/ industry insight
Teaching: One of the Best Ways to Learn
Gary Fraley, of East Kentucky Power Cooperative, is well acquainted with GE’s Air Filtration workshops. He’s told us that our fabric filtration seminars help new-hires better understand operations, and he’s sent a dozen colleagues to the sessions over the years. For return participants, Gary recommends the sessions as refreshers to stay on top of technology and improve dust collection performance.After 40 years in industrial filtration, we continually gain insights from Gary and customers like him. Meaningful interactions in seminars, webinars, and on-site training sessions help us see what’s going on in our customers’ operations. Our expertise is shaped by understanding their challenges, pain points, what works, and what doesn’t. That knowledge is critical to boosting our value as a trusted supplier.
• Customers teach us what’s important to them. A chemical industry customer switched to our pleated filters with ePTFE membrane along with a clean-on-demand system and quickly shifted from using three compressors to one. When their associated energy consumption costs dropped by more than $10,000 per year as a result, we recognized that the value formula is more than filter life + efficiency; it also includes the significant factor of energy savings. Understanding that helps us better communicate about total R.O.I.
• Customers teach us about new challenges. The economic environment of the past few years resulted in more down time, especially for plants serving construction-related industries. One potential outcome of lower production demand is additional system shut-down and start-up cycles. While many fundamentals of dust collection are unchanged, a five-fold increase in webinar attendance has influenced what we emphasize. Because of the recent experiences of customers, we’ve placed more focus on techniques for responding to changes in their plant operating conditions.
• Customers also teach us how to be better trainers. Seminar participants can include everyone from plant managers, to environmental engineers, to maintenance, to purchasing—and beginners to seasoned professionals. We learned from customers that sessions must be adapted for varied audiences. By including educational expertise when designing programs, we continually adjust workshop delivery to help make sure everyone who attends takes away practical, worthwhile information.
Ongoing input from customers’ real-life experiences refreshes our seminars, virtual webinars, on-site customer training and the spectrum of insights we can offer. By being students while we teach, we become better innovators who can deliver better solutions.
