January 22. Firstly, a brief comment about the course. Nothing has changed and after a cursory look I think we are O.K. My observations noted in the Dec. 18 post are still holding true with no bad ice. I may hate myself for writing this, but I even think the ice on the new putting greens may be a non-event. The only bad thing would be above normal temperatures and above 0 overnight lows for a few days combined with rain. We don't have the snow to ride out one of those.
..... continued from December 10th......
As well as fairways, mowing the rough is one of the most costly jobs
we perform. In the past, especially last year, we ran both rough units
without to much concern for cost. The bigger unit can mow plenty of
rough but it is a hog when it comes to fuel. Same as we did with the fairways, we
made a concerted effort to limit when and how long each unit was
operating. Anytime we can mow without play the better production is. A
few years ago we broke the rough areas down into precise zones and then
mapped these zones. The areas we choose to mow each day are optimized with the hope of avoiding golfers. On our lunchroom wall we have aerial photographs of the golf course highlighting these zones and operators keep track of where they had been
by labeling a zone with a date of when it was last mowed. You would
think it would be easy to decide if an area needed to be mowed or not
but there was more than a few times in the past where I would see different operators
mowing the same spot a day apart. All this effort and planning did pay
off:
 |
| Hours Spent Mowing Rough |
Although the decreasing hours trend is obvious, what
you don't see is the fact that by operating fewer machines my total
staffing requirements also dropped (and this is despite the fact that we added an extra cut around the greens this year.....oops, another caveat: that extra cut was absorbed mostly by me and my hours aren't included in these graphs. The more I think about that the more I realize that it is wrong and maybe I should start to add my hours spent on equipment to these numbers. Hmmmm). In fact, for 2014 from May 1 to
Oct.12, the total staffing hours put into maintaining the golf course was 1200
fewer than in 2013 during the same time period.
I already mentioned
what a funky year 2014 was with respect to staffing but basically the drop in total hours can be attributed to operating with one less season full time
staff member (which actually was part of the plan for 2014). For 2015 I already know I will be losing another season
full time staff member and I plan to replace that person with a part time but I
have to believe we are at or slightly below the optimum staff number
for my department so I'm not sure how feasible that plan really is.
It's getting repetitive and boring but here is one more graph:
This graph highlights the yearly cost of mowing (labour added to operating costs) for fairways, roughs, and tees and collars. I don't include the cost of maintaining our equipment in any calculation mostly because there is a fair amount of variability which could slightly skew a comparisons (for example in 2013 we spent just over $500 on repair and maintenance for both fairway units; this year it was only $126. Same machines and a year older; should be more, you'd think). I believe I have far less control over the repair costs associated with equipment maintenance. If I could predict when or how something was going to breakdown I would stop it from happening. So, I guess, the point being that as inconvenient as it is dealing with old stuff when it comes to mowing the biggest cost is the labour associated with process itself....usually (so much for getting any new stuff?).
