Graham Corporation employees complete the Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing (GD and T) class on August 24, 2023.
GCC’s Best Center assists Graham Corporation with request for a specialized Workforce Training Class
Within a four-month period, GCC’s Best Center was able to create a customized contract training class for Graham Corporation and 22 of their employees. The course, called Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing (GD and T), is geared towards reforming the company’s production process and eliminate waste and affords profitability.
Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing is a set of rules and symbols used on a drawing to communicate the intent of a design, centering on the function of the part.
“GD and T is a topic that is very important for cost effective manufacturing as well as making sure the design intent is met. However, it’s a language that not a lot of people have a firm grasp on,” says Adjunct Instructor Gary Renz, who taught the class.
He says once a company commercializes a project, they make sure it will go together and work as intended in the future. Renz says his class offers clarity and reduces some of the confusion and ambiguity of GD and T.
Renz was previously an Adjunct Instructor at RIT and is retired from Quality Vision International in Rochester. The company designs and builds precision metrology systems for inspection and quality control. He also worked at Newport Corporation and prior to that, he worked 27 years at Kodak in Rochester.
“We have people who are a few months in at Graham, as well as decades in at Graham, everything from senior project engineers to welders who use specifications.”
Cory Green, Workforce Development Training Specialist at GCC’s Best Center, says for this particular section and industry it’s the first-time a class like this was offered at GCC.
Funding for the course was procured through SUNY and Workforce Development funds, with the first session held on August 14th and the last session on August 24th. Classes were held in four-hour long sessions three days a week. Green says Graham Corporation also assisted by providing paid training for their employees while paying them their match that they would earn on site in a production environment.
“This is just one of those landmark cases where we get to go into something new, which strengthens our overall focus as an institution. Through SUNY, we came to this project and speaking with Graham, who has a very similar vision, that this would be a demonstration project.”
Green says that all the information, resources and curriculum will be shared within the SUNY infrastructure and will be available to other Workforce Development programs in other parts of New York State and the region as higher education continues to support programs that promote career and technical trades as opposed to the typical higher education initiatives offered at most colleges.
“With Graham committing to sending so many of their engineering and manufacturing team to this training, we are extremely optimistic that they will be able to affect real positive change within their organization at a much more rapid pace than the average company.”
Renz says the group of students from Graham Corportation really wanted to learn while attending class.
“There is no question, this was an outstanding class. These were 4-hour classes over 6 days. The attentiveness was outstanding. It was a lot of material. The biggest challenge here is we had students with a widely varied skill and mix of experience with GD and T, but it’s pretty universal. A lot of people understand abstractly what it means and what it can do, but the actual application has a lot of complexities and nuances that hopefully this course helped resolve.”
Adjunct Instructor Gary Renz handing out course completion certificates on August 24, 2023