From Crisis to Confidence: Turning Facilities Failures to a Future-Ready Campus

Hello, everyone. My name is Steven Blackburn from University Business, and welcome to our Ed Talk here today from PR crisis to confidence where our panelists, they will be discussing how to turn failures into a future ready campus. And all of this is brought to you by the general support of our sponsor with us here today, Rightly. Now for some quick housekeeping items, I'll try to keep this as brief as possible. So first, if your audio cuts out or the slides freeze at any time, the the quick way to fix everything is just refresh your screen, and that should fix the issue. So again, any issues, just refresh your screen. At the end of our main presentation, there will be a live Q and A with our panelists here if we have time. You can submit your questions below. If you look at the bottom of your screen, click on that red ask question box. It's the one with the question mark in the chat bubbles. Again, we'd love to answer your questions. 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And now it is my pleasure to introduce Citi's moderator who will start things off and then introduce our guest university speaker. And our moderator today is, Katie Gramajo, who is senior industry marketing manager, of education at Brightly Software. Katie, you may now begin. Thanks, Steven. Hi, everyone. Sure. Some of you may have seen me before do a lot of these with Brightly, but if you haven't, I work for Brightly. Let me skip ahead. Brightly has been a software here in the facilities management for schools for about twenty five years now. We started specifically in k twelve, and we work in higher ed and all across the globe focusing specifically on facilities, infrastructure, and capital planning. So I am Katie Gramajo. I work for Brightly now, but prior to that, I was in a lot of your shoes as the director of operations at two different schools. I was at the Windward School, which is in New York, and I was at Campbell Hall, which is in Los Angeles. Angeles. So both coasts, nothing in the middle. Kyle, you wanna introduce yourself? Yeah. My name is Kyle Gregory. I am the director of facilities at Loyola University, New Orleans. Prior to coming to Loyola, I was in the air force for about twenty years and just retired last year. It's been about two years here at Loyola, and I look forward to sharing my experiences with everybody. Alright. So to understand the story that I know you're all dying to hear, we have to start with capital planning and how it can potentially break down. So capital plans fail if they're built on incomplete data, if they're built on outdated information or no data whatsoever from your facilities, which happens more often than not. So by doing that, you have misprioritized investments, you have budgets that go overboard, and you have a long list of deferred maintenance. The piece that happens all the time in our industry is that the facilities teams have this data and are often overlooked for how they can get it to the finance team, the asset condition, life cycle of those assets, and what it looks like. So at Loyola New Orleans, the alignment between that facility's data didn't quite exist yet, and so that's where we're going to go with this asset life cycle management. And before we get into the story, one quick thing to note, what is asset life cycle management? Because you're going to hear that term throughout this webinar. It's essentially connecting your facility's data to your capital strategy. So you're tracking your assets from the date of installation, commissioning, all the way through replacement. You are using predictive modeling instead of just reacting to decisions and reacting to maintenance that needs to happen. And, ideally, you would have a capital plan that's aligned and realistic to what your assets are actually doing in real time. Now not a lot of schools have that yet, so we're gonna start with how you might get it and what could happen if you don't have it. So I'm gonna hand it over to Kyle to talk about what happened when he started at Loyola. Well, thank you again for that introduction. Little bit about Loyola before we jump into it so I can paint the picture for everybody. Loyola, New Orleans is located in what is called Uptown, New Orleans. We're about fifteen minutes away from the French Quarter. For those of you that are familiar with the New Orleans skyline or the scenery, we're located right on Saint Charles Avenue across from Audubon Park. And the photos or the videos that you see of that street car that rides all the way down to the city and all across New Orleans, that does pass right in front of Loyola University. Our students and our faculty use that quite frequently. We have two campuses. One is called the Uptown Camp or the main campus, and the other one is our Broadway campus. Essentially, one is a graduate's and the other is an undergraduate's campus, and they're about four blocks away from each other. So we're really centrally located to each other, while being an urban campus. We have somewhere around four a little bit over four thousand students and our buildings vary from being historic buildings over a hundred years old to our most recently completed dormitory that was just finished last year. So now let's talk about our crisis. What happened? So prior to me coming to Loyola, things were done differently. I'll just say it that way. When I first got here, as most of you are probably in a similar situation, preventative maintenance was not something that was on the forefront of everybody's mind. Unfortunately, down here in New Orleans, we have extremely hard water. So what ends up happening if you don't treat your water, it can really damage your products. And for those of you that don't know what hard water is, just imagine when you're taking a shower and over time you get that little white stuff that starts to build up on the shower head, that's