by 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