Waste Not

The Goal: Shenvalee Golf Resort examined its golf course maintenance operation with the intent to improve, conserved and use resources more cost-efficiently.

by C&RB Staff (editor@clubandresortbusiness.com)
April 2008
 

Waste Not The Goal: Take a hard look at every aspect of the golf course maintenance operation at Shenvalee Golf Resort, to see how processes could be improved and how valuable resources (labor, equipment and materials) could be conserved and used more cost-efficiently. The Plan: Systematically analyze all processes and solicit input from all crew members. The Payoff: Aerification manhours cut by 25%; crew startup times improved by two-thirds; equipment downtime because of fuel or fluid issues virtually eliminated.

Much of the current push for new ideas at clubs and resorts focuses on finding ways to enhance or add customer value, which is certainly a worthwhile objective. But an equally worthy goal, suggests Charlie Fultz, is to attack value’s evil twin: the waste that can be found in all parts of a club operation.

Before recently moving to the supplier side to join the technical staff of a fertilizer manufacturer (see pg. 14), Fultz was the Golf Course Superintendent at Shenvalee Golf Resort in New Market, Va. for five years, and an active, practicing member of the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America for 13 years. As a superitendent, his specialty was speaking at conferences about the “Working Smarter Training Challenge”—a 52-week training and crew-building initiative focused on lean management and reducing waste.

And at Shenvalee, Fultz practiced what he preached. From simple, common-sense steps to systematic studies using sophisticated, process-mapping techniques, Fultz and his staff waged war on waste in the resort’s grounds maintenance operation at every turn. Some of their most successful battles were on these fronts:

• The maintenance facility. “I asked my crew to designate areas of waste,” Fultz reports. “One specific area of the operation that kept coming up was our morning start-up. Our shop was a mess. Through the crew’s work—not mine—they redesigned the shop floor to maximize morning start-time efficiency. Just by having things better organized and in designated places, according to when they would go in and out, it saved us about 66% over our previous start-up time—from 15 minutes, to less than five. Imagine that savings split among nine people, times five days a week, and you can see how you’re beginning to eliminate major waste.”
• Equipment pre-start routines. “Another area that my crew was worried about was the routines that were to be followed before starting equipment,” Fultz reports. “They had been told what to do and what to check, but some weren’t doing it. usually because they couldn’t remember all the steps. We came up with small, neon-orange cards—the color was not only for visibility, but also to help serve as a reminder that couldn’t be ignored—and mounted them on each piece of equipment. Each card had a printed checklist for what to do before starting the machine.

“For example, on a tee mower we had a card with these steps:
1) Check oil.
2) Check hydraulic fluids.
3) Visual check.
4) Check fuel.
5) Check brakes.
6) Check tires.
7) Give two minutes warm-up time.

“It all sounds simple,” Fultz says, “but adding the cards totally eliminated anyone running out of fuel, and did away with fluid issues for the entire year. That has big implications for waste caused by equipment downtime—no more running fuel out to machines that have run out on the course, or making the equipment tech deal with those avoidable issues and instead letting him focus on the longer-term projects that are a better use of his time.”

• Process mapping—“This is where you lay out how you do something from beginning to end and then take a hard look at everything, to try to identify the wasteful steps,” Fultz says. “Then you reconstruct the act so it’s more efficient.”

The grounds department became as pristine an operation as the golf course itself at Shenvalee Golf Resort, thanks to an all-encompassing effort to take waste out of every part of the operation. Simple but effective measures, such as affixing maintenance checklists to equipment and designating specific staging areas in the shop, yielded tangible savings in key areas such as fluid and fuel conservation, crew startup times, and reduction of costly equipment downtime.

At Shenvalee, the maintenance staff took on “the huge task of mapping our core aerifaction process in the spring,” Fultz says. “And our updated plan, compared to the original approach, saved over 25% of our manhours,” he reports.

Fultz goes so far as to contend that “as a whole, course maintenance is a waste operation, because it is not a moneymaker per se.” The key for course maintenance professionals, he says, is being able to identify and distinguish between “necessary waste” in their operations that indirectly add value, such as course mowing, and unnecessary waste that can be eliminated. “By setting goals that constantly seek to find and eliminate waste, and then following through, [superintendents] can add value to their operations, too,” Fultz says.

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