calcium. Terrible for your hair, Kyle. Terrible. I did not know that. I'm gonna have to remember that. Thank you. So jumping back into it. So this the hard water essentially created very rough conditions for our equipment. And our equipment was already extremely old. As you can see on the screen, most of our boilers and chillers were beyond their useful life. So let me go ahead and paint the picture for you. Mardi Gras is an extremely busy time for us in New Orleans. Essentially, it's like holiday if you go to Europe. Katie, I don't know if you've ever been to Mardi Gras, but essentially, the city I definitely recommend it. So the city essentially shuts down for two weeks. And four days before Mardi Gras, we experienced a boiler failure in the middle of the night. What happened? I had a boiler tube rupture at about eleven o'clock at night on our main boiler for our campus. Then four hours later, we had another failure on our backup boiler. A four foot flame ejected out the back of the blower motor and essentially now rendered me completely useless and heating our campus. The most unfortunate about this, because, of course, it always gets worse, our entire our entire heating system, not just for the HVAC, but also for the domestic supply, was associated with these boilers. So we lost the ability for kids to take hot showers as well as condition their spaces during a time of the year in which, unfortunately, a lot of these kids are gonna be drinking and partying and not going out of town. As you can see on the screen, it was a very long process, ups and downs trying to fix it. We had to bring in some rental boilers to make this make us operational. It took us about ten months before we finally got our system online, but fortunately, now where we're at, we're at a position that not only do we have two new boilers in place, we are in a situation in which we are conserving energy, we have redundancy, and we have now implemented a preventative maintenance program, so that way we don't have these issues present itself in the next five, ten, or fifteen years. Alright. So let's talk a little bit about how to overcome crises or situations like like this. For those of you that aren't facilities directors or facilities managers and looking at things at the at the executive level, over the years in my military experience as well as being here, I've been exposed to numerous mentalities of how to handle crisis situation from hurricane responses all the way to these boiler scenarios. And some of the best advice that I've gotten in my career was to model yourself after a duck. And what do I mean by that is take a look at the screen and you can see the duck floating in the water. The water that's surrounding the duck is essentially your data. The this is all the information that you're going to receive about the situation you're dealing with. That's your situational awareness. Is this water cold? Is it hot? What what is the information telling you? In the case of my boiler scenario, what happened? How did we get here? Why did it fail? What's going on? From there, then you need to figure out, alright. This is my data. Within your data, how did this happen? Then you need then we start talking about what direction do we need to go through? How do we resolve the the crisis, the problem we're dealing with? Again, as you can see when you look at the duck, you can see the ripples in the water. That duck is traveling in one direction. That's where it needs to go. That's what it's doing. That is your command, your intent, the message you're delivering to your team. Where are we going? How are we going to get there? And then lastly, it's discipline. More often than not, people think the idea of discipline is telling somebody what to do or holding standards. While those things are important, this idea in a in a crisis management model is more about self discipline. It's trusting your employees to execute what they need. It's trusting yourself to follow the data that getting. It's to make a decision and push everybody there. And let and again, look at the duck. Underneath the water, that duck's feet are moving a mile a minute, so that way it can get to where it needs to. It's staying disciplined regardless of what obstacles are placed in front of it and everything that's on its path. And, Kyle, you were relatively new to your position when this all happened. Correct? Which is a lot of pressure for that duck. Yes. At that time, I would have been thirteen months in this position. So That's a big trying to be big crisis for an early position. So I think that's also good to note of the the as you said, the pressure always happens, and it seems to happen in the domino effect of it's never one thing. It's more and more things, so let's solve the problem while moving forward. Correct. And that's where we're at right now. So let's talk a little bit about the data that I received when I had this issue. So within your data, you should fortunately have the root cause of how you got there. The root cause for us, as I alluded to earlier, was twofold. It's the age of equipment and the maintenance. At the end of the day, the age is the age. It's like with a vehicle. If you drive fifty thousand miles and you never do any sort of preventative maintenance on it, odds are at fifty thousand miles, you're gonna have more issues than if you were doing the maintenance prior to getting there. As you can see on the screen, it's it's pretty self explanatory. We weren't tracking PMs. There's nothing standardized. We didn't have service contracts in place. We weren't able to even document where to prove this. And again, in this scenario, the water treatment was our true root cause. If we would've been treating this thing right from the moment it came in, we would've been fine. And, Katie, just like you said, yeah, this happened one year into my employment here at Loyola, but this wasn't caused by one year's worth of lack of