Best Practices - It is easy to see that low-e equipment has reduced the amount of energy used in the snowmaking process. Essentially, the industry is making more snow with less energy. The cost per unit of production is less and this is good for the bottom line of business. To improve on the situation, managers must also recognize that lots of energy and money is still being left on the table. More importantly, wasted energy means less snow production - and every resort wants more snow. The good news is that reporting tools are available to identify and measure optimal productivity. The dashboard below shows precisely what costs … [Read more...]

Best Practices - Now that most snowmaking systems are upgraded with the resources of low-e snow guns, automation, VFD's and better compressors; managers are in search of the next level of efficiency. Reality is that all of this equipment, including automation, needs human resources to operate it at best production. Therefore, the next level comes from maximizing performance of the human resources. To insure maximum performance requires a standard or benchmark to measure against. Once the benchmark is established, actual operations are compared to it and the differentials are reported as productivity margins. These KPI's measure how … [Read more...]

Best Practices - Since most resort managers come from a background in business finance, understanding the industrial process and KPI's of snowmaking can be a mystery. The good news is metrics are available that quantify snowmaking performance with the same accounting methods as financials. Percentage Margins Similar to revenue producing departments like retail, the snowmaking process also measures performance with percentage margins. In both applications, the metric uses a benchmark with actual performance (or profit or productivity) measured against it. The differential is expressed as a percent. Below is an example for 12 hours of … [Read more...]