Wolverhampton City Council

Worcester Bosch and Wolverhampton City Council have developed a partnership over several years which will see over 1800 boilers fitted year on year until 2008. These boilers are currently SEDBUK Band D but will change up to SEDBUK Band A as part of the partnership in time for the industry Part L regulation changes. Both Worcester Bosch and Wolverhampton City Council intend using the partnership ethos as a way to approach the smooth transition over to condensing SEDBUK Band A technologies. Ensuring the efficient and correct installation, handover and aftercare of these boilers remains their first priority.

No one local authority is the same, and so partnerships are designed to suit each partnerships bespoke needs. However, one aspect of Worcester Bosch’s training initiative plays a part in almost every partnership - ‘Worcester Bosch’s commitment to providing boiler training’. Matt McGann, technical specification manager at Worcester Bosch says it’s not seasonally expedient or cost effective to take a local authority’s direct labour team, or sub-contractors, off-site to the Worcester Bosch training Academy. He says: “Training can take up considerable time, albeit well spent, and in the meantime boilers need to be installed and commissioned. Our mobile training unit includes working examples of our systems, allowing training to happen alongside the actual installation of boilers by sub contractors and local authority direct labour. The mobile engineers work with installers on-site for as long as needed and are often able to give valuable focussed feedback on site issues or conditions, in this way sometimes solving potential issues preventively before they arise.” The mobile training unit not only helps train installers on the boilers but also on the key areas that are the most frequent cause of installation difficulties. These include flues and air supply, gas and oil supplies, electrical wiring and controls, and, system design and flushing. These four areas are among the key issues that Worcester Bosch want to communicate as part of their preventative problem training programme, helping installers to anticipate problems and try and prevent them.

But for Wolverhampton City Council’s team of over 60 direct labour engineers, Worcester Bosch’s training will also especially focus on the areas of handover, trouble shooting and maintenance. Even though Wolverhampton City Council’s sub-contractors are on-hand obviously , out of hours, there are reduced engineers resources. Therefore the onus is on Wolverhampton City Council and Worcester Bosch to make sure the direct labour team are able to efficiently fix the ‘out of hours’ reported faults.

The concept is that for the five year warranty period, Worcester Bosch carry out its standard same day/next day service package during the week. Then, once trained, the Wolverhampton direct labour force, cover all call outs in and out of warranty during evenings and weekends. Truly a union of working together in the interests of better service to the householder.

The on-site training will run in three year cycles with a quarterly review to ensure the right knowledge is being shared and skills gap being filled. Worcester Bosch hope that by year two at least fifty per cent of the direct labour team will be confident in their ability to trouble shoot and fix any faults, and that one hundred per cent will be confident by year four. Worcester Bosch’s ultimate aim is for the direct labour team not to confuse fault finding and maintaining a good first fix rate with finding a fault, over a period of several visits. Matt McGann adds, “We don’t want to encourage them to approach fault finding by the systematic replacement of parts, which is not an uncommon method, and unacceptable to tenants who end up waiting too long to have the issue properly resolved. Indeed, ensuring this does not happen is a core part of the partnership with Wolverhampton City Council. If we can in the long term produce a first fix rate which is compatible with that of our own in-house engineers then the time and resource investment will have been worthwhile.”

As Wolverhampton City Council’s direct labour force also installs on boiler changes and system changes, it was agreed to schedule a programme of ‘installation and commissioning’ training at the Academy which trains engineers in four areas – flues and air supply, gas and flow rate, system design, flushing and commissioning and wiring, controls and programmer set-up.

Wolverhampton City Council is paying a fee as part of its partnership to have a five year warranty on each boiler. This fee includes the cost of Worcester Bosch making available a stock of spare parts to the direct labour team for repairs. But the stock of parts can only be released when 50 per cent of the training is complete. Once in operation, there will be a clearly designed process which creates a measurable audit trail for both parties to assess the training needs of the partnership.

Matt McGann explains more. “Obviously this is not to catch out installers but to encourage more care in troubleshooting and ensure the right kind of training is given . The mobile training unit is invaluable in this, because it allows us to demonstrate to the direct labour team, the commonality of parts between our different boilers. There is therefore a smaller inventory to learn, more time can be spent on mastering fault finding, resulting in a direct labour team confident of making a precise diagnosis, and not content to change every part until the boiler works again.”