Smart Infrastructure for a Smarter Future: Capital Planning Across Industries

Slash webcasts. All right, on with the learning objectives for today. We're going to learn the four stages of the asset lifecycle management framework. Gain deeper insight into how FCAs and asset investment planning software contribute to data driven decision making, enhanced compliance and more strategic long term forecasting. And we're going to discover how different industries can leverage smart infrastructure tools to enhance sustainability, improve asset performance and align capital investments with organizational goals. Now it's time to learn a little more about our presenter. I'm proud to introduce Katie Gramajo. She's the senior education specialist with Brightly Software by Siemens. She's an APA certified education facilities professional and develops technology driven solutions for school facilities management and capital planning. With over sixteen years in maintenance and operations and twelve years leading school facilities and operations at the Windward School and Campbell Hall School. She has advanced facilities master plans throughout major renovations and she has also advanced comprehensive staff management across multiple campuses. Her expertise spans facility operations, sustainability project management, strategic technology integration for educational institutions, all driving innovative approaches to work order management and funding prioritization. In other words, she's at the top of her game. She's a seasoned facilities leader with a background in maintenance operations and a former professional opera singer. We'll see what we can do on that end. But for now, she's going to bring a unique blend of strategic thinking and creative problem solving to the educational facilities sector. I've had the pleasure of working with Katie several times over the last few years and I'm so excited she's here again with us today. So Katie, welcome to the webcast. Thanks, Wendy. It's awesome to see you again. I will say I think I've gotten a couple of jobs making a joke about the opera to operations translation. So I had to throw that one out there. But, today we're going to talk about smart infrastructure and capital planning in your facilities. So diving into how capital planning is evolving in all industries from education to healthcare. Though I come from education specifically, we have a lot of similarities with our partners in government, healthcare and manufacturing and we will be going through that. As discussed before, I work for Brightly Software. We are a Siemens company that has been a leader in asset management for the last twenty five years. And I will not read the whole blurb about Brightly but what I will say is we started in education. So it's near and dear to my heart because I knew it long before I was working for Brightly and we have a lot of interesting things we can talk about as we move forward. So you've already heard my bio. I will not bore you with it again but I've worked in school facilities leadership. And in doing that, I was part of the operations team who worked on the capital plan and the financial side of that. So it's a whole other level on your facilities management. So let's get started. What is a capital plan and how do you take your strategic intent in that capital plan and ensure that it's actually grounded in your real time asset intelligence? It's important that that's very precise because capital plans are only as good as the data that you have. If you're going to your facilities director, if you are the facilities director and a finance leader is coming to you in all assets and saying, what's the next plan? What's my master plan for the next three, five, ten years? It's important that you have that real time knowledge of what your asset health is in order to predict the costs that's coming up and how to do that. So some of those things in various sectors can differ. So healthcare, obviously you have a lot of compliance needs and equipment life cycle. Manufacturing, it's that uptime and making sure that your industry is not down at all or you're losing money. In the government, it's all about your infrastructure and your resilience to ensure that your infrastructure is working the way it needs to be. And in education, you have that resilience piece same as government but also you need to align those capital investments with your academic goals, with your student experience. So if you have inaccurate or outdated facilities data, you won't be prioritizing your investments correctly. Your budget will not be correct. You will have a deferred maintenance backlog, whichever one does, but you will not be chipping away at it slowly. You will not be able to prioritize where that spend is for the next few years. So where that comes from is your facilities team. Your facilities team is the one that needs to provide the data for your risk profile, for your condition assessments in order to help the person creating that capital plan decide what assets are needed and what is not just an aspirational project. What is the priority level for this spend? And the easiest way to do that is to use technology. We all know in today's day and age, technology is the way to advance what we've been doing manually but there's even more technology out there that you may or may not be aware of that can help make your life even easier. So today I'm gonna talk about that and what you can do if you're starting from step one or you're already halfway through the journey where you can go from there. So we call it a Brightly Asset Lifecycle Management or ALM. If you haven't heard that, it's essentially the term for connecting your facility's data to your capital strategy. So tracking your assets from commissioning to decommissioning, creating a potentially predictive model that will allow you to long range financially forecast what your capital plan should be and it will also help you predict what renewal replacement and reinvestment is coming down the pipeline for you. If you are able to do that without just guessing based on a vendor's knowledge or based on your staff's knowledge, then you can actually support your scenario planning and your budget requests so that they are approved and as close to accurate as possible. The outcome we all want is this capital plan that's aligned strategically and also sustainable and there won't be too many emergencies that pop up and throw a wrench in your plan. So we made this graphic that shows the steps that I'm going to walk you through and how it works. There is a roadmap to get to the goal of a full transformation for your organization where your assets and your maintenance life cycle is working at an optimized level. So where we go is we start from your asset info, which is step one, which would ideally be an asset register that's giving you baseline condition assessments. Then we go to step two, which is your tactical asset management. That's improving your day to day operations, your work orders, your inspections, your ESG reports, things like that. Then we're going to step three. That's when you get to the strategic piece. This is what we're all hoping to get to, which is aligning your capital plan with your long term goals using predictive modeling and