VIRTUAL TECH IN A CRISIS DELIVERS EXPERT TEXTILE TRAINING ACROSS THE GLOBE WITH AVA CAD CAM

AVA CAD CAM been giving free e-training sessions to all customers during ‘lock down’ and will be including more free sessions with all of our Development Plans and lease renewals for the rest of 2020.

A New Take on ‘ECO’ Textile Design and Printing - Where Expert Training Delivers Virtual Rewards

Guest Article Written By Nick Langford MD of AVA CAD CAM

I’m sure that ‘the ECO question’ – What we are all going to do about halting global warming and the progressive destruction of our planet? – has been gradually creeping up the agenda for all of us?

AVA CAD/CAM has been no exception to this. In the past couple of years discussions with large textile and fashion printers and retailers have increasingly focused on what we can do to help them reduce waste and improve their environmental footprint.

At one level, this typically involves improving the profiling of production printing (rotary screen and/or digital) so that the whole (digital) design creation and approval process is based on more accurate/realistic previews (on screen and digitally printed) of what the final, bulk printed, product will look like.

This results in less on-press strike off attempts to match the approved (usually digitally printed) target, which in turn means significant reductions in lead times and pollution and in wastage of labour, press time, machine time, fabric and dyes and chemicals.

Many buyers don’t even realise that mills are often averaging more than ten attempts to hit their approved targets. Reliable (digital) remote approval procedures can save further air miles and expensive people’s time.

But the Coronavirus disaster has alerted us to a less visible, but equally valuable, way of reducing the environmental footprint of both AVA and our customers.

AVA is a very people focussed business. Although we have some outstanding proprietary software technology, we are well aware that any technology (software especially) is only as good as the people using it.

That’s why we spend even more money training and supporting our customer/users than we do on developing the software. Technology (our own and that of third parties with whom we interface) is evolving faster and faster on shorter and shorter development cycles. AVA provides all of its customers with two major releases a year which incorporate dozens of new features (many of them user inspired) as well as new third-party technologies (new operating systems, digital print RIPs, interfaces to new 3D scanners and spectrophotometers etc etc). All of this means that user training shouldn’t be seen as a one-off exercise. We encourage customers to embrace the ‘Life-Long Learning’ philosophy which we share with all our own employees – ensuring that people remain motivated and excited by new challenges and are constantly acquiring new knowledge and skills.

All of which may be very good, BUT it did mean that, on an average day in 2019, two thirds of our workforce would be jetting around the world visiting customers. COVID 19 obviously put a stop to all that, but it has made us realise just how effective direct e-training (via a live link using Zoom or similar software) can be.

We have always had other forms of digital training and support. AVA Assist is a web enabled interactive support system – incorporating screenshots, video clips, tips and tricks etc which is accessed directly from the software and replaced the traditional printed ‘software manual’ a long time ago. To this we recently added ‘AVA TV which provides a variety of detailed on-line tutorials (in various languages) which users can view at their leisure. Most of our training and support, however, is, necessarily, highly customised.

No two AVA customers or users will be trying to do exactly the same thing, in exactly the same environment, with exactly the same degree of prior knowledge and experience. So, every AVA training session is preceded by a planning meeting in which the AVA trainer and the trainee discuss background experience, exactly what problems the customer is currently encountering, what the biggest productivity ‘wins’ would be etc. etc. The actual training session can then be highly focussed on the particular needs of that customer/user. And all of this almost invariably took place face to face. Either the customer travelled to Macclesfield in England (in order to escape the inevitable distractions of his or her normal working environment) or an AVA trainer travelled to visit them on location in the USA, Brazil, China or wherever. Although this was very nice (it’s always good to press the flesh and cement good working relationships over a meal and a beer or two after work), it was rather unproductive (many hours wasted travelling) and polluting (many air and road miles involved).

The current epidemic has forced us to re-evaluate all of this.

I’m sure there will still be occasions on which our physical presence on site with customers is both necessary and desirable and (once travel restrictions are lifted) face to face visits will resume. But, having been forced to hone both the planning and the delivery of our customised ‘e-training sessions’ during the epidemic, we are sure that, on the majority of occasions the trainee will now get the same (or better) quality of training on-line as they would have done face to face.

And the great news is that, as well as doing a little bit to help save the planet, this new way of doing things is also ECOnomically friendly.

As well as avoiding the obvious travel and accommodation costs involved in face to face training, e-training is hugely more productive for both trainers and trainees who don’t waste time travelling. This means that we can deliver more hours of actual focussed training and support to our customers at lower cost.

We’ve been giving free e-training sessions to all our customers during ‘lock down’ and will be including more free sessions with all of our Development Plans and lease renewals for the rest of 2020.

So, hopefully, at least one good thing will have come out of the tragedy of the epidemic.