We are approximately 2 months away from December and it’s crunch time to get those snow removal bids out for the upcoming winter. After last year’s overactive season, a good place to start this year, would be to gain knowledge of climatological snowfall over the past 5, 10, 15, or even 30 years. This newly acquired information will assist in the bidding process and make your bids accurate and competitive.
One potential problem with these pre-season bids is deciding on a price for your company’s plowing or salting services. Many times, an estimate is made which results in underpayment or overpayment for a season’s work. To combat this misjudgment, companies are now incorporating past climatological snowfall data, such as Snowtistics, from different observation sites into their bids. How does this help? By understanding the climatological, statistical, and historical data for your site(s), companies can get a feel of how much snow occurs, then use this information to accurately price pre-season bids.
To give an idea of how this snow data can be broken down, start by deciding whether you want to view that data by the amount of snow over a time period (monthly, seasonally, yearly, etc), by event count or both. When choosing total snow, remember the information can be broken down by month or yearly/multiyear intervals. Alternatively, one of the most popular new ways to view historical data is by event count. An event in the case of winter is defined as anytime snow accumulates. Additionally, these events can be customized based on threshold amounts to fit your needs. Think of the benefits of knowing how many coating – 1.0” events occur over the winter, versus 2.0”+ events! This information can help decide how many salting versus plowing events a particular site may have.
It’s never too early to prepare. Just remember how important statistical, climatological, and historical snow data can be when pricing pre-season bids. Before you know it, it will be time to break out those plows, salt spreaders, and shovels!