scenario planning. And then finally, the pinnacle that is aspirational and I'm just going to show you a bit of what does a fully digital campus? What does a fully digital facilities look like? How can you use building automation systems, digital twins, remote management to make your life as easy as possible? Every step gets you a bit closer to this goal but you don't need to panic if you haven't even begun. We'll go through where you can start. And then we get to this piece that's what are our targeted outcomes? Well, obviously the goal would be predictive maintenance, fully predictive maintenance moving from reactive proactive but then even predictive so you can know what will fail before it fails. Using your data to anticipate that failure before it happens, reducing your downtime, extending your asset life as long as possible. The more you maintain a car, the longer it lasts. The same idea here which we all know. Then also being able to track your assets in real time. You have inventory control, you have emergency response, you can plan for climate resilience. All of these things can happen if you have the data to do it. So let's get into step one, asset information. It seems like in this roadmap of ALM, the asset information should be simple. It's foundation for everything. We all have it but you can't forecast or digitize anything if you don't have it. Starting with a centralized asset register is essentially your master list of everything you have. HVAC units, plumbing systems, electrical panels, roofs, everything. Having that data is important. Some of us probably have it in a spreadsheet. Hopefully you at least have a spreadsheet but you might not even have that. You might have it in someone's mind who's worked here for a very long time. So creating that centralized asset register is the first step. Then you can actually understand the financial value of these assets and that can help you in insurance cases, in budgeting, in replacement planning, in any sort of strategic decision about reinvestment or disposing of assets. Once you have this, you can go to the next step. So where we start is usually something that's called the facilities condition assessment and we're going to get to our first poll. Our first poll is, there we go, does your organization have a formal facilities condition assessment? Please take a second to select your answer. Yes, we conduct it regularly. It's a required process. Yes, but only occasionally when events require it. No, but we'd like to. No, we're not currently required to do so. Please answer the poll when you have a second. All right, so we'll keep going through here. So it seems like most people, yes, you're required to do it. In schools I know most are required every five years. Others seem to be doing it when prompted. So let's talk about exactly what it is and how you can go about doing it if you have not yet or if you do, how you could possibly do it better. A facilities condition assessment is usually conducted by engineers, an external firm who's going through every single thing on your list. They're entering your building health, your infrastructure and evaluating the integrity of HVAC, plumbing, electrical, everything. We know this is important because it will give you cost estimates for repair and will give you projections, energy efficiency assessments. All of these things can be included in a facility's condition assessment. It's critical because it will help you start to prioritize your tasks. But here's the problem. When you do this, it's done. When I did one and it was a couple of years ago now but it was just a big binder that I was given with facts of everything that was in the school in all of our buildings. And then what do you do with that binder? You have a list of what you need to fix and you have a list of things that might fail but you're not updating it. It's static. It's a moment in time. And perhaps you are keeping your own version of it and you're updating it but that's really the biggest problem with an FCA is where do you put that data after spending all this money to receive this information and you need to keep it updated as you make changes, as you keep going. So specifically talking about various industries, I just wanted to go through this since not everyone is in an education based position in this webinar but they're not one size fit all. They can adapt to what your industry needs. So a healthcare FCA might help you maintain your patient safety, your regulatory compliance and ensuring the most important things for healthcare are working HVAC power. Government public agencies will use their FCA to justify their infrastructure funding to meet ADA compliance, energy compliance, all of these resiliency efforts that your constituents may be asking you for. In manufacturing, the key is no downtime. Improve safety, align your equipment maintenance with production schedules, compliance needs, and ensuring that you are up and running whenever you need to be. And in schools, it's about prioritizing spend. It's about where are we spending next? If we have a limited budget, where does it go to? And what goals can we align with educational priorities? Across all of these sectors, an FCA is just a strategic planning tool and it will help you move into the next phase, which is our tactical asset management. So what I like to talk about here is you have your data, you have your asset registry, where do you put it? You need to maintain your day to day facilities. You need to help your team respond quickly, efficiently, improve their systems for working in the day to day operations of your facility. And in order to do that, you need to implement technology. The goal of that technology is faster work order response time, less time where technicians are trying to get the information. They have it. They can reduce the downtime by responding in an efficient way to also help with the daily maintenance routine. So what are your daily maintenance management? Filter changes, minor repairs, anything that you know is planned maintenance. How can you make sure that these things don't become larger problems by being on top of them? Keeping on top of inspections, compliance safety, we talked about that. Detecting wear and tear early. These are the things that all need to happen on a day to day basis that can be helped by implementing technology. And then the other things on this list are risk management. So that's obviously we want to mitigate risk by knowing when something is going to need repair and be prioritized in our capital planning. And then finally our ESG performance and reporting. Social and government often track these metrics for various compliance issues and so we need to be sure that we're doing that in a real time way. So the next piece that we get to is what's the technology Katie, you keep telling us about? There's two different terms you may have heard, a CMMS and an EAM. The CMMS stands for computerized maintenance management system. It's the older term for a similar software that manages your day to day maintenance. I personally prefer calling it an enterprise asset management if you're using a software that is of the next level that's taking you beyond just a work order ticketing system, beyond just your day to day work order