maintenance. This is a compounding issue over many, many years. And the good thing, I'm gonna show everybody exactly what it looked like. I love and hate this photo, Kyle. Oh, trust me. I love and hate it as well. I've lived this. So what you see on the screen is a cross section cut of one of the boiler tubes that ruptured. The stuff that you see right here, this icky looking stuff is essentially calcium. Think of your think of your bones in your body. The sodium bicarbonate and calcium carbonate, because of the heat being applied to it, caused this to solidify. This little to this little hole that you see in there, that's all the path that the water could take. So what happens when you start heating up water? It starts to expand, and it's gotta go somewhere. Right? So that is an example how bad it can get if you don't do maintenance on your boiler system. Alright. So we talked a little bit about data. Now let's jump into the direction. So what did we as a university have to do? Well, it's a multi pronged approach because we're dealing with not only the crisis on hand of we don't have hot water to supply to these children for almost a month. How do we resolve this issue? Stabilize until we get the new boilers in place, But how do we prevent this from happening again into the future? So we got a rental boiler. We were able to get that thing operational as quickly as we could. Like I said, we had it here for about ten months, but the long term focus is what was important. And I will always say to everybody, and I have learned this throughout my life, every obstacle is an opportunity for improvement, and that is true for the case of Loyola University. Because we had this boiler failure, infrastructure has been on the forefront of everybody's mind, whether it's faculty, staff, student. And unfortunately, now with what's going on in New Orleans, Katie, I don't know if you've been reading the news, but we have infrastructure problems all across the city. So it's well known how important infrastructure is. And Kyle, actually we have a question that I think would be a good timed one for this slide. Where did you find the money to do these replacements? So obviously this was an emergency, so usually that will be approved due to an emergency need that has to happen for the school. But was there a way you were able to continue to get this investment? And as we talk further about your future plans, how were you able to do that? I know we're gonna lead into that a little bit, but maybe you could talk specifically about this moment right here. Yeah. That's a great question. I'm the benefit of timing. That's really all I can say in this type of situation. The prior to me coming to this university, the previous administration had gotten bond funds for major capital projects and improvements over the years. And once we finished our major dormitory project, we had such savings in the contingency that we didn't have to touch. We were able to actually pull from that contingency and fund the infrastructure project. Now what's unique to New or it's the program's name is unique to New Orleans, but I know most states have this. It's called the energy smart program. For those of you that are unfamiliar with it, essentially, our local utility provider, Entergy, gives cash rebates for us saving for saving funds. So we've been able to use a mix of bond funds for the major capital, but then those tertiary components that are either in the central plant or in other buildings, we've been able to fund through some of those energy savings. And as you can see on the screen, we've been very fortunate. Since January of twenty twenty four till now, we've saved almost twenty percent of our utility usage, which is very astronomical for a campus this small in this type of environment. You've received those rebates from EnergySmart that can lower the cost of what you had to put up front at least. Correct. And that's the our and, again, it's unique to New Orleans from my understanding. Those rebates can either come to us as a check or the contractor that we're working with that can go directly to them to help offset that cost so that way now it doesn't even have to hit our books. Exactly. So that's actually a perfect transition to our next slide, which is how does Kyle get from we have a crisis to we never wanna deal with this again in the future. So we're talking about that ALM roadmap that we mentioned in the beginning of this deck, and what that is is starting with your asset information. Most schools we work with do not have a database of their assets. And what I mean by assets is the larger components within a building, not just your real estate asset package, but your boilers, your chillers, those large high ticket items that need preventive maintenance, just like Kyle mentioned, like a car to keep running properly, and that's where we go. Then we need to strategize how to better run our day to day. That's our tactical step. And then our capital planning is our strategic. And then our fourth is, ideally, we move to a fully autonomous campus that gets us through the day with as little manual work as possible and everything being automated. Now that's the goal, but we gotta start somewhere. I do think a key is moving forward. We're gonna start on this journey, and then I'm gonna get back to some of these questions because I think they're important to address. So right now, let's start with the beginning. You can't manage the risk that you can't see. If you can't see it, you can't manage it. So you need your asset information. You need a centralized asset data, condition, valuation all in one place. To do this, you need what's called an FCA. If you're not a facilities minded person, that's a facilities condition assessment. That's gonna give you a snapshot of where your facilities are at at one time, similar to a home inspection you might get when you purchase a home. But as you know about all of those, it's a one time