacturing problems, we’re failing. It’s like teaching you how to load a gun without showing you how to shoot.

Maximize Your ROI with Live GD&T Training

Although live, customized GD&T training requires a sizable investment—especially considering the value of your employees’ time—it can deliver substantial savings in return.

To calculate the ROI of live training, weigh your investment against these invaluable benefits:

• How much time and confusion you save by tapping into the expertise of a dedicated GD&T specialist who can guide your team based on real-world experience and practical applications.
• How much more knowledge you gain by tailoring your training to address your specific needs and incorporate your actual drawings, instead of expecting employees to translate arbitrary examples into real-world production settings.
• How much faster your team can return to work and start applying GD&T to improve communication, instead of wasting time memorizing standards they’ll never use.
• How many costly problems you can prevent by leveraging live GD&T training to troubleshoot manufacturing errors, deviations, supplier disputes, scrap parts, and downtime.

Training shouldn’t just teach you how to apply GD&T to your drawings, but how to incorporate it into every step of your production process so you can make improvements that impact your bottom line.

Contact us to see how live GD&T training can streamline your production and boost your bottom line