Tracking Grooming numbers?

Tracking Grooming numbers?

Postby Groomer1 on 27 Feb 2009, 20:52

Do any areas track the cost of grooming? Cost per hour or yearly cost.
What it cost to run a tractor for the season? Maintenance,fuel and labor.
How many arces tractors groom? Nightly or yearly.
Just wondering if any one has any numbers or keeps track of grooming cost for the season.
I know Prinoth has a trip meter and a overall meter for tracking. Not sure what PB has for tracking.
The area i work at uses the Prinoth 350. Average about 55 to 65 arces a night per tractor. About 7 hours of grooming.
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Re: Tracking Grooming numbers?

Postby WINCHCAT on 28 Feb 2009, 00:27

#1. thay are snow cats
2. for the maintenance it really depends on, what you have, how you are running it, what you are doing with it.
3. we can go throught a tank of fues in like under 12 hours
4. are 350 we,ve had for about 3 months and have spent like $1000 on it for maintenance plus BR didnt do that well for inspecting it
and not to sure about arces per hour but i'm sure i could find it (since ive found everything else)
and 1 thing i've found out about the 350's is it does NOT have 350 hp it has 345 (are cat we can get like 500)
a true groomer run with the yellow
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Re: Tracking Grooming numbers?

Postby Rchristian on 02 Mar 2009, 21:04

We download and track figures every day for an accurate cost of grooming. We track running time, idle time, tiller time and acres groomed. There are a lot of other variables when you talk about cost of grooming like:
Daily preventive maintenance, summer maintenance, shop costs, mechanic labor hours, parts costs, fuel costs, breakdowns (yeah they stink but they do happen)
Being able to get an accurate cost of grooming requires detailed repair and maintenance records. Unless you have these figures, just tracking nightly grooming numbers will be a shot in the dark.
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Re: Tracking Grooming numbers?

Postby cbender on 04 Mar 2009, 18:07

Another thing to keep in mind with the BR350 trip meter is that it does not know when you are traveling over previously groomed surfaces (AKA multiple passes and overlaps) so the 55-65 acre per shift figure is not reliable for tracking your acre/hour costs or department productivity.
Curt Bender

"The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of acreage is forgotten"
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Re: Tracking Grooming numbers?

Postby Tom400CFI on 13 May 2009, 23:25

This topic is of interest to me as I am in the thick of tracking, right now. I require my operators to fill out a "Nightly Slope Log", on which they put their name, cat #, date, shift, conditions, start, finish and total hours, gallons burned, and then sections for each run completed, and special projects like plow projects etc.

Now that the season is over, I'm taking all those pieces of paper, from ever operator from every shift, and inputting the hours, gallons and acres into a spread sheet that calculates GPH, APH, and GPA. To get the acres from the operator's Slope Log, I have to literally look at each run's name, that they wrote down, look at a spread sheet that has our trails and their acres listed on it, find that trail, and plug it's corresponding acreage into my calculator. And the next trail, and the next trail and so on. Talk about arduous! I'd like to figure out a way to have the data "down load" more easily or more quickly.

The other problem is that gang or team grooming totally screws up the data. I haven't really figured out how to deal w/that, and worse, when everyone contributes to one run. For example, when everyone leaves "the barn", they groom up this one particular run, and at the end of the swing shift, everyone comes down that same run, finishing it, and it's done for grave shift. So how do I "credit" the acreage to those people and those cats? I don't know yet.

I don't use the data from the cat b/c there are WAY too many variables that the cat doesn't "know" about; track slippage, overlapping, grooming-the-groom during travel, etc. I think that what I am currently doing is far closer to "reality" than using the data from the cat's computer. Plus, our PB's don't have acre calculating capabilities.

If anyone has a better system in place, and wants to share, I'd love to hear about it. Thanks!

-Tom
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Re: Tracking Grooming numbers?

Postby snowwizard on 16 May 2009, 13:37

Your way of tracking is what I had to do a ski area when I was grooming manager. We had to track everything for the bean counters. It was very time consuming. Had to do weekly reports and monthly reports, felt like a date entry person. At first it gave me a good idea how much time was spent by the operators to groom the mountain. Kept tracks of times for all conditions so when they were different conditions I had a good idea what I needed for operators. For keeping track of individual trails is not worth it. I would base tracking on acres that are groomed that night. Keep track of what each shift completes. Total acres and total fuel used for each shift no matter what conditions you have.
I did come up with a good average how many acres an operator can cover in an hour’s time. On an average it was about 6 – 7 acres per hour. This was an average in all conditions over the season. We were using the BR-400 and using about 55 – 60 gallons a shift per tractor. Did a test with the PB acres were the same but fuel was a little less. 45 – 50 doing the same trails. I’ve notice the Prinoth 350 were doing a little more acreage, (8-10 acres) but also burning more fuel. (65-75 gallons) The new PB 400 was about the same and burning about 50- 55 gallons per shift. The shifts were 8 hours, but tractor time was around 6 - 7 hours on an average. Shift change, re-fueling and lunch would eat up about an hour to an hour and half nightly per operator. All of these numbers were based the type of grooming we did. I’ve found some areas groom different so the above numbers were just from the mountain I worked at.
Overall I would keep tracking simple. Do it by the shift. It’s a team effort to complete the nightly assignments. There is too many variables to get a precise grooming numbers (Conditions, terrain parks, pushing and plowing and lifts work.)
Just from my experience in tracking grooming numbers.
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