Last year at this time I attempted to explain the time and money each job takes (go
HERE) and tried to highlight supposed trends in the maintenance at KGC.
I used that information this past season and with some reading on
Twitter and various other sources I tried to implement ways to be more
efficient. The one caveat about this years information is that 2014 was
not the best year when it comes to demonstrating staff hours worked this season. Early season staff changes
caused me to veer from my original compulsive, controlling, and
over-thought plan but I'll still explain it and then "pontificate" about
what I've been able to interpret from the numbers.
As
it stands, we are pretty tight staff wise already so what I felt I
needed to do was plan each day from opening to closing so I could staff
as efficiently as possible . Generally, it's the SSDD when it comes to the routine maintenance at KGC so I felt I could plan a week out it would be fairly representative of the season in a very general sense.
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| Schedule for a "Monday" |
This was only the first part. Last winter there was a
fair amount of talk amongst turf geeks about something called a
"digital job board". Basically, a digital job board posts staffs daily
routines on a template that was stored in the "cloud". This allowed for
viewing jobs anytime and anywhere as well as on the fly changes from a
smart phone out on the course. It was suppose make me more efficient
but I didn't take full advantage since my phone lacked a data plan;
however, it did make me plan better. For my job board I basically stole
the format from the superintendent at Pender
Harbour golf course on the coast. I think it was a Twitter discussion about job
boards in which he and allowed anyone to view his job board so I basically copied the look and
added some personal touches.
.jpg) |
| The View as You Enter Lunchroom |
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| Close up of Donated 40" L.E.D T.V. |
Now
instead of trying to interpret my chicken scratches on the white board
staff could easily read what the days plan was. There was glitches and
there is lots of fine tuning to do but I'm fairly confident in saying it
has become a useful and appreciated method of communication.
Enough
background. How did all this planning and scheduling affect the
operation of my department? As already mentioned, the whole process
made me a better organizer. It also reaffirmed my assumption that there
are very few areas we can cut back on. Laying out a typical weeks
worth of week ahead of time demonstrated to me just how much we are
unable to do. There was more than a few mornings when either a
unplanned absence of a staff member or some other event resulted in me
having to shuffle a typical daily task or completely eliminate that task. I had an idea that there were potential cost saving in a few of the daily routine tasks (mowing greens, tee, fairways,
roughs, bunkers, daily set-up, rolling greens) associated with maintaining the course. I thought we could do better (budget wise) when it came to mowing tee's and collars, mowing rough, and mowing
fairways. Maybe we could save money on fuel and labour if we tried a few different
things.
To be continued.......
