Tell Us About a Typical Day.
Jared: My typical day is getting projects out the door, making sure everything is properly done and there are no problems with the units that we work on. I usually specialize in the after-treatment of our units; a lot of the cleaning, the intake ports and stuff like that. I kind of jump around the shop, too, on various things. It just depends on the day and what’s in the shop at the moment.
Some of the stuff we work with is really heavy. If we don’t have a jerk rope (shock-absorbing link for heavy lifts) at the time or somebody else is using it, you can worry about trying to lift by them yourself. Is this going to fall on me? Is it going to hurt me in any way? Am I going to get cut?
What Did You do Before Anvl?
Jared: Before Anvl came to the shop, we used paper. It has simple questions on it like, “What are your safety concerns?” and, “Are the batteries locked out?”
With Anvl, we actually take pictures of the battery now which documents that some techs forget to lock the batteries out. The questions are a lot better than previously what was on paper because you can actually have room to write out what the problem is, how you can fix it, and take pictures to show the problem too.
I’m not a tech savvy person, but when
I feel a little bit better about doing the job now than when it was written on a piece of paper. It actually makes me pay attention to what I’m doing and you’re able to take the pictures with it and you’re able to zoom in on things you wouldn’t be able to see just by taking a quick glance at it so you have an extra look if something you see is wrong. It holds us accountable.
On jobs that I am new with or things that I’ve only done once or twice it makes me feel a little bit better about doing it because it asks simple questions that you wouldn’t think of on a day to day basis and gives me all of the insights I need to go into that job and full understand what is happening.
Can You Share More About the Risk You Face Everyday?
At my old place, all we had were bottle jacks. That’s what we would use to lift up the trucks and we didn’t really have jack stands that would support the weight of a vehicle. We’d have to quickly get under there, do what we had to do and get out because it was unbalanced. If it wasn’t balanced correctly or something, it could have possibly fallen over.
We actually had an incident at one point where it came slid off the jack. Luckily, no one was under it but it did slide off the jack and we did have a problem and that’s when they were like, “Okay, well we need to get jack stands.” Jack stands to make it so if it falls, it’s not falling very far. It’s still supported in some way other than on a little three-inch platform on the axle.
Why is Safety a Priority for You?
I have a seven-month-old child that I would like to see every night. If I had continued [at my old place], at some point, I feel like I might have gotten hurt and or died and I wouldn’t be there for her. By using Anvl, this shop actually makes you think about what you are doing so that way you don’t get hurt and nothing bad happens to you so you can go to your family at night. It makes me a little bit better, think clearly on safety so I can go home and see my baby girl.
Having a tool like Anvl helps us all out because we’re all on the same page, they are all the same questions, we all see the same question every day. It makes us actually think about those questions so say another tech has a problem that this tech didn’t, we could communicate with each other and say, “Hey, what did you find issue here? How would you go about it?” That’s how I feel about it. You can communicate with the other technicians to figure out what could prevent that problem because we all see the same questions. With management, they feel a little bit more confident in us… because we’re actually paying attention. We’re not just going through pieces of paper and checking it off. We actually have to show what the problem is and how we could possibly prevent an injury from occurring.
The management feels more confident in us that we’re going to do the job properly and safely.
At first, they were in a dark on what safety precautions. If they can see the pictures that we take on equipment, then they’ll see, yeah, that was a safety hazard or no that wasn’t or even get involved and say, we could have done this to prevent this or that so I feel it has improved us in the shop and management in the office too.
Interested in learning more about how our technicians are using Anvl every day? Request a demo here.