snapshot. You have specific data on your assets that are done usually by an engineering firm and cost a lot of money, and then they hand you a binder or an Excel spreadsheet or some sort of PDF, and you have to do something with it. And in my past lives, people would just write on it. Did this. Check. But there's no actual oversight into how to keep this data accurate. So this is where Loyola started, collection, and then we'll talk about where they put that data. Alright. So the timeline, when you look at this, it's a little skewed because our asset gathering started before the boiler scenario, which actually worked in our favor. So like I said, I started here in January of twenty twenty four. My background before I came here in the air force was asset management, work order management, facilities management. So I have a lot of experience in that world. Once I got to this university here and started seeing everything, I realized this needs to be in place. So once we got the time once we got the the approval to go ahead and push forth, it's a really quick process. The team came out sometime in October. It took about two weeks. They walked around the campus, they inventoried everything, and they were able to apply a condition index to it, basically saying, you know, is it good, is it bad, which allows us to determine how long of a lifespan this thing is gonna have. Took a couple months for us to get everything ready to go, and the beauty of this was when I first got the reports, it was sometime around January ish. So it looked like a canary in a coal mine type situation, Katie, because guess what happened the very next month? I lost my boilers. Of course. You had step one, but would have been better to be at step three at this point. Much it would have been much nicer. Much nicer. So yeah. So they come in. They do the assessment. They knocked it out. Takes a couple months of data, just going back and forth, you know, refining everything to the tools that you need, and then tying it into the CMMS. And that's where the magic happens. On to that, Kyle. So what is a CMMS? For those that don't know, computerized maintenance management system, can also call it an EAM, an enterprise asset management system. But, basically, it's a software that takes your facility's condition data and implements it all in there in an asset hierarchy where you can now track everything you're doing on that asset. So as the team gets a work order or a ticket to do a repair or a preventive maintenance, then you can put in the soft software exactly what you're doing, and it will update the condition of your asset. So that is gonna not only do daily work orders, like this faucet is leaking, and then Kyle can someone to do it, but it will also do your regular maintenance, your inspections, and your performance reporting. So that's the next step, which is tactical, moving to your day to day improvements. And in doing that, we lead into how Kyle started fixing his day to day other than this large crisis. What else did you do? So once we once we got the crisis resolved and we got the asset system in place, we knew where our direction was. We we got there. But now it's how do we keep this from happening again? Now is the final the final part of this, the discipline. We put everything into the system. It's now generating these work orders. We're now contracted with our local our local providers to provide the services that we can't do. And guess what? When they give us their reports, we're able to associate it with the asset in the system, which now allows us to dynamically adjust how much longer this thing is going to last, whether it be another two years or another four years. As we're doing the maintenance, Katie, it's adjusting for us, which you know what the beauty of that's allowing us to do? We're shifting from being a crisis response team to a preventative maintenance workforce. Exactly. And, Actually, this next slide will go perfectly with the question we have in our Q and A, which is, who did you work with to manage your stakeholders' expectations during your crisis process? How did you share updates? We noted that there were some news reports on this issue. How else did you keep people informed of your ducks paddling feet underneath the calm? So, I'm in a unique position here where I work directly for the president of the university. I know that most universities are not set up that way. I'm very fortunate. So I had a direct line, but it took a team effort. We worked with our marketing and communication team, so that way we could constantly get updates out. Our emergency management team here at the university, we were having daily meetings while the crisis was ongoing. We were working with our media relations team, especially once the the news reports started coming out that we were in the situation. Obviously, we needed to make sure that the correct information was being passed on. That it was it was a team effort. It wasn't us just working in the background. It was working with all levels of the university, being with the pro you said on this slide, Kyle, which you focused on the facts, not not excuses. It is what it is. Here's where we are. Let's just figure out how to fix it as fast as we can. Yes. I mean, at the end of the day, stuff breaks. And it it's it's my job as a it's my job as a facilities director to either paint the picture before it happens or tell you how we got here and how we're gonna fix it's it's just just own it and figure it out. And even though it was a crisis, it was a really good proof point, as you have noted on this slide, to help justify your future spend to keep this from happening in the future. So I think that will lead into our final two steps, and I'm gonna ask a quick poll that you'll see on the screen. Have you heard of asset investment planning software? Please check. Yes. And we have it. Yes. But I don't know what it does. Now tell me more. And we'll do this very quickly