The Importance of Training in The Linings & Coatings Industry

Companies can spend thousands of pounds on state-of-the-art application equipment. The customer can request the best lining material on the market. An all singing all dancing promise of 25 + years Warranty withstands the harshest of environments. All this may be true, but so many of these systems fail earlier than stated, this is due to human error 95% of the time. Why do we need an inspector to check the work when this should be part of your own quality control as a linings & coatings applicator? Ok failed lining systems give others work to repair but costs the consumer the money and unnecessary downtime.

Systems can fail from; Under curing, poor coverage, misses around nuts and bolts, wrong product, water in lining material, poor preparation, not enough adhesion & lack of quality control upon completion.

The solution? It’s all about training. We spend our whole lives learning new things, whether it’s not putting the wheelie bin out the night before and the bin men turning up earlier than expected or we take that gamble of not checking the screen wash on the car on a wet wintry day.

We all make mistakes FACT, so we need to be prepared that when applicators apply these liners, they are going to forget something they are going to speed things up to knock of earlier off-site on a Friday. Having been on site, worked the job applied the linings & coatings, I know for a fact that pressure is the biggest problem. 500sqm you have 7 days to grit blast, clean the storage tank, vacuum the tank. And apply 2 coats of solvent free Epoxy with 4 Operatives on the project. The person quoting has stated yes, he will blast that in a day no problem then straight on with this and so on. The Site workers are going to be stressed, they will curse the managements name. They certainly will not do what they have been taught to do, this is how the human mind works!

So, from a managerial view we need to think first a foremost that the most important part of linings & coatings application is doing a perfect job by the book and as stated by the product manufacturers. We need to consider this in our pricing, our timescale to do the project, and allow for downtime & equipment breakdowns. We need to allow the applicators the time and the resources to do the job perfectly.

You can send your applicators on ICATS, you can make them sign a paper to insist they have stripe coated or applied the coating to a wet film thickness of 600 microns. But if you don’t give your applicators the time to implement all they have learned or been taught to do, you will not get the desired result you have specified to your customer.

To sum up, my view is the best way to train your Staff is allowing them the time to put into practice what they have been taught, it works for SLS so it can work for you!