WINTER MAINTENANCE
PREDICTING THE UNPREDICTABLE: HOW
In the FM world we often hear talk about the transformational impacts of AI. While clearing snow, gritting or de-icing car parks can, on the face of things, appear to be low tech, the high risk nature of protecting businesses from accidents and litigation has made our sector an early adopter of AI tools. Where in the past winter gritting would be about laying down de-icing salt every night on a precautionary basis or – worse – scrambling to get a team out to handle an unexpectedly frosty morning, today’s winters are proactively managed through sophisticated weather models, algorithms and mobile networks. At OUTCO, we have pioneered an approach over the past 20 years in winter services that is now highly automated and highly dependent on AI decision making. Technology has been truly transformational and has been key to giving organisations greater certainty in the face of nature’s volatility.
While it’s fashionable to speak about artificial intelligence, AI tools are ultimately an evolution of last decade’s hyped technology – ‘Big Data’ which was the genesis of AI algorithms. Since day one, winter gritting services have been driven by weather forecasts so perhaps its unsurprising the sector has become so data-driven. After all, in aiming to predict highly complex weather systems, meteorology has always been at the cutting edge of fields such as supercomputing. As meteorological models have grown more advanced, commercial users of weather data have been able to apply this to better anticipate and respond to weather conditions. At OUTCO we have
TECHNOLOGY IS TAMING WINTER GRITTING As OUTCO’s winter services business celebrates its 20th year anniversary, Founder and CEO Jason Petsch, examines how technology is transforming the way organisations control seasonal unpredictability.
seen the quality and precision of this forecasting significantly increase and benefit from highly accurate forecasts of ground surface temperatures that are better able to predict frost.
This is how technology has transformed gritting from a low tech, best-effort trade into a data-driven discipline that helps organisations achieve health and safety compliance. Data has allowed us to act faster, anticipate better and target resources more accurately: using proprietary algorithms and AI in a real time environment, we can automatically activate a gritting or snow clearance service as soon as specific conditions are forecast. In the same way that so many businesses deploy just-in-time logistics, we bring this type of capability to achieve a 99.8% service success rate over more than 2.5m jobs and counting.
All this is only possible thanks to the tools we use to interpret and employ data effectively – the intelligence part of AI: Our in-house NIMBUS system uses bespoke algorithms to make thousands of data points actionable. These include topological data from site surveys, records of past winters, real time weather conditions, and client-specific KPIs and risk profiles. This doesn’t just help to mitigate the safety risks on any given cold night but significantly reduces organisations’ long term financial risks. When used effectively, data lets us better understand the specific risk profile of clients’ sites, which makes it possible to offer fixed price contracts for the entire season. This ensures that costs don’t unpredictably
34 | TOMORROW’S FM (
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