18 Fleet Maintenance | November/December 2017
WAL-MART TRANSPORTATION
TECHNICIAN COMPETITION
By Erica Schueller, Editor-in-Chief
“Walmart has been conducting some
form of a technician competition since
the mid-1990s, and has evolved to the
program we run today,” Eric Benge,
Senior Regional Maintenance Manager,
Walmart Transportation LLC, explains.
Walmart Transportation is a subsidiary
of retail company Walmart Stores, Inc.
and manages and maintains the company’s
private trucking fleet operations.
Benge says the competition started after
employee requests to conduct some
form of evaluation, and compare performance
and knowledge among peers.
“This group is naturally competitive and
saw the opportunity to showcase their skills
in a friendly competition,” Benge says.
All technicians within the company are
welcome to participate in the skills competition.
Starting at the local level, the top
two winners of each shop advance to a
divisional competition, Benge says. The
top 10 winners for each division then go
on to compete in the company’s national
competition. Walmart Transportation also
encourages all competing technicians to
participate in their respective state trucking
association championships as well.
The national event is organized by the
Corporate Fleet Maintenance Team, while
local competitions are conducted by the
respective Service Shop Leadership teams.
Winners for each round are determined
by their performance based on a written
ASE test and hands-on skills challenges.
“We work with our suppliers and vendor
partners to develop a technician event that
is relevant to the equipment and challenges
they work on every day,” Benge says.
Conducting company-wide technician skills
competitions “creates an environment to
measure skill level, recognize top performers
and identify training opportunities
for continuous improvement,” Benge
confirms. “It encourages and rewards
self-development and helps build relationships
with our vendor partners.”
Measured success with organizing
technician skills competitions
A number of organizations provide real-life examples of
company-wide skills competitions for their employees.
There are a number of approaches shops can take when conducting a
skills competition for their technicians. Organizations such as TA Truck
Service, Walmart and Ryder System have a proven track record when it
comes to conducting successful technician skills competitions.
TA TRUCK SERVICE TOP
TECH CHALLENGE
By the TA Truck Service Training Team
Established in 2014, the TA Truck Service Top
Tech Challenge is an internal skills competition
designed for the most adept TA Truck Service
technicians within the company to compete.
TA Truck Service is the maintenance and
service division of TA and Petro Stopping
Centers, a full-service travel center.
The Top Tech Challenge incentivizes obtaining
new skills and certifications through competition
and prizes, and gives top talent in the
field the chance to be recognized by employees
at the home office, while simultaneously
preparing them to compete externally.
With the benefits come hard work. Planning an
internal competition can be a huge undertaking.
At TA Truck Service it happens over the course
of about six months. From deciding competitor
qualifications and how many individuals
are invited to compete, to determining what
hands-on and written stations to include to
best prepare the technicians for the national
competition each year, the training team has a
considerable job planning the annual event.
Each of the 20 competitors must be an ASE
Certified Master Technician, and must be one
of the top scorers on a 100-question ASE-style
written exam. Each year the training team finetunes
the stations included in the competition
and how they are scored. Having TA Truck
Service representatives serving on TMC, running
» The full team from TA Truck Service
during the 2017 TMCSuperTech
Technician Skills Competition.
Photo courtesy of TA Truck Service
a station at TMCSuperTech and staying at the
forefront of new diesel repair and maintenance
technology helps make these decisions easier.
At the Top Tech Challenge competition, the technicians’
scores from each station are compiled
to determine the winners, who are recognized
at a banquet following the two-day competition.
Along with winners of state technician competitions
from that year, the top finishers at Top
Tech Challenge comprise the TMCSuperTech
team representing TA Truck Service.
The positive impact of internal competitions
reaches further than TMCSuperTech.
In the past four years, TA Truck Service has won
22 individual TMCSuperTech station titles and
had multiple top finishers in the overall event.
This performance can be attributed to the success
of the TA Truck Service Top Tech Challenge.
For 2017, TA Truck Service had 10 top three
overall finishes and 35 station wins from the
state diesel mechanic competitions leading
up to TMCSuperTech. These technicians
work hard to balance their full-time positions
with training and traveling to compete.
The excitement of the competition and the
notoriety of the winners inspire technicians in
the bays to pursue additional training and certification,
and to provide more expertise to when
working with professional drivers every day.