“The training facility in Knoxville, TN has a threefold purpose. We train all of the new Haas service technicians for Phillips Commercial and Phillips Federal. This can be anywhere from 4 to 6 weeks of training. Typically, it is one week a month for 4 to 6 months. Our second purpose is to provide update training to our current technicians. This training is driven by the 360 Teams. Once a Team has identified an area of needed training, we step in and provide that for them. The third purpose is to provide maintenance training to our customers. We have one week each month that is dedicated to customer training. Customers are trained on the same equipment and use the same procedures that are taught to our techs. The thing that sets us apart is the fact that we have the latest equipment as well as the older equipment to learn on. Our current inventory is 5 full machines and 5 partial pieces. We are most proud of the fact that there is no piece of this inventory we won’t disassemble for training. Almost no one in the industry has new equipment that can be disassembled for training. Not only can we provide system presentations but we follow that up by actually disassembling that system on a machine and providing real-world instruction. As for me, I’ve been working on Haas machines since 1992. The satisfaction of repairing a down machine has been replaced with the satisfaction of seeing new technicians learn a craft and come to the realization that only a handful of people are capable of being proficient at this difficult job. Watching our techs learn to put mechanical, electrical, and computer control theory together to troubleshoot machines is quite rewarding.”