Turning a paper-and-phone snow operation into one live command center
An Ontario snow-and-ice management company planned every storm by hand — working the phones to crew each event, tracking salt and equipment on paper. Folio built the platform that turned that scramble into a single, weather-aware system that plans, staffs, tracks, and learns from every storm.
Snow & Ice Management · Ontario, Canada
- To plan and crew a full storm, end to end
- Hours → min
- Every asset, route, and material tracked in real time
- Paper → live
- Equipment, HR, and weather feeds unified in one hub
- 3 → 1
- Crew coordination, automated by AI
- Multilingual
To plan and crew a full storm, end to end
Every asset, route, and material tracked in real time
Equipment, HR, and weather feeds unified in one hub
Crew coordination, automated by AI
The Company
An Ontario-based snow-and-ice management company responsible for keeping sites clear and safe through the winter — coordinating crews, plows and equipment, and de-icing material across many locations, against weather that doesn't wait. Like much of the industry, it ran on paper, spreadsheets, and phone calls. It had begun building a platform of its own to pull the operation together, but the build had stalled short of something the team could actually run on. The company brought Folio in to make it real, then to take it all the way through scoping, build, and hosting.
The Challenge
Every storm was a manual scramble against the clock. When weather moved in, the office planned the response by hand — who goes where, which equipment, how much salt — then worked the phones, calling crew members one at a time to confirm they'd show. Planning a single storm took hours the forecast didn't always give them.
The workforce was multilingual, so every one of those calls risked a message that didn't fully land. Equipment, material, and labour were tracked on paper, if at all, which meant no live picture of where assets were, how much salt had gone down, or whether a route had actually been serviced — the exact data that billing and liability turn on. And because nothing connected, nothing carried forward: every storm started from zero, with no record to make the next one go better.
The Groundwork
Folio didn't start by writing software. It started by scoping the operation as it actually ran — tracing a storm end to end, from the moment weather appeared on the forecast to the invoice after the last route was cleared. How did the office decide allocation? How were crews reached, and in which languages? Where did equipment, GPS, and salt data live, and where did it simply evaporate? That map of the real workflow, edge cases and all, is what every part of the platform was later built to fit.
What Folio Built
At the center, Folio built a single operations hub — one source of truth for every asset the company deploys: people, equipment, and material. Then it wired the live world into it.
- Equipment telematics, straight from the source
- Operating hours and GPS location pulled directly from the equipment's own APIs, for service scheduling, live tracking, and proof that a route was run.
- HR in sync
- Employee records synced from the company's HR system, so the crew roster driving every storm was always current.
- Weather, watched automatically
- A live feed from the government weather service, so the system saw storms coming before anyone had to.
- Storm-triggered planning
- When a storm was forecast, the hub alerted the office, where operators allocated equipment, material, and crews to the event in one place — an afternoon of planning compressed into minutes.
- Automated, multilingual crew coordination
- The platform messaged every assigned worker to confirm availability and coordinate the response, communicating in each person's own language using AI — retiring the one-by-one phone tree entirely.
- Live tracking and validation
- Through the event, equipment hours, GPS, and salt usage flowed back in real time — to manage the storm as it happened, and to validate and bill that the work was actually done.
- A storm planner that learns
- Every event's data fed an optimization layer and a plan builder, so operators could design future storm plans from what actually happened on the ground, not from memory and guesswork.
Where It Got Hard
The multilingual coordination was the part with no shortcut. Reaching a workforce across several languages, automatically, and getting reliable confirmations back inside the tight window before a storm meant building AI-driven messaging people would actually understand and respond to — not a translation bolted on as an afterthought.
The second hard problem was making real-world data behave as one. Equipment APIs, an HR system, GPS, weather, and salt usage were never designed to share a picture, and stitching them into a single live view accurate enough to dispatch and bill from took going deep into each source on its own terms.
Results
Storm planning collapsed from hours to minutes: operators allocate crews, equipment, and material in one place, the moment weather is forecast.
The phone tree is gone: crews are reached automatically, in their own language, and confirm availability in a single pass.
Every asset is live: people, equipment, and salt tracked in real time, with GPS and operating hours flowing in continuously.
Proof of service is built in: equipment and GPS data validate that routes were actually run — the foundation for clean billing and defensible liability.
Every storm improves the next: usage and performance data feed an optimization layer and a plan builder instead of disappearing.
One source of truth replaced paper, spreadsheets, and phone calls: an ERP-grade backbone, purpose-built for snow and ice rather than forced from a generic tool.
Folio owned it end to end: scoping, build, implementation, and hosting.
“Planning a storm used to take an afternoon and a stack of phone calls, and even then we were never really sure who was coming or where everything was. Folio didn't hand us generic software and walk away — they learned how we actually run a storm, including the fact that a lot of our crew don't take instructions in English, and built around it. Now the system sees the weather before we do, crews confirm in their own language, and we can watch every piece of equipment and every route in real time. It feels less like software and more like we finally have the whole operation in one place instead of in everyone's heads.”