Hi Willem and Others, Please be aware that my answers below are my own views and may or may not reflect the reasoning of the rest of the committee. The more I study the formulas the more I appreciate the intelligence of the old formula and the revisions Fred has introduced. Willem Wrote: Please explain to me the difference between a plan and a formula. My Answer: A workload formula seeks to provide a simple number of how many technicians are needed for a particular inventory. It is based on information which is as objective as possible and should work for any institution. A workload plan creates a plan for what specific work should be done, how long it should take, what pianos get what service etc. Such a plan could be used to derive a workload formula. Willem Wrote: I don't quite understand the how a piano inventory can remain stable for years. My Answer: Piano inventories are generally quite stable. Under your plan, a technician adds up all of the work needed. In a typical university with 100 pianos, there might be 25 that need rebuilding or could be considered as needing it. If one listed all of that under "additional work", it would yield a need for several technicians immediately. So considering all of the other work needed to keep the inventory going, there could be a need of perhaps four or five technicians for that one year. However, the following year those 25 pianos are now rebuilt and all of the other work done, there would be nothing left for them to do. This design would encourage universities to hire all of the techs needed to fix everything in one year, and then lay them off, keeping just one tuner. Eight or ten years later, they could do the same thing again. This is typical for how they purchase pianos. Do we wish to be temporary transient employees? I'd say not! We should be able to build homes and put down roots with families and private businesses. How we design the formula is critical to how it is used. With the standard caut formula, the work needed is not really analyzed. The inventories age, condition, etc. is. So an overall workload number is calculated. The technician will likely take the worst or most urgent piano and rebuild it, as this is done, another piano deteriorates and now needs it. So the workload is steady and ongoing and the technician is a stable employee. Willem Wrote : Part of the formula uses the age as a factor. That, by itself, would change from year to year. My answer, Age does affect how much work is needed to maintain it, so it should be in the formula. It also shows universities that replacing pianos with new is one way of staying in compliance. The change in workload due to an aging inventory gradual. It could make a sudden change when large groups of pianos cross lines, such as when they hit sixteen years old. The affect, considering other factors, would still not be huge on final workload. Willem Wrote: Although most pianos stay in the same room, some are moved around, from performance halls to teaching studios, to practice rooms, even within a year. And as you said, there are changes in humidity, conditions, etc.. Don't those things then change the formula on a yearly basis? On top of that, isn't the number of tunings, and the number of minor adjustments to go along with them, the main effect on a change in humidity, condition, usage? My Answer: Absolutely. The formula result would change upon changing any factor. Pianos which are switched around will swap some multipliers, (usage, humidity control, acceptable standards), so there probably is no change there. Having humidity and use level in the formula shows how solving some of those problems would affect workload. Most universities are so far out of compliance that I doubt it would threaten anyone's job if they did fix those problems. This, again gives the schools options on how to get into compliance with the formula. Willem Wrote: And if you rebuild a piano, doesn't that change everything? My Answer: Yes it does, but not very much. Try moving one piano from poor to excellent rating. With a hundred pianos, it won't make much difference in workload. In a typical reality, if you rebuild a piano, probably another just slipped down into the poor category so the resultant workload isn't changing much if at all.. Willem Wrote: As I pointed out, there really isn't a good way to indicate what to do with a rebuilt 50 year old piano. And how is non-productive and administrative time handle! d in the formula? My Answer: A 50 year old piano well represented. It would get a low mark on the age factor, but be classed as excellent for condition. So it's not likely to break strings, and shouldn't need new hammers, but at the same time it is still 50 years old. As such, it is often plagued by other problems that typical rebuilders missed. (stripped screws, loose capstans, fragile finish, S&S keyslips which are screwed in, old parts, weak legs, etc.). That is one reason that the market value of rebuilt pianos is less than that of new. It may be that we should have separate categories for remanufactured pianos vs rebuilt pianos. But even a remanufactured piano is not new and tends to have some problems common to old pianos. Non productive and administrative time are not addressed in a workload formula. They would be in a work plan. I don't think CAUT is in a knowledgeable enough position to determine how much or how little time should be spent on particular aspects to the jobs. That would require a lot of discussion. Willem Wrote: My feelings are that a piano faculty member would be much more able to use my formula than the CAUT formula. An administrator, if he/she kept records, would know how many times a piano gets tuned, especially in a contract situation. With only 2 columns to deal with, it would seem my plan would be a lot easier to adjust on a yearly basis, if it needed to be adjusted. My Answer: If a piano faculty member or administrator looks at how many times their pianos have been tuned in the past and how much time was devoted and uses that to determine the workload, it nullifies the purpose of the formula. Universities should do what is right, not what they have been doing, so the workload formula should not be based on that. To compile that information is a big job for any administrator, I sort of doubt they will really do it. If they fail to do part of our formula, they still have the base workload numbers to look at. Willem Wrote: I know we are trying to get a formula ready by Convention time. But if this is going to be used for along time to come, isn't that better take another year, than trying to pass something that isn't completely ready? Although the US Constitution is worthy of amending, some states have recognized their constitutions were so bad, that they completely rewrote them. Alabama is in the midst of