From Raw Data to Smart Capital Planning: Optimizing Facility Asset Investments

Welcome, everyone. We're gonna give it about a minute. We have people steadily joining the webinar, so let's just give them a little time to join, and then we'll jump right in. Alright. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Michelle Frederick. I'm the vice president for professional development for APA. We're happy to have you here this afternoon for our webinar. Just a couple housekeeping items. If you have any questions, you can please put them in the q and a. We will be monitoring that throughout the webinar, and we will be answering questions live within the webinar at the end of the session. Also, if you are having any technical issues within the webinar, you can also put those issues here. And my my me and my partner or colleague, Erica, will also be trying to assist people if those things should should come up. This webinar also qualifies for one CEU or learning unit, which you will get at the conclusion of this webinar. It will show up within the new member compass within the new platform or membership platform that we have for APA. So without further ado, I'm gonna hand this over to Katie from Brightly, and she can start the introductions for herself and her panelists. So thank you, Katie. Michelle, we're happy to be here. So today, we're gonna talk about from raw data to smart capital planning. So how do you optimize your facility investments? And today, I have a great team with me. Obviously, I'm with Brightly. We're a Siemens company. You may know us formerly a school dude, and we focus on asset management, capital planning, facilities, maintenance operations, sustainability, all the things. So you don't need to read this whole blurb. You can look up some things about us. So I'm gonna let the guys introduce themselves, and then I'll introduce myself. Steve, you wanna go first? Yeah. Thank you, Katie. Steve Adams, the director of facility operations here at Wake Forest. Basically, that entitles, it entails working with the, maintenance teams, the lock shop, and I spend quite a bit of time on renewal in the capital side, the condition assessment piece, and and certainly partnering with Brett on on kind of the total process that that takes. And I'm Brett Hewitt. I'm the assistant director of facility systems at Wake Forest. I've been with Wake Forest for almost fifteen years now, and just, you know, all of the we technology support, and and system administration, managing our work order system, and whatnot falls under me. I'm Katie Gramajo. I'm the senior education specialist at Brightly, but I used to be a director of operations at the Windward School and Campbell Hall School, which are both k twelve private schools on opposite coasts of the United States. So we've I've gotten to know Brett and Steve and their journey here at Wake Forest, and we're gonna get into what they've done and how you might be able to translate that into what you're doing in your own campus. So when we're talking about capital planning, that's usually what the finance leaders are focused on. But oftentimes, the facilities directors, the operations directors have to present so much information in order to help with that capital plan because facilities are the largest part of the capital plan. So when you're creating that, you can't just guess. You need precision to understand what your institutional goals are and what your real time asset look. If you if you don't have accurate data, you're going to make poor investment decisions. You're going to guess what your investment should be and potentially guess wrong. Facilities teams are the piece that can give the data to the finance leaders that will prioritize what needs to get done when and what needs to be replaced. So when we're talking about that clicked too soon. When we're talking about that, my friends at Wake Forest here have done just that. They're currently preparing to implement real time asset intelligence, which we're gonna talk about what that means, which would help their capital planning by having accurate facilities data, which will create strategic decisions. This initiative is gonna hopefully reduce all their reactive maintenance, improve their budget forecasting, and align with their future investments. And most importantly, in education, it's always important to align with your institutional goals. So I'm gonna talk about exactly how they do that, but the overarching theme is ALM, asset life cycle management. You've probably heard this before. It's in a lot of publications, and it's a term that's just linking the facility's data to your capital strategy. That's the key that you need to know. You're tracking your assets from the commissioning to the decommissioning, and it's actually moving you from reactive to predictive modeling where you can actually create long term financial forecasting worth the final goal being a capital plan that's strategic and aligned with what you actually know, not something that you're hoping is correct. So here's a pretty slide that shows you what we're gonna walk through today. It's a road map that will help guide you towards having a more resilient facilities. And wherever you are on this journey, whether you have no asset information and no data at all, or you have something in between these stages, we'll help you figure out where you are and where to begin. So the four steps, and I'll get into what each one is in detail, obviously, but is getting your asset information, starting with your foundational catalog of everything you have, then taking that and moving it into tactical improvements, which is streamlining your maintenance workflow, implementing some sorry, automation, and reducing your downtime. And then the next piece, which is one of the harder pieces, is strategic long term planning. What does that look like? How do you know what your risk is, and how do you align your goal with your with what your school would like you to do, whether it be sustainability, security, growth, any of those things? And then finally, the digital transformation, which is predictive maintenance, complete automation. Everything's integrated. All your decisions are correct because you're proactive and you know, and this is the pinnacle that is not something I would say anyone is quite at yet, but maybe some. But if you are, let me know because I'd love to talk to you and know how you got there so fast. So when you follow this road map that we're gonna talk you through, you'll get to the outcomes that we all want, which is automated workflows based on predictive maintenance, asset location