Get To Know CI’s Growing Online Training Program

Step foot in the Cincinnati Incorporated facility in Harrison, Ohio and you’ll see a whole lot of manufacturing goodness. A multitude of machines out on the floor, plenty of hard-working people doing what they do best and lots of showroom, office and classroom space.

A couple of those classrooms are specifically for press brake and laser training. Pre-pandemic, the rooms were filled with people from up to 12 different companies. Six software simulators let attendees interact with CI’s proprietary software, customized based on the machine model. After the classroom portion was done, the class would move to the showroom to work on test parts. 

Now, of course, things have changed. Travel is limited and best practices mandate that we keep our distance. But necessity is the mother of invention! In the first half of 2020, we took our machine training online, and we haven’t looked back. 

“I remember being scheduled to go to a customer to teach a two-day bend simulation offline programming course,” said Eric Mercon, Press Brake Training Specialist at CI. “But when travel started being restricted, I offered a discounted rate to do the training class virtually. It went better than I would have thought.”

Since the offline training course is 100% off the machine, it wasn’t much of a challenge to teach it remotely (the training we can teach remotely includes fundamentals, safety and offline programming). A webinar was created, attendees all gathered in their conference room and Eric rearranged his classroom at CI to use a projected screen with one camera as well as a screen capture through the webinar. 

“We had two computers running, and I moved back and forth so they could see me teaching at a whiteboard as well as me on my computer,” Eric said. “We did the full two-day course almost exactly the way I’d have done it if I had traveled there. Shortly after that, Matt [Garbarino, Marketing Director at CI] suggested web-based training with our 4-hour press brake operator class.”

“It was pretty obvious that because of business conditions and customer demand, our training programs had to evolve,” Garbarino said. “The training webinars we did in the past were very successful, and they allowed us to engage and train in a way we hadn’t done before. Those webinars confirmed that we had to stick with it and perfect it.”

One of the perks of the webinar format is attendance. Our in-person classroom training maxes out at 12 seats per session, but the Bend Simulation training webinar had over 200 people in attendance. To reach that amount in person, our training specialists would need to spend six months in the field.

\If your team could use some software and machine training to get the most out of your CI equipment, visit our dedicated training page. The revamped online training is further proof that we at CI are dedicated to our customers, always doing our best to give them tools and resources they need to be successful.