because we only have a couple more minutes. And while we wait, I'll just jump in really quick and say so everyone in the audience, look at where the slides were currently, and you should see the questions right now. Just click directly on the answer, that best applies to you, and then click submit. So, we really appreciate it. About twelve percent of you have, given your answers and love to have a few there. Alright. I'm gonna keep going because we have a good number. No. Or I don't know what it does. That's usually how this poll goes if I ask it, so I'm not surprised. So the third piece, that strategic planning piece comes in, and it's asset investment planning software. So I'm actually gonna just jump down to this next slide so you can see it. We're on this oh, sorry. We're right here, and we're at asset investment planning. So this is a software program in addition to your CMMS that will take the finance layer and add it to your facilities. So, basically, we're going to take all that data that Kyle's team is inputting into the CMMS based on all the hard work they're doing, preventive maintenance, day to day work orders, and all of those costs, and that's gonna be pulled into another layer that translates into a capital plan, gives you risk scores, gives you, predictive budgets, gives you all different scenarios that you can check into and see if I replace this based on this priority, how would that affect our budget? And I won't go too much into the tech specs of this. You can look it up yourself, or we'd be happy to set up a meeting with you. But it creates that financial insight so that you can make as accurate a prediction for your budget request as possible. And that goes right back to that question of how did you get the budget approved. If you have something like this, it will help you get the budget approved by including that data moving forward. And then our final piece, because we're almost done but it's very exciting, is the digital piece, which is how do we fully integrate a campus? How do we move a campus into the future with automatic work orders? Let's tie our building automation system into our work order system and automatically trigger needs as they come in. We're currently working on that with Kyle and his team. More to come. We won't get into it now, but it's some exciting future plans that we have to make facilities as efficient as possible. So I'm gonna let Kyle wrap this up, and we'll see if we have time for a quick question. But these crises don't start at the failure. They start long, long before most of the people at the university at that current time were even there. And so how we deal with it, how the duck keeps swimming in our metaphor that we're going to continue to use is all that's important, and how can we prevent it in the future so we have the data to do our the best we can to predict what's going to happen when it happens. Kyle? Yeah. And, unfortunately, at the end of the day, I can't really tell express to you guys the scope gravity of how impactful this was in a a thirty minute conversation. At the end of the day, everything we've talked about, it's it's real world. The programs that Katie is talking about, that I use, that many other people use, they're tools. They're tools to help make you successful, to help you come up with a plan. But the one thing I'll leave everybody with, it's in the words of a modern philosopher, Mike Tyson, everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the mouth, and that's all this was. It's just another tool to help you resolve a problem. Thank you all very much. I was gonna say, Kyle, on that note, final question, did you have a business continuity plan when you started, or do you have one now that you've been through this? We do have a business continuity plan now, and no. We did not. Exactly. So there you go. You don't have a plan till you get punched in the face. Thanks, everyone. Perfect. And on that note, I'll just close this off before we get punched in the face. So everyone, thank you very much for your time here today. If we didn't get to your questions, just, continue putting them in the in the ask question box at the bottom of your screen. We'd love to respond to your questions after the event. And also before jumping off everyone, I am gonna push a few things on your screen just so you have them, so you don't have to search for it. First, I'm gonna I just pushed on your screen some related content. I can see there was a slide here with resources, but if you actually wanna click directly on them, you can. On that box there, there's that guide that I mentioned at the top of the hour for you to click on. Or if you would like to learn more about Brightly, there is a link there as well. So take a few minutes to do that. In the meantime, I'm now gonna push on your screen a survey. So as I go through my closing slides in just a few moments, as I'm rambling on, feel free to, start taking that survey because we'd love to hear your thoughts on on this presentation. We really would appreciate it. But first off, I just wanna thank you both both of our speakers today, Kyle and Katie, your time here today. This is a really great conversation, and I really do appreciate it. And, of course, shout out and thank you to Brightly. And to our audience, thank you for joining us today as well. For those of you who enjoyed our presentation, we have more Ed talks like this one that are provided by us here at University Business, which is the leader in editorial coverage of news, current issues, as well as trends in higher ed. And like I said, at the top of the hour, we at UB will be sending you an email tomorrow with the slides on the on demand recording. So look out for that in your inboxes. And, again, feel free to, click on any of the resources at the bottom of your screen and the survey. So with that, on behalf of UB, this is Steven Blackburn. Thanks, everyone, and thanks again to Brightly. This was great.