management. So both will focus on scheduling and tracking maintenance work orders. But enterprise asset management is a software that will then take it further, not just about the maintenance, but the entire life cycle of the asset, giving you those strategic insights. So you would schedule your routine maintenance, you would manage your work orders, you will track your assets for maintenance. Great, that's the day to day. But on top of that, now you're going to integrate asset condition, the risks, the risk score that can be created from various sources of where that comes from and the financial data. So that then supports your capital planning, your long term forecasting and giving you the data to make smarter decisions. So while CMMS is a good starting point, EAM is the direction you want to be moving on if you're trying to really up your game to the next level of strategic asset management. So let's connect the dots from where we've been so far. We have the facilities condition assessment, you get the data from that and you put that information into a dynamic workflow. The dynamic workflow should be an EAM software of some kind where you're able to actually take that data from your FCA and make it actionable steps. What that means is the findings on your infrastructure condition, your cost estimates, your compliance gaps are now put into this system which is going to link each asset to a location and a priority level. The priority level is key for when you get to the next step. It's not just a report, it's actually part of your daily operations of here's what's continuing to happen, here's what needs to happen. So with your FCA data in your workflow, now you can have work orders based on your assessment findings automatically created, already set up. You know these things need to happen when they're ready to go for your team. You're not deciding it weekly, daily, monthly. Then you can also track your progress. The best thing I always like about implementing something like this is you can track your progress and your team's hard work. So when your team says, why are you tracking me and all the things I'm doing, you're trying to show that I'm not working. It's actually the opposite of this. Most of the time we know as facilities leaders, our teams are working way too hard and doing way too much every day. And having this trackability in a software that would allow you to see your work orders based on the hours, the asset and which asset is causing the most failures and the most overtime and the most downtime will actually only support proving your staffing needs, whether it be getting more staff, whether it be there's an asset that's costing you more because it's always needing overtime repairs. You are able to do all of that and track your progress as you move forward and then align those to your strategic goals. So the key takeaway from everything I've said thus far, because I've said a lot in twenty minutes is integrating your FCA data into a living resource through technology and EIM is key to move to the next step because that will ensure your capital planning is grounded in real time data and your maintenance team is supported by facts that will help them in their day to day operations and making their lives easier which is what we all want. So I'm going to go through a quick case study and because I'm an education specialist, it is a university, it's Wake Forest University who's one of our clients. And what did they do? What did they have? If you don't know anything about Wake Forest University, I'll give you a quick summary so you know where we're coming from. Three forty acres, nine thousand students, eighty buildings, and a lot of them are old. So you have a varied campus with many different facilities needs. The big challenge was the staff. The staff was using outdated software. The staff didn't have the information they needed and they didn't have asset condition information. So they might've had a work order ticketing system which I assume almost everyone has at this point, but they don't have the visibility into their asset conditions and they aren't able to actually in the field real time get that information to them and create those plans for future reporting. So they wanted something mobile friendly, something modern that was asset centric with actual reporting capabilities and they wanted to be able to make real time decisions based on that data rather than having to figure it all out. Their goal was move from reactive to proactive using data and then scale as they learned how to do that and grow with the complexity of their buildings and their campus. So to give you a quick overview, when they implemented an EAM system, is the first part of their journey, they already moved from a ten percent reactive to ninety percent or sorry, ten percent reactive. I'm saying that backwards. Ten percent preventative maintenance, ninety percent reactive maintenance. They moved it to a forty five percent preventive maintenance just from being able to respond quicker. So that's a huge leap. They empowered their technicians with mobile access, work orders, parts, manuals and they reduced downtime and extended their asset life by being on top of the asset maintenance. I've done a few talks like this in person at conferences and usually when I ask the question of what do you say your percentage of reactive versus preventive maintenance is? Usually preventive is ten percent or less. Very few people can get to a forty five percent just because of the time you're constantly replying to day to day work orders and ticket requests. So getting to that point in and of itself is huge. The other thing that I talked about before, which is the technicians are now mobilely able to access their work orders, their parts, their manuals in the field. So they don't have to return to the office. They don't have to come back for questions. And that also speeds up their response time which then in turn allows them to have more time for preventive maintenance rather than fully reactive maintenance. And then before sustainability was a goal of the university but they didn't have the ability to track it other than what they were doing. So tracking sustainability metrics in a data centric way is key because now they actually have a sustainability staff member that helps them support where can they reuse supplies? Where can they reuse furniture? What can they do to report out to their board, their constituents, what sustainability measures they've taken? I see a question in the chat. Do you have an SCA template form that can be used for an assessment? There definitely are those available and I know we at Brightly have a few resources which we can send out after on our website that will get you started in that. I would say the best place to start if you're going to try to do it in house because you're a smaller organization, you can do it in house. One of the private schools I used to work at would do the large one every five years but then do in house updates every year. And the best way to do that is by building, by asset class, by type and you can do it in a spreadsheet to start. But we do have some resources on Brightly that I can make sure you receive after this because we'll go through this chat and make sure we get