WSA Member Update 1.15.25

January 15, 2025 Dear WSA Members, Wishing a Happy New Year to you and yours! So far, however, 2025 has been difficult for WSA members and others on both sides of the country. The fires in California are and have been terribly devastating. And, for those of you in the East who do not snowplow as a service, I know the extreme snow/cold weather has proven difficult for operation. Our sincere condolences on both. I thought a good resource to start the new year would be the 57 notable speaker quotes from Automotive Fleet’s ‘Fleet Week’ event. Although you won’t find all of them to be of use, I found a number of them to be thought-provoking and/or good reminders of ways to improve fleet operations.  To help show you the power of using AI in your company I used Google’s recently released LM Notebook program to generate a podcast about the World Sweeping Association. Basically, I provided the program with two pdf files from WSA’s Forms and Handouts area: the handout about the Ethics program and Why Use WSA Members, along with the URL of WSA’s home page. Those are what were used to achieve the results you will hear. Click on this link to listen on YouTube. Feel free to provide the YouTube address link to anyone you believe might benefit from hearing the information. To show you what kind of results you might achieve by doing the same for your company, I used the information from the website of one of our Advisory Board members, David Ross’ Millennium Maintenance, to make a podcast about his company. This one is audio only and you can hear it at this link. Here’s a third example: In my response to the last WSA Update, one of our members wrote, in part, the following: “I have a topic that is larger than the sum of any one man. My topic is how do I teach ‘situational awareness’ every day and even more during the holidays. How can we help individuals ‘see’ what now they are looking at but not really noticing?” I used my account at Perplexity.ai (you don’t really need a paid account there) to get ideas about what actions might be taken. At this link you can read the entire question, along with a variety of ideas about things someone might try to get their team to do a better job of truly ‘seeing’ things out of place on the jobsites they service.  Finally, to provide assistance if any of the above has inspired you to look further into using AI in your business operations, to get you started here is a pdf file now on the WSA site that lists some of the leading programs in a variety of business-oriented areas. If any of the above gives you ideas, tips or results you might share with other members please  let me know. This month, our Safety First! post centers around the extreme cold being experienced by much of the country. January’s Safety First! message discusses the following:Dealing with Extreme Cold: General Arctic Safety Tips & Advisories Winter Vehicle Prep RemindersReminder to Mitigate Ice/Snow Around Offices and Client OfficesDressing and Other Tips for Cold WeatherPractice Ergonomics in Cold WeatherDefensive Driving – Two Pages of Cold Season Best PracticesI’ve sent out renewal notices to everyone by now. If you didn’t receive yours please send me an email. I’m also interested in your feedback about any of the topics we covered this month as well as any ideas you have about future topics you’d like to have covered. BTW, this year our WSA Member Updates will be going out once a month on the 15th of each month. As always, if you have questions or comments about this WSA Member Update, or anything else to do with the World Sweeping Association or power sweeping in general, please let me know. Good Sweeping, Ranger Kidwell-Ross, Executive Director World Sweeping Association