a fight to get that accomplished. The 100 year old constitution has so many amendments, it is reportedly the longest in the world. While many of the "old guard" want to keep it, and make more amendments, there is a growing number of people, with the support of "newcomers," who want to see a Constitutional Convention to write a new one. My Answer, Our workload formula is fairly new territory. The only examples we have are the old formula, and the Steinway Recommendations. The Alabama Constitution can be re written with 49 other examples to look at. Far less dangerous, I would say. I agree with you that it is too important to rush. I don't think we are rushing it. It does seem to have consensus, though more input is desired. Starting over with your formula or any other type at this point could not be reasonably accomplished before June. There are probably always other ways to build a formula also. Willem Wrote: While we seem to agree on the base workloads, there is also disagreements with how the formulas need to be used. With my plan, there doesn't have to be an agreement with how often a piano needs to be tuned, nor on how long it takes to do a tuning. The number of tuning is a matter of record in each school. We, as a group, don't have to agree on that, any more than we have to agree on the condition, age, etc., of the pianos in our inventories. All a tuner has to do is put down what has been done in the past. The amount of time it takes is also adjustable in each situation. The number of tunings is how many tunings a piano gets in one year. But as far as how long it takes, that is again, a matter of individual technicians to decide. As I pointed out, the "base time" for a tuning is one hour. If a tuner takes more than an hour, the whole column can be adjusted to reflect how long it actually takes. A! nd I don't think administrators are going to expect us to do 8 tunings a day, any more than they expect a secretary to write x number of letters in a day, or a janitor to clean the same number of rooms in the same amount of time. My Answer, Herein lies perhaps the greatest deficiency in your formula. Your formula is essentially no different than what has been practiced in the last 100 years. The tech tells the university what to do and university doesn't listen. Why should they listen? There exists an inherent conflict of interest which universities are shrewd to spot. If a contractor tells the university what they need, and they do it, the contractor makes more money. If a staff tech tells them they need to hire some help, and they hire someone, the staff tech has an easier job. Your formula has no claws and no teeth. Our formula gives a recommended workload, from a non profit group of experts. They can see whether the tech is telling the truth. It has real power to make a difference which is its' essential purpose. For contractors, they can calculate the workload and come up with a number and present that to administration. This may show that a particular institution needs to hire 0.4 techs. That will cost much money to create a position and because it is part time, it will be hard to fill. They might then listen to that contractor who has been telling them they need to double the amount of tuning they are doing. They will usually do the cheapest thing, which is often to stay with the contractor. For a staff person, it provides an objective number to help them get the help they need. Willem Wrote: The other question I have is, have we, as a group, or individually, asked our administrators what they want from us? Have administrators asked us for a workload formula, or have they asked us for a workload plan? If this has been asked of us, and if this is why we are committed to the CAUT formula, then I can see keeping it, and working with it. (But then why hasn't someone told me this at the very beginning.) My Answer: Administrators have demonstrated that they need this formula in innumerable ways which spoke louder than words to hundreds of techs over many years. While their pianos languished from inadequate service, we cried out individually and were largely ignored. As a group we are able to present them with objective numbers agreed on by experts. A rule of thumb commonly used by administrators for the maintenance of durable goods such as pianos is: 5% yearly should be given to maintenance, and 5% yearly should be saved toward replacement. With 100 pianos having a million dollar replacement value, you should spend $50K yearly on maintenance and save $50K toward replacement. This is probably why we have so many institutions with one tech per 100 pianos, it just sounds nice and kind of works out that way. But this isn't what pianos actually need. We are here to educate and help bring standards up to a reasonable level. A workload plan is an excellent thing once the formula is calculated. It can show how alternatives in how the time could be spent. Since time is money, it also works when considering whether to contract out some services, or hire employees. Our workload formula does not dictate how the time is to be spent. Willem Wrote: I asked Fred to explain how the workload formula could be adjusted to reflect the amount of time spent, and he gave a very easy explanation. This would indicate that there is a need to have a "time plan" that can be given to an administrator, if one is needed. My plan does the opposite. It uses the number of hours per week, which can very easily be changed to workload. If 50 hours a week are needed to maintain inventory, that equates to 1.25 techs. So my question is, if my plan is easier to use, and gives the same results, why is there opposition to it? My Answer, The plan must provide an objective recommendation from a non profit group of experts which states a particular needed level of service for a particular school. Yours does not do this. It relies on the individual tech telling them what they need, who has a self interest in the result. Yours also bases the workload and what the institution has done previously, which is pretty sorry in most cases. In our formula a workload number is achieved by objective means. The only two areas where there is some subjectivity is under "quality" and "condition". Here Fred provides excellent guidelines which takes away almost all of the subjectivity. It is true some of us might prefer keeping old parts more than others of us, so there is some subjectivity under "condition" We may also draw slightly different lines dividing which pianos merit rebuilding, so this would introduce some subjectivity into the "quality" issue. However Fred has really done a thorough job oif minimizing subjectivity. All other areas are totally cut and dry. I hope this has answered all of your concerns, Mike Jorgensen
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