back to you. If anyone else wants some of those resources, chime in so we can make sure you get them too. So moving forward, Wake Forest was able to do all of this with just the EAM. I will say that I don't have a slide on this but I'm presenting with them, in the future soon. They're also now moving into my next step which strategic asset management and then finally our digital transformation. So as I get to that, I'll try to sprinkle in some things that they're doing as we go along because they're moving beyond this. This was something that they did a few years ago and now they're well beyond this. So bearing the lead, strategic asset management, what's step three? If we're in step three, we're moving to where most people want to be. It's not aspirational. It just takes time to get there. We're not just managing our assets and reacting to maintenance needs. We're trying to proactively shape the future of our facilities through data driven capital planning, which is a fancy word that you, a fancy term that you probably hear all the time. But what it means is we're using the information we have in a strategic way. What does that look like? Capital investment plans and reporting. You're going to be building long term investment strategies. They're going to align with your organization's mission. Whatever your institution, your business, their mission is, you need to be able to align your strategic investments with that. I use schools as an example. If your school is a performing arts school, you will not be investing a lot in the football stadium. It's a simple answer but that's the mission of your organization and where you should be aligning your goals. Then you'll be able to put this into real time data presented in a format that can resonate with your finance and leadership team. So if you're the facility staff and you're not a financial expert but you need to get this information to the financial teams to create their capital plan, You need this data to help you in this next step, create what that plan might be. The other thing that I love about our next step is that it also helps you create what if scenarios. What could happen? What happens? Can you actually model different funding levels, different asset failures or growth projections so that you are ready no matter what happens, you have a plan. And again, there's only so much you can do with acts of mother nature and things like that but you should have a plan so that you can move your capital plan where it needs to go depending on what happens. The other thing that you can do is actually predict and use historical data, predictive analytics and forecast asset failure. You can also project manage. You can project manage with strategic planning and overseeing your capital projects. You're tracking these goals, you're paying attention. And then finally, the last one on this list is sustainability dashboards. If you have a very lofty net zero goal, you can track that. But if you don't, you might just have compliance levels that you have to meet and you need to be able to communicate that to stakeholders. So all of this matters because your strategic planning is taking your facilities into a cost center that is taking money and making it actually a strategic asset. You're not just fixing the problems, you're investing in resilience, you're investing in performance. And if you're aligning with a mission, that's what your leaders will want to see. So how do we do that? You're all thinking, Katie, just tell us how to do it. So we're going to get to our next poll. Which describes your use of CMMS or EAM systems? If you have a CMMS or an EAM system, are you using it? Are you managing your maintenance and assets through that? Do you have a system in place but you're not really sure how to use it? Do you not have anything and you're kind of looking and that's why you joined this webinar to see what it's all about or you've never heard those terms until today? So I'll give you a second to answer that poll. And I see a couple of people in the chat that would like a copy of some of the FCA resources. And we have all of these Q and A in here so we will be sure to get back to you. All right, let's see. People have a CMMS or an EAM and they are trying to manage their assets. That's great. Twenty nine percent is doing what I'm talking about. We have thirty eight percent approximately that have a system and are trying but are not one hundred percent sure they're using it right. I feel like that's probably the most common answer if you have an answer that I hear in person, which is we have it, we're trying to use it, we're not really sure how to use it, we're probably using fifty percent of its capabilities. We don't have one. We're exploring options and we're just learning what it means. So great. This is all good. You're in the right place if you want to learn what it means. So let's get into it. The next thing I'm talking about is called asset investment planning. It's also known as AIP software. It is where you take the data that you've already invested in your CMMS or your EAM system and you go to the next step. Your operational data is now strategic insight. It takes your, we always say it takes your facilities data and translates it into financial data. So if you don't have it yet and you have those things cause in the poll a lot of people said you have CMMS or an EAM, how do you then move to this next level? What does it look like? Well, AIP is a framework and software solution that can actually help you organize all of your data from your facilities, from your work orders, from your response time, from your staff and what they're doing every day and allowing you to give you the information to prioritize your investments, to build transparent and defensible budgets. Defensible budgets is very important in public schools, private schools, but I'm sure it's also very important in other places if you're trying to get your budget approved by whomever is the powers that be that approve your budget, you need to defense on why you need it. And in doing so then you're actually extending your asset lifespan because you're keeping on top of these things, you're not reactive. So it's not just about tracking the assets, it's about planning for the future. An AIP software will automate your data collection, will use predictive analytics, will centralize your asset management, take that data directly from your CMMS or EAM, whatever you want to call it and give you those strategic insights that you don't need to do manually and figure out by yourself. So what does that look like in a little bit more detail? Let's talk about it. In terms of all of the industries, not just schools specifically, what are we talking about? If you're in healthcare, you might use AIP to budget for medical equipment replacements and ensure you're constantly in compliance and what upgrades need to happen for these main areas, patient care areas, the places that just cannot fail. In a government, we talked about this a little bit before. You need to be able to forecast your infrastructure investments. We all know even if we're not in government, what happens when infrastructure fails? How do you minimize downtime? How do you improve safety and align your goals with whatever your community