tracking, essentially climate resistant resilience and sustainability, integration of security with maintenance, and prioritizing all of your capital plans based on your facility's needs. So starting at step one, if you feel like you don't even know where to begin, this is where you begin. Foundational asset data and starting here, creating a centralized asset registry. Knowing your values, knowing your conditions, and creating a condition assessment. This will this is the foundation that's the most imperative of everything you do. If you do not have the foundation of the asset data, then everything you do after that is not gonna work. And we've spoken to different clients that have potentially not had the most detailed data. And if you do that, it's only gonna set you up to keep having to go back, you know, the one step forward, two steps back analogy. So making sure this is done right is very, very important. So I'm going to do a poll. And the poll question is popping up right now. Take two seconds to click, and then we'll see what you all say. I have a feeling this is does your school conduct an FCA? I'm assuming most of you do, but I'm curious if it's a required processes for you, if it's just for certain events, or if you're not required and you're interested in learning more about it. We got about half of our crowd participating now, so we'll give them just another few seconds to get their answers in. Alright. Let's see what we got. Alright. Yes. So most people are required. That's what we we were thinking. And some some of you are occasionally prompted by events. Some are considering it, so this will be good for you to interest to figure out if you want to do it and how you might want to do it. And if you're not actually required to do so, I would still consider doing it to get your asset registry in account unless you have some other way to do that. So let's talk about what that looks like. An FCI, like we talked about, is something I'm sure most of you know, but most schools are required to do it, and it's comprehensive evaluation of your infrastructure. It'll cover your HVAC, your plumbing, your electrical to help prioritize your improvements. When you get those detailed reports, it may have cost estimates. It may have lifespan projections. It may have compliance tips and checks for you, but it's a static snapshot. Most of the time, it's a binder or a PDF or some sort of file that is outdated as soon as you start making updates. So unless you're going to put that condition data into some sort of software tool, it will never be current again unless someone is writing on it with a marker or fixing it online, then your your data is not going to be updated. And at that point, you've wasted a ton of money on something that is no longer accurate. So What did my friends at Wake Forest do? I'm gonna let Steve and Brett talk about what they did, and they've done different kinds of FCAs. So we're gonna get into it a little bit. Brett, do you wanna talk about where we started? Sure. Yeah. So just to start off, a little bit of background on Wake Forest University. We're a small private research university located in Winston Salem, North Carolina, renowned for a blend of small student centered liberal arts college atmosphere, with academic breadth and resources of a major resource research institution. We relocated to Winston Salem in nineteen fifty six, so that's our current campus now. And, really, there there were two periods of heavy construction for the campus. The first was, you know, nineteen fifty two to fifty six when we first built campus, and the second was two thousand ten to present. Hopkins residence hall, Byron Welcome Center, Farrell Hall, our sports performance center, Maya Angelou residence hall, then renovations of a lot of our older residence halls have all occurred since two thousand ten. And then we just recently broke ground on the grounds, which is, a transformative hundred acre mixed use development, that's in our Deacon Boulevard area, and that's gonna have, offices, residential, and it's also over near where our football stadium and, coliseum are. And to add on top of all of that, we're currently, preparing for our bicentennial in twenty thirty four, which will mark two hundred years since the founding of Wake Forest University. So with all of that, come our challenges. Right? Bit coming up, Brent. Just a little bit. So we've got a lot of historic buildings, that require large amounts of capital investment. We've got many aging assets that need to be tracked for maintenance and replacement. And then, you know, in two thousand seventeen, we took a look at our what then was our current CMMS, because it didn't fit our current needs. We weren't fully utilizing it. It was expensive, and there were gaps in the functionality. So we, you know, we we looked at what do we need, and we decided we needed an asset asset centric solution. We needed a mobile solution because at the time, our technicians were still doing things on paper. They were still handing things into our customer service, and we weren't very efficient. And we needed something that was easy enough for both our aging workforce to use, but also robust enough to meet our other needs, such as reporting for in informed decision making. And at the time, it was kinda interesting that within facility we we had facilities, but we also had our athletics, our real estate, and our EHS groups were separate groups and weren't part of facilities. But now, facilities comprises our maintenance, landscaping, grounds, custodial, capital projects, planning, fleet, business ops, waste, and events. And then since we've implemented our new CMMS, we've got athletics, real estate, and an EHS have all become part of our group, and they all use our EAM. So, Katie, I'll pass it back to you. So So thanks, Brett. I think that's a good place to start. And I just wanna know, they've come a long way in, what, six, seven years? So there's hope for everyone. We're gonna we're gonna help you get there. When you're considering what kind of FCI you wanna do, a lot of people are required, like we talked about, to use an engineering firm every Five years, certain types of years. And the good thing is they're gonna give you very deep evaluation of your needs. It will support your compliance if you're required to do it, but they're super expensive, and they take a really long time. And as we said, that data depreciates very quickly. So other than when it is required, how do you keep going with your FCA? Can you do one internally? Can you so we're gonna consider an external as an engineering firm coming in to do