Training Day and Site Refresher

A training day was recently held for our crew at Casella Family Brands. Overseen by Sandeep, CFB is is a set of complex sites, scattered over four states, all controlled from the Yenda site in Yenda NSW. Several issues have been identified and the training day aimed to deal with a lot of the issues.  The training day follows on from the annual fire training conducted annually by CFB for all its staff and security. 

A large part of the job involves monitoring various winemaking equipment outside of normal "production" hours. This includes various pumps, chilling equipment, filtering equipment as well other subsidary equipment such as drainage pumps. This becomes extra useful over holiday breaks when the winery shuts down and essentially leaves it to the security team to handle such issues.  It can be critical that certain machines are shut down in the correct sequence to avoid spoiling the wine and that taps, gases etc are dealt with in the appropiate manner. CFB ustilises the latest in a lot of wimemaking techniques so there is always new equipment to learn to operate as well as 2000+ wine tanks as well as beer, spirit and water tanks.

Once a year or as needed the team is assembled and put thru a CFB Cellar Training course for Security. Whilst it shows our training of new staff is about 95% comprehensive, there is always something new or improved that they all can learn. It is a good chance to also catch up with anyquestions they may have.

A good example is a particular filtering machine that can be shut down two different ways. One method generally takes 5 minutes to fix and restart whilst the other method takse 45-60 minutes to achieve the same result. Doing it the first way improves productivity for the cellar staff and a cost saving for the winery.

The day also included a question and answer with Winery management giving us a heads up of what is to come, and squashing any rumours.

The crew were shouted to a lunch at a local restaurant and finished the day off with a tour of various other sites in the area owned by CFB that they monitor by CCTV 24/7 but have never seen in the flesh. This aims to give them a better undertstanding of what they are watching and how to deal with various issues that arise. 

Overall the day was well recieved, a lot was learn't by all, even the long term staff.