needs and ensure that your budget is planned accordingly. In manufacturing, you need to actually plan for your upgrades. What production equipment do you need upgraded? What energy efficiency do you need to improve to save money and increase ROI? Also what OSHA standards are you complying with that you need to check-in on? So there's a lot of places you can use it in manufacturing and in education like talked about, how do you prioritize renovations? How do you get your budget approved? How do you do that, while aligning your facilities with your academic mission? No matter what your industry is, the goal is the same. Make a smarter, more strategic decision with limited resources. I have a question that I'm going to answer right now. It's a Brightly specific question but I will answer it. This is a separate piece from your CMMS. So if you have, ours is called Acid Essentials. If you have something separate software. Brightly's is called Origin but what it is, is it is CMMS agnostic. So it takes the data from whatever CMMS you have, whether it's Brightly or not and it adds that financial piece. Obviously you know my bias but moving forward, it adds that financial piece from any CMMS or EIM data to a different level of software. So it's something in addition to. How does it work? The simplest way to explain it in the non technical way of what it's doing is a four step process. It's centralizing that asset information from your CMMS, from your EIM. It's documenting the condition as it stands today of your asset, which is your baseline for planning. So as you're planning and it's updating constantly based on your work orders, if my team is updating work orders, updating what they're doing and their maintenance of an HVAC unit, let's say, it will start changing the condition of your asset. So it will actually say, okay, you haven't been doing your changes which means now your asset life is shorter because you haven't been changing the filters or you have but your team hasn't updated in your CMMS and marked it as done. So it takes that next level. I would also say a commercial office building is very similar manufacturing in Brightly. We call it CRE commercial real estate, very similar. It's all the same type of use case. Any facilities that needs to plan their facilities budget and their assets and when to replace things and repair things, it would all be the same. That's a really good question. Another question specifically about this, I'm going to talk about it in this slide, which is what is the source of these expenses? So it's actually, I'm going to, it takes your data from your CMMS, it connects it to your existing maintenance data. Then it's taking the asset condition with work order history, your preventive maintenance schedules and all of the details that's happening. So like I just said, if your team is staying on top of things, connecting that. It's creating your PM schedule to ensure you're on top of those things. And then step three is what your question is about that I see in here, which is it's providing an analysis of your assets. So it's taking historical cost projections, it's taking actual, what ours does and maybe not all of them do is it can take local data for costs. It can take depending on where you live because we all know supplies and things cost differently depending on where in the country you live. So it takes local data, it takes data amalgamated from all of the people around you that are also using the same thing and creates a cost projection based on the manufacturer data, on local data, based on asset condition. And it does all of this to create an end of life estimate, a risk score and an industry benchmark, which will then allow you to say, okay, I'm looking at this compressor unit. Here's the end of life estimate from when I bought it. It was twenty five years. We have not been doing our preventive maintenance. We have not been keeping up with the repairs. So now it's down to ten years and the risk score is higher. But then you're able to actually put in those priorities based on this is a high use area, this one is my top priority and that sort of thing. So I won't get into too much data on the specifics of the software. We can definitely send out resources about that. But what it does is it will take all that information and allowing you to, with your insights to create that budget. It's actually, yes, it is. It's being constantly updated. It uses RSMeans data as well as your own data and local data all combined. So it supports your budget requests with that data and then you can go and build a compelling capital plan and it actually will help you go up to thirty years of potential future capital plans. You're not just asking for money, you're showing why it's needed and when it's needed and what happens if it's delayed. If something comes up and now you don't have the money for that thing that you budgeted for, when should it now fall into your new capital plan? How can you adjust your capital plan? And helps you do that quickly and automatically rather than sitting back at the drawing board and erasing things and saying, okay, I just lost that twenty five thousand dollars Where am I going to get it from now? So it helps you do all of that in a technologically based way that uses formulas and local information and RSMeans data. Thank you, Eric. That was a good question to help you figure that out. So the final piece of this section, we still have one section to go but we're going to get to it and you guys have almost made it to your forty minutes is the asset investment planning process. Where do we go? We got our data collection from our EAM system. It is accurate. We have our risk assessment which is helping me prioritize based on the urgency and the impact on my organization. What does it do? Then it's giving you financial modeling, translating that technical data into budget language for whomever it needs in a finance focused report that will help you plan a budget. And finally you take your annual budget and you build a capital plan which is actually grounded in real data, real time data and ready to present to your board, your boss, whoever is approving your budget. So AIP in and of itself is the bridge from the CMMS, the EAM, the facilities to the finance. And it's actually helping you push yourself from reactive to proactive investing. And I personally feel it gives you the confidence to know that you're picking the right thing to fund because the worst thing that can happen and I use this analogy a lot when I'm talking to people is you just trust your vendors. We love our vendors. Some of them we know and trust and love but the example is I don't know much about cars. If I go to the car mechanic with my car and they say to me, you need to fix this, this and this and it's going to cost this much. I have no data point to say, no, it shouldn't cost that much or no, I don't need to fix that for two more years. I have no data point and I don't know enough about cars to say that. So what we need to do is have that to back our choices so that yeah, we might be wrong but at least we did as much as we possibly can to predict it and prevent it before any other emergencies or unexpected expenses come up. So let's get to this final piece before we go to our Q