Company Profile: Eaton – Training the Hydraulics Industry

Keeping staff safe in industrial settings is top of the priority list for companies around the world. This is true in almost any setting, but especially so in the hydraulics industry, where the pressures and flow create risk. Ask any heavy-duty mobile vehicle operator or an oil rig crew member, and you’ll immediately hear that it’s risky business.

With a substantial focus on training, Eaton sees companies – original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), distributors, and end-users – making steady investments in training.

“We’re finding more and more companies are realizing the immediate benefits of training,” said Jeff Finch, senior vice president and general manager, Hydraulics Global Products and Markets, Eaton. “Properly trained hydraulics personnel are essential to helping those they interact with achieve safety, reliability, and productivity. There is no margin for error when it comes to hydraulic technology.”

The company strives to help distributors, employees, OEMs, and end-users train staff, including salespeople, maintenance and technical employees, and engineers. Through its Hydraulics Group Training Services, the staff brings a total of 140 years of experience in hydraulics and education, making the company’s programs an industry standard. Eaton has had a long-standing track record in providing the industry with training, tracing its program roots to 1945.

In addition to product and technology courses available, as well as the annual Distributor Meeting (EDM) held recently in Orlando, Training Services representatives offered seminars from eLearning development to “The Cardinal Sins (the dos and don’ts) of Hydraulics.” Alongside Training Services at EDM were product managers, engineers, and market personnel packing nearly 8,000 hours of training into 60 workshops for authorized Eaton distributors over the three-day conference.

All training sessions bring together experts with deep application and product knowledge to solve tough industry challenges in new and different ways. Training Services offers customers more than 30 courses, including technical courses ranging from basic to advanced and product courses on a wide range of fluid conveyance and power, motion, and control topics. Some of the company’s offerings are highlighted below.

Instructor Symposium

This course, designed for instructors and educators who teach in the fluid power industry, underscores the importance of not only training channel partners, but also the next generation of fluid power professionals. The Instructor Symposium exposes professionals in both academic and commercial training operations to the latest in emerging hydraulic technologies and teaching methods.

By taking the unique angle of teaching the teachers, this event helps drive positive growth in this ever-changing industry, and ensures that the students of the instructors attending the symposium are taught the best and most recent information. Attendees of this three-day course, offered annually at the company’s training center in Maumee, Ohio, engage in lectures and hands-on lab exercises, covering topics such as leaks, causes, cures, and hose routing; systemic contamination control; logical troubleshooting; vehicle drive calculations, aeration and cavitation, thread identification and tube bending; and the cardinal sins of hydraulics.

After attending his second-annual Hydraulics Instructor Symposium, Bill Hotchkiss, CFPAI, CFPS, technical training manager at SunSource Fluid Power Distribution, deemed the educational value of the session “immeasurable,” saying, “If there are fluid power instructors not attending this annual event, they are missing the boat.”

Pro-FX and IEC 61131-3 Certification

Certification options are available at the end of many of the product training sessions, including the Pro-FX™ and IEC 61131-3 course. Electrohydraulic system designers find this course helpful in understanding the full range of capabilities offered by the Pro-FX control software, based on the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) 61131-3 compliant CoDeSys version 3.5 integrated development environment. Learning through hands-on programs on the actual hardware, attendees get a thorough overview of the programming software, application controllers, and displays, as well as information on the debugging and visualization capabilities available. This certification process, recently updated with the launch of Eaton’s new Pro-FX controllers and display, is currently available several times per year at the company’s Hydraulics Group headquarters in Eden Prairie, Minn., and will be available in China and Europe starting in 2014.

Post-Warranty Wind Training

These training sessions, focused uniquely on educating distributors to be successful in the post-warranty wind market, are new to Eaton and currently in the pilot program stage. In addition to an existing Wind Turbine Fundamental Hydraulics course, which targets technical personnel, the Post-Warranty Wind program includes an online webinar that provides distributors with valuable Wind Power Operations and Maintenance (O&M) market data. In addition, an overview on the sales tools made available on the Post-Warranty Wind website equips distributors with valuable data and information they will need to successfully approach prospective post-warranty wind customers who can benefit from the supply of Eaton products and solutions.

These and dozens of other training sessions are available to help employees, distributors, OEMs, and end-users succeed in their varied hydraulics endeavors. The time and financial investment required to properly train and certify personnel is easily justified by the quick return in the form of reduced downtime.

• company profile
• eaton
• hydraulics
• safety
• training