Flexospan - A WEDnetPA Success Story!

A great success story coming from the WEDnetPA partner - Clarion University featuring participating company: Flexospan.

Since 1969, Flexospan Steel Buildings, Inc. has manufactured commercial and industrial steel roofing and siding products at our location in Sandy Lake, Pennsylvania.  The Company is known for specializing in hard to find heavy gauges and paint finishes that will stand up in extremely corrosive and abrasive atmospheres.  Flexospan has a self-storage facility division that can provide complete material packages for entrepreneurs beginning or adding on to self-storage facilities.  The Company also manufactures complete custom and pre-engineered steel buildings as well as structural components and accessories.  Because of the specialized skills of our workforce, we are able to respond to unique manufacturing requirements and to deliver an outstanding level of customer service that has been the backbone of our company since its inception.

In our industry, it is essential to offer solutions and options to our customers in their metal roofing and siding projects.  We provide first-rate training to our staff to give them the tools they need for these challenges.  Our registered engineering staff has undergone technical training on building design software specific to the products that we manufacture.  This targeted training has been a tremendous resource in allowing us to provide technical input and project options for our customers.  We have recognized that in addition to our high standards for manufacturing and our technical abilities, excellent customer service is essential to our continued success.  Flexospan’s customer service training is designed specifically for our Company and the industry we serve.  It provides tremendous motivation for our experienced sales staff to continually strive in exceeding the expectations of the customer with regard to both the quality of the product and the customer support they receive.

Our Company’s experience with the WEDnet program has been EXCELLENT in all respects.  It has been a real pleasure working closely with our partner organization, Clarion University, from whom we have continually received outstanding support and guidance through the entire WEDnet process.   We would encourage other companies to contact Clarion University for more information on this tremendous training opportunity.

Submitted by:

Lauri Frederick, President

United Envelope - A Featured Success Story!

A great success story coming from the WEDnetPA partner - East Stroudsburg University featuring participating company: United Envelope.

Our Company’s challenge is to find and train employees to work in our production areas and learn the envelope manufacturing equipment and processes.  Almost all applicants come to us with no knowledge of the envelope industry.  Some applicants have prior manufacturing experience and for others this would be their first work experience in manufacturing.  Therefore, we need to train virtually every new hire.

The type of training we need to provide is specialized based on the particular types of envelope manufacturing equipment that we have on our production floor.  Therefore, we need to do in-house training.  Our training and safety manager spends the first two weeks with every new hire and has a training process for those two weeks that involves hands-on training and classroom training. Types of training include – understanding the parts of an envelope; machinery safety such as guards, lock-out tag-out, and proper operation of the machine; quality inspection of the envelopes; packaging process; reading and working with job jackets; and PPE training.  He reviews daily processes, safety procedures, quality procedures, and more.  It is an expense to do such in-depth training, but our hope is that each new hire learns the business, remains with us and advances to other positions.  It is to their benefit and ours for them to have a full understanding of the work processes.

We heard about WEDnePA and contacted our local partner at East Stroudsburg University to see if it was a program that we could utilize.  What makes WEDnePA a perfect fit for us is that we can utilize our own trainer, even an in-house trainer.  We build a training plan to meet our objectives and WEDnetPA allows us to revise the plan if it becomes necessary during the contract year.  Submitting our invoice information as to training hours, reimbursement due, etc. is fairly easy.  The funds we receive from WEDnetPA allow us to do more training in other areas as it supplements the core training expense.  WEDnetPA is a program that helps employers to meet training needs and does so in a way that is not overly cumbersome to the employer.

Submitted to WEDnetPA by: Vicki Herman - HR Director

Weiler Corporation - A Featured Success Story!

A great success story coming from the WEDnetPA partner - East Stroudsburg University featuring participating company: Weiler Corporation .

Weiler Corporation had many issues with their original data warehouse.  Performance was very poor and data was inaccurate.  Most users developed some type of workaround to satisfy their information needs. This involved running production reports and mining some data from the data warehouse through predefined reports.  In order to produce the required information, the user would manually consolidate the data and use MS Access or MS Excel to present the information.  This involved many non-value added hours to produce limited information.

Approximately two years ago, Weiler made a decision to invest in a more robust data warehouse/business intelligence solution to mine and provide critical management information.  MicroStrategy was selected for business intelligence because of its robust ad hoc reporting capabilities.  When I joined Weiler in June 2011, the team was still working on the project without any implementations.  After reviewing the status and strategy, it became very clear that the team needed more formal training to move this project forward.

In August 2011, we abandoned the two year effort and engaged MicroStrategy.edu, to train the technical and user teams.  The skills taught by MicroStrategy.edu included architecting a data warehouse, MicroStrategy configuration, MicroStrategy administration, data modeling, project management, ETL (extract, transfer, load), best practices strategies, dashboard creation, power user training and web user training.  I am happy to report that we completed our first implementation November 5, 2011.  Users are already reporting tremendous time savings and more accurate information.  In addition to the user reports, we have one dashboard created.  WEDnetPA funds for training were critical in the education of our team and rapid achievement of our goals.

This success story was provided by: Donna Piccirilli