and A section. What does the future look like? We've all heard about AI, we've all heard about digital twins. What comes after this? You've got your facilities running, you've got your finance running, where else can it go? So a lot of people use the word digital or they say it's a smart facility. It's a smart institution. It's a smart campus. What does that actually mean? What could that mean for you and your organization? Most organizations have a BAS in their facilities, which is a building automation system, also sometimes called a BMS. This is giving you the information you need when things are broken. They're giving you IoT sensors. It's giving you actual real time sensor data of what's happening in your building. That should now be connected into a unified platform where you take your HVAC, your lighting, your security, your utilization data and it's all in a unified platform that gives you centralized control of your facilities. Ideally giving you remote building management, giving you a team that can monitor and respond to issues from anywhere can be agile, can reduce response time. At schools, you're not always in the building at large campuses and other I'm sure in governments and healthcare, if you're running a facilities with multiple buildings and multiple areas, commercial real estate for example, you're not going to physically be at the location half the time. So you can respond to issues from anywhere and get those without getting those phone calls after it's happened preventing the issue from happening. A digital twin is a buzzword that we all are hearing right now but what it actually is, is a virtual replica of your physical asset. So it would allow you to simulate the performance to predict your failures, to optimize the operations before they occur in a digital view of your facilities. And then the next piece that we're hoping this will all include and we're trying to work on with our partners in Siemens is this unified building interface, a single pane of view where you can see all of these things, you can manage report and make those decisions from afar while looking virtually at the exact thing that's happening in your building. And finally, the obvious answer of why this is so great is your emergency response. You have the real time data so you can act faster. And one of the stories that one of our clients has talked about many times with us is what if you are at a place where on the weekends your staff's not there and then you have a pipe burst and then the pipe bursts and no one's there and you don't see it till Monday morning. You've got a huge insurance claim on your hands, you've got damage. If you had had a sensor reporting and letting you know if you had had all of this, you wouldn't have that problem. You'd be able to react in real time. So I think that's something that can really help. When we're looking at this process as a whole, digital transformation is something that we all talk about and we hear about and we read about in our trades journals but it's not just about new technology. It's not about just buying the software. It's about creating a process for you, for your stakeholders that includes a shared vision, that includes assessing infrastructure readiness, upgrading your critical assets, implementing your control systems, defining what are those KPIs once we do it? How do we know this is working? How do we actually attribute what are now our reactive versus proactive maintenance percentage is? What's your ideal funding? And then continuously improving towards this autonomous facilities operation. It's a journey and so this seems very, you know, high level. We're not even there. We're just trying to get our maintenance teams to respond quickly and efficiently, but it is possible if you just do it one step at a time. Another slide that I like to show is this one because I think it shows all the different pieces of what's disconnected. I'm sorry if you can hear that, my dog is being a pain in the butt. There we go. It's all very disconnected. And right now you have all these different pieces and you're struggling because strategy, technology and procurement are all disconnected. And usually the facilities team is very separate from the finance team, from the procurement, from the IT team. So when the investments are made based on cost, not on life cycle value, you're just going to be disappointment when the outcome of that investment doesn't match the expectation that you were hoping for. So what you really need is a strategy, smart technology and financial models that will help you with your long term goals. And if they're not integrated in a fully transparent system, there's only so much you can do. And so the start, the place you need to begin in all of this is how do we connect these systems? How do we make a transparent shift from facilities to finance and then moving forward, hopefully predictive, not just proactive. The final piece of all of this is we take all these pieces. It's a fancy slide but all it's saying is everything I just said which is what is a smart facility? If you're calling it a smart facility, what is it? Technology automates your operations and gives you real time monitoring. Finance supports your life cycle cost management. You're prepared for those expenses. You've budgeted for it and you have it ready to go. And you also have that emergency fund for the things that come up that are unexpected. All of this aligns with your strategy. So it's aligning with your sustainability needs, your branding, your user experience. If it's students, if it's patients, if it's the customer in a manufacturing, all of those goals are met by this strategy. It's creating this holistic approach so that like I just said, you're not reactive, you're not proactive, you're predictive and you're resilient and everything you have is moving forward to ensure that everything is working together and you're doing the best you can to predict the future, which is hard but you can get there with technology. We're getting close. So all of that leads to my wrap up here and I'm curious if anyone has any questions and that we get to the end. I know Wendy's on here somewhere too if there were anything in the chat that I missed. Well, are some really good questions coming in. So first of all, thank you so much. Couple of questions and a couple of requests for some of that additional resource information that you shared earlier, Katie. So thanks everybody. Keep it coming. One question came in about smart building programs programs and how they play alongside the BAS and all that benchmarking piece. So what can you tell us more about that Kate? That's a really good question. So yes, there are a lot of smart building programs. I say that because they say that word and we don't actually know what that means. In some cases it can refer to different things. Smart building programming needs to be tied in somewhere if you want it to do all the things we just talked about, which means you can have a BAS system, you can have a smart sensor program where you're getting IoT alerts, you're getting alerts that say this pipe is leaking, this thing is happening. But what are you doing with that information and where is it going? So I think that's the piece that Brightly and Siemens