“Our staffing is limited, so it’s a great support for us because we don't have to do training in house. Instead, we can partner with Francis Tuttle to help upskill our employees.” - Blake Lawson, Maintenance Manager for Anheuser-Busch’s Metal Container Corporation
Anheuser-Busch had several options for electrician positions come up due to retirements at its Metal Container Corporation (MCC) facility. They wanted to provide a path for current employees to train up for that role.
The corporation already had a longstanding relationship with Francis Tuttle Technology Center’s Workforce and Economic Development team. The customized training they developed together gives employees exactly what they need.
MCC is a mass manufacturing operation that makes between 30 and 40 million can lids a day, said Maintenance Manager Blake Lawson. The maintenance team performs routine machine maintenance and serves as a support arm for the operations team. The equipment is semi-autonomous, and if everything is working, people can press start and it runs. When the equipment is not working properly, the maintenance team troubleshoots problems and gets equipment back up and running if the operations team is unable to do so.
This is where the Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) and automation training comes in. The class equipped electricians with a fundamental understanding of logical diagrams and trees to allow them to troubleshoot equipment issues. While it was designed with new electricians in mind, it has also served as a refresher for those who have more knowledge.
Support Equipment Manager Zach Jones is one of the employees who completed the training. Jones’ class was a little more advanced and went in with some of the basic knowledge, but even so he said it was a great opportunity to refresh skills and learn new approaches.
“With programming, there’s so much you can learn, and you can do it in a million different ways,” Jones said. “For me, that class was learning different and easier ways to do the same function that I hadn’t yet learned. The other three guys who were in the class with me took pretty much the same thing of being able to learn new bits of information in the program itself and being able to apply it to make it work correctly.”
Lawson shared about another person who attended the class who has been with the company for about six years. He already utilized the programming software in his role, and the class showed him ways to be more efficient.
“By going through this class and understanding different ways to go about the same problem, he said something that used to take him two hours may now take him 15 minutes,” Lawson said. “It cuts down on the amount of time to do the task and gives him easier routes to get to the same destination.”
MCC operates 24 hours-a-day, with employees working three days on and three days off while rotating between days and nights every two months. This provided some scheduling challenges as Lawson didn’t want to leave teams without an electrician on days they were in training. He also wanted the employees to complete the class within a certain window so people wouldn’t lose track of where they were with the information.
However, Lawson said Francis Tuttle has been a great partner, and Consultant Meredith Chipman and Trainer Marshall Chipman were accommodating and worked closely with them to navigate the training schedule.
The class was two weeks long, with employees working from 6 a.m. to noon on Monday through Friday then attending class from 1 to 5 p.m. on Francis Tuttle’s Reno Campus. Twelve people completed the training, with four employees attending over three sessions.
Lawson said this training has been valuable for his team. The class provided employees with different and more efficient ways to manage their day-to-day tasks, which is especially valuable because of their current staffing limitations. It is also a way to demonstrate the company wants them to be successful, and Lawson added they are planning to offer an advanced level class next year.
“On the managerial side of things, it shows the technicians and operators that we’re investing in them and are trying to give them to tools it takes to effectively accomplish their goals on the team,” Lawson explained. “I think having an opportunity like this speaks volumes, and hopefully that’s recognized.”