By transferring some of its ‘Engineering Kompetenz’ skills to the eight apprentices, “Walter’s in-depth tooling expertise has given a massive boost to the youngsters’ production engineering knowledge base”, says Olympus Engineering’s quality and technical manager Will Mitchell. “Furthermore, all eight received a Certificate of Competence in the jointly-designed Fundamental Manufacturing Economics & Cutting Tool Application Programme.”
Walter GB has been supplying the 157-employee, £16 million turnover business with a range of tooling for some time. Indeed, for the past 12 years, Walter has been the company’s main tooling integrator, an arrangement that has included the provision of onsite tooling vending machines.
As a result of close co-operation between the companies – and Olympus Engineering’s strategy for an ongoing, ever-improving apprenticeship programme – Mitchell discussed with Walter GB’s regional applications engineer, Gary Wilson, the potential for additional training in all aspects of tooling. Subsequently, Wilson and the apprentices spent 30 minutes a week over a three-month period covering subjects such as manufacturing economics, the fundamentals of metal cutting and cutting-tool applications, as well as discussing a production environment case study.
Says Mitchell: “We felt it would be very worthwhile to add in-depth tooling knowledge to our apprentices’ curriculum, which traditionally involves day release at a local college, along with comprehensive in-house training on our shop floor. In addition, we have regular working lunches where we discuss business activities such as finance and customer management.
“Together with Walter GB, we came up with a focused programme of tooling-related modules that have clearly made a big difference, giving the apprentices an insight not only to the basics of tooling but an invaluable awareness about solving production problems using different machining and tooling strategies.”