is trying to help with. And I know there are other places that are also trying to help with it but how do you streamline all that into that single pane of glass and then use that data other than just to react to it? So you have the smart building that's alerting you. We'll keep with this example. The pipe is leaking. Great, I'm going to go fix it. It is no longer leaking. But then what does that mean? Does that mean this is something that now the risk score is higher on this building because this has leaked thirty seven times in the last two months and this is now a priority on our budget versus not. Is this a building that's a high use building? Is this a building that's basically vacant? So we can push it down a little bit on the list because there's something else more in a higher priority. So that's something where the smart building pieces like those systems are a component of all of this and ensuring that it is tied into some other resource that adds the financial aspect is key. And I think that's missing from a lot of it. It's the facilities piece you're getting but then what do you do with that other than fix the thing, right? So I do think that's an awesome, it's like, you know, if we go back to that slide with all these little hexagons or whatever they are, it's one of those buckets, but how do we connect them all together? To me, it's really harnessing or delivering on the promise of automation of AI of advanced data analytics. And it's exciting to see it like in real time through that Wake Forest kind of detail that you shared. And then of course the leaky pipe example. I mean that's one thing you can't just fix it and forget it. So one of the things sorry, I'll just add to that Wendy. One of the things that Wake Forest is currently doing is just that they're actually piloting with us in Siemens. What if we have all these disparate BAS systems in all of our buildings? How do we connect all those to create automatic work orders in our work order system, in our CMMS, in our EAM? And it's something that we're trying to pilot with them right now because that's the goal, right? Everything just does it for us and we just respond to it. So hopefully we're getting there soon. Yeah, that sounds like an exciting project. Maybe you could bring us an update at some point. I think people here want to hear how that all comes together. I'm sure it's very relatable. Chris has a question about software programs and small nonprofit limited budget kind of entities. I think it kind of aligns with another question that's come in about how FMs can and should communicate the vital aspect of strategic asset management. You know people are fixing the leaky pipes and they're reacting and they're reacting and they're here. How do you get them to look bigger? And then maybe talk about what that investment means no matter what the budget. Exactly. I think that's important Wendy which is obviously there's a ton of options upmarket. There are small ones that are very cheap and there are large ones that are huge for massive conglomerates that you don't need if you're in a small little nonprofit organization. I get that. But what I would say is the best way to impress upon the person that needs to approve you purchasing something like this is to show them the return on investment exactly like you said which is it may cost some upfront, but what it will be doing is actually managing your budget so that in the future, I'm not just coming to you for ten thousand here, twenty thousand here, ten thousand here every day because we didn't prepare for it. We can plan ahead, we can prioritize and we can actually choose those things. So sometimes it takes a bit and actually, I mean, go to whomever you would like but in Brightly specifically we have some ROI calculators that can help you show that to the people in charge that would have to see that. But there's a way that you can show how maximizing your efficiency saves money. Another good example on like a very basic level is if you have a work order management system and your staff is more efficient at responding to requests, you won't be paying as much overtime. And if you're not paying as much overtime, there's a savings that would add to your ROI in this purchase. So there are ways to show that if that comes down to it. It sounds like the calculation and the hard costs. I mean, this is data and data is really it's not subjective. Can you talk a little bit more about the predictive maintenance side and the FDA FDA data, not just to talk about bringing the system to play or board, but how about those capital investments like you were talking about? What kind of guess what kind of scope or presentation do you think makes the most sense when you're talking with the decision makers and the people writing the checks? Yeah, that's a great question. And I think so let's say, I mean, we're all realistic. I worked at private schools. They didn't have insane budgets. So you have to work with what you have. So you might not get all of these things that I just talked about all at once. But let's say you have an FCA, you got to strike while you have a fresh one. If you have a fresh one coming up, that is your time to invest in some sort of software system to keep it updated. If you don't, then you can plan for that accordingly but start laying the groundwork now that says if I'm putting in this investment in time into this data collection, what am I going to do with it? And continuing to keep that investment going. So once you put that into your FCA, then you have it or into your CMMS or your EAM system, then you have that data that you're keeping up with. So once your staff is using it and convincing your staff to be up to date because of something I said earlier, is this actually helps you. This helps you show the work you're doing, show the efficiency you show if we need more staff, show if we are not meeting deadlines because we are being asked to do this many hours and you have data to prove it. It's not just me saying, I know they work really hard so trust me. You actually have data and hours and proof to show it. So once you get everyone on board to that which is a challenge sometimes and they see the value of putting in that little extra work with technology, then you'll have that information. If you just have that piece and you haven't moved on to AIP, you can definitely use that data for capital planning. You could use that data. It's just not helping you the way AIP takes it to the next level. But can you say, okay, this has failed this many times and this is how much it costs and you can create that capital plan from that data? Yes, you definitely can. It just AIP takes it to another level like you said, using more technology, more data AI driven functionality where you can say, okay, what else? How much does this cost in Minnesota? How often do people have to change these things in this area and add all that other data on top of it. So just takes it to another level but you can definitely use it. That's interesting. And a question just came in that I think is a nice segue from Paul. So thanks Paul. Asking about staffing levelsexpertise that you would recommend to keep this kind of system going maybe from the onboarding through the Depending on where you work and what