Case Study

Nesco Relies On ClimaCell To Make Job Site-specific Decisions

Has seen savings of time and money by tracking MicroWeather.

42°21'02.1" N 71°03'27.6" W

The Challenge

Established in 1945, New England Sealcoating Co. (NESCO) is a pavement maintenance company based in Massachusetts that serves customers across Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Maine. The company provides a number of different paving services for shopping centers, office buildings, tennis and basketball courts, apartment complexes and other areas with paved surfaces. The number one challenge for NESCO is the weather. When it rains, the NESCO teams cannot do their job. The company is paid the same amount whether it takes them 1 day or 10 days to complete a job, so maximizing every single day of work is essential, especially since they work for just eight months of the year to avoid winter weather in New England. If the company managers know it’s going to rain at 4pm, they can get a certain amount of work done before the rain comes, but if it’s going to rain at 10am, they need to cancel the team for that day or send them to a job in a different town where it isn’t going to rain. This is why neighborhood-by-neighborhood MicroWeather rain prediction with precise timing is essential.

Solution

Unfortunately, the three weather solutions NESCO had been using were often incorrectly predicting the exact location and timing of storms. Because of this, NESCO would have teams arrive at a job only to be “washed out” with rain or they’d cancel a job because there was a forecast of rain, and then it would end up being sunny and they missed a full day of progress on a project. The company was on a constant quest to get better weather software. NESCO began using HyperCast™ software from ClimaCell in the early spring of 2018 and immediately started seeing data that was better at predicting the timing of rain storms.

ClimaCell’s HyperCast solution has become the primary weather solution for NESCO. It is used by multiple members of the team including the President of the company, Craig Swain, and the head of scheduling who makes all the decisions at 4am each morning about which teams to send to each job based on weather predictions. Recently NESCO had a big job in Foxboro, MA and all of the traditional weather systems were showing clear skies, but HyperCast showed a storm was approaching. Because of this prediction, NESCO avoided sending a big team to Foxboro, where there ended up being a severe rainstorm that would have prevented any work from being done. The NESCO team has seen many examples like this and is excited to leverage the solution for the rest of the summer and to use ClimaCell’s temperature data in the fall to avoid paving on days when it’s too cold for certain paving products.

“Since we started using ClimaCell, we have had a much better ability to predict the start and end time of each storm,” said Craig Swain, President of NESCO. “I have a tablet on the dashboard of my truck that I keep on at all times showing HyperCast, and I watch the dots on the map to see exactly where each storm is and how it is moving forward. We’ve definitely saved costs and staff time by using this solution, and I’ve been recommending it to other pavement and construction companies.”

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