staff level you have, it is a question. So like in an ideal world you have some administrative staff that is the day to day manager of this, whether it's the facilities director, the assistant director, something like that where they are now using this to ensure the teams that are out in the fields are closing their tickets or updating their things, are doing all that. Like ideally you have someone manage that. It's usually in my instances, it has either been the director does it themselves or the assistant director, the admin assistant, the dispatcher per se would be the person actually using that. It's all very user friendly once you do it and most places, Brightly in particular does have lots of training, lots of resources where you can meet with people and make sure you're using it to the best of your ability. I will say the key is making sure that first step getting your data in is accurate or you're just going to be hurting yourself in the future. So getting that in there correctly and taking the time to do it, even if that means slowing down the launch of something like this is really important because that's your baseline as you move forward. And then once you do that, like I said, you can definitely do it yourself. You don't need a whole person who this is their only job. But does it make it easier if you have an admin that does it? For sure. But you don't need to be an IT expert or anything like that to do something like this. And you talked about kind of a timeline and how your mileage may vary. Is that something that Brightly would work with on an individual basis? Kind of give some recommendations for some key guideposts along the Like you said, some people might have a fresh FCA that we can pull from, some might not. And what Brightly does, think some other, I'm sure our competitors do too if you have someone else, but keeping it generic is you can do it with a specialist that would do it. There are partners that will do it for you. If you have the team to do it themselves, great. But most people don't have the team that has the time to go around and mark everything down themselves just like an FCA. Some people do internal FCAs and you can definitely do that. Some people don't have the time or the staff available to do it. So it's really up to you. There's always an option to get it done either way. Okay, well here's an option. It sounds like somebody might be interested in leveraging. Rebecca's asking about her school. They're currently using Asset Essential as their CMMS. They want to hear more about features that can be added or implemented to elevate it to a true AEM. Great question. Yeah. So if you have a CMMS, whether it's Asset Essentials or someone else that I will not name, can for Asset Essentials, the first part of the question is you can always upgrade your game using it. We have a lot of reports, a lot of functionality that people are not using and we have CSC which our customer success team that can help you elevate your use of that and we'll reach out to you specifically, Rebecca, to connect you to someone. But if you have any of these programs that aren't even ours, asset investment planning software which is that third step we talked about is a separate entity that pulls the data from that. So there's two answers, which is how do you optimize using what you currently have and then what can you add to it? I hope that makes sense. Yeah, it does. And I'm shocked to look at the clock and realize we are coming right up to the top of the hour. So first of I want to thank everybody for these great questions. If there's a few still hanging out in the chat, remember we're looking through them and we're going to be able to get those answers to you. So I'm going to have Kevin's question as our last and in case Katie maybe you give us just a quick wrap up and next steps and then I'll come back and release us all into our day. Kevin's wondering how Brightly is procured. How are you working? Are you a subscription basis? Are you off the shelf product purchase? How does it all come together? Depends on your situation. So I will we'll reach out to you. Anyone who specifically wants information on their organization, what it looks like for them. We will get any information to all of you and we will also reach out with a follow-up email so you'll be able to contact us and check out our resources and we'd be happy to answer questions specific to you. Easy to do. Great. All right, let's talk about next steps. Some people might be hearing from you guys directly. They're going to get those resources in addition. But what should they be thinking about as they go into the next phase of evaluating and assessing this kind of system for their own team and department and organization? Yeah, I think it's scary for most people especially if you've never used anything like this or if your team is very set in, we use this thing, we know how to do it, we're not changing. So I think the most important part that I always come across is okay, what is the benefit of this that will make our lives easier even if it's a bit of a lift to start? And so how do we prove what that value is first? And then what does that lift look like and how do we take it one step at a time? It sounds so generic to say that, but it's true. What is your asset information? What do we have here? How old is it? How often are we fixing it? What are we doing? And gathering that database is the first step. Once you have that, you'll feel so much better because at least you have a list of everything you have. And then once you've gone through all that hard work, you want to spend the money to have some sort of software to put it in rather than just waste all that time. So the more you can be proactive and plan ahead, I would even argue before you waste your time gathering all that data, plan where it's going. What are you doing with it before you waste all that time? And if you don't have a plan for that, it's not worth doing at that point. So plan where it's going, what comes next and know that most places I'm from education, we're one of the slowest to adopt technology. Most places are not in the digital facilities yet. We're all just talking about how do we get there one step at a time. So that's all you can do when you're starting your day while also responding to eight thousand work orders a day. It's true. And for everybody on the call, we're all in this together. So your questions are just really helpful for all of us. We know where we want to go next in continuing to offer this kind of information and education to our community. I want to thank Katie for an excellent presentation that really, really got a lot of us thinking and a lot of us excited about what's out there in terms of these digital advances. We're not aspirational yet, but I think pretty soon a number of us from today's call will be. Thanks for your presentation. Thank you everybody. Nice to see you again and anyone find me on LinkedIn, send me questions. Happy to help. Great. Thank you, Katie. And thanks to our sponsor today as well, Brightly for their support of this event and their support of FM education in general. We really appreciate it. So once again, we appreciate everyone's time. Thank you. And this will conclude today's event. Have a great afternoon.