it for you, and then we're gonna talk about how you can do an internal FCA. So Wake Forest actually did both of those things, and I'm gonna let Steve explain how they did it, when they did it, and why they did both. Yeah. Thank you, Katie. So, Katie, one of the words you used was a journey. Right? So that is definitely where we are at Wake Forest. We're on this journey. Brett and I talked to that quite a bit each and every day. And I think when you look at internal and external SCAs, there the the reality is it's not a one size fits all approach. Right? So, traditionally, as we've been talking, you're looking at your core legacy buildings on campus. Right? Whether they're existing, they're new, future, whatever it may be. But that also can apply to campus buildings that you own, but you lease the space. Right? Brett mentioned some of our real estate stuff. But then there's also buildings you might be considering purchasing. Right? And we've recently gone through that process as well. So I think understanding your your collective portfolio, how the building is utilized, the complexity of the building, future plans for the building, all those types of things going to it. Right? So a couple questions Brett and I ask ourselves and, you know, something each of us may wanna think about is where is your organization on this continuum? You know? What are the tasks at hand? What are the future things you're trying to do? What goals do you have with the data that you're collecting? Do you own the facility? Are you doing the lease buy opportunity? You might be selling or demoing one of your buildings. How is the facility currently used? Will it be reprogrammed? And most importantly, what is your timeline? Right? So whatever scenario you're working to, what is that timeline that you're working with? So specifically to internals, one of the keys that Brett and I identified very early on was we needed to set up our process internally to mirror our existing CMMS platform. That really just comes down to that ease of data transfer. Right? So that can be done in various different ways, but I I would encourage people to make sure that it lines up with your CMMS. You know, how deep of a dive do you take when you're talking internal? Right? Because if you're like Wake Forest, you've got limited resources. You're probably asking a lot of people to stop their day to day, come help out, things like that. So, again, that keeping in mind, what is the challenge at hand? What is the task at hand? So, obviously, you know, everybody first level, that building envelope, the roof, the exterior shell, things like that, MEP, naturally. And one of the ones that's kinda out there and sometimes it's in, sometimes it's not, is the food service piece, which can be a real challenge at times. And then we kinda look at the second level as your site. Right? Parking lots, exterior lighting, hardscape, storm water, utilities, all those things. And then, certainly, we touch on the architectural, but, again, not knowing what the future plans for the building, we don't spend a lot of time there for for the most part. A couple other things internally you wanna look at is certainly your institutional knowledge. Right? This is a group effort. Make sure you're talking to the people that have that knowledge. You know, your internal assessment team at the core, Everybody's gonna look at maintenance, utilities, project management, but there are other people. There's other resources out there that you might wanna consider. Outside of your university, and this actually came to us through a, research facility we reached recently purchased, was we were able to kind of understand the GC that has done all the work on the building. So we spent quite a bit of time. And if you think about it, that's a condition assessment in itself. Right? Talking to that GC who did the projects, did updates, things like that. So, again, don't limit yourself to what might be a traditional SCA approach. You know, from an external, if, again, you like Wake Forest, you're looking at some type of an RFP. You're gonna have to set clear expectations. What are your deliverables? You need to understand the cost upfront. Right? So, again, what what are you trying to gain from this? The key info, typical stuff, building gross square footage, binding the drawings, original, any renovations that have done. We're blessed at Wake Forest to have a great archive of all of our information. Our guys do a great job keeping up with that. Certainly, scope of work, timeline, deliverables, things like that. So On the timeline piece, make sure you build in enough time for that RFP process. Right? That that is one that You wanna go quickly, but sometimes it doesn't work out that way. We found it helpful to have and it was a virtual kickoff meeting. Just get everybody acclimated. Who's the team? What are we doing? Things like that. But then also a site tour. Get everybody on-site. Make sure your technicians are available. Schedule time for them to walk and talk about the building. Then you've obviously got the data analysis, creating the report, doing the feedback on the draft, and then hopefully getting all that turned over to a final report. You know, some of the deliverables that we look for, certainly, you're gonna want that high end executive summary. I think that's important for the leadership folks. They're not gonna read two, three hundred pages of information. Right? So you need some roll up summaries. Do it by section. Do an overall. If it's a building you're looking to buy, make sure you speak to that. If it's one you own, speak to that type things. One of the other things was the cost. Right? Make sure you understand when you're using an engineering firm what all they've baked into the pricing because you need to understand how they develop their number, or are there any things that you need to add soft costs or, you know, PMVs, things like that. From a, you know, timing perspective, we kinda looked at the immediate needs, and we kinda broke that down into three sections. What's required? What do we recommend doing? And what's optional? Right? So that immediate group of needs is really important. And then we look at the traditional two to five years, six to ten years. One of the things that I think is helpful at Wake Forest is we have a MSA process, a master service agreement. So if you can get some of these firms into that process, that just helps fast track. Maybe you won't have to do an RFP process. And for us, we've had some recent things where things had to move very quickly, and that was a very a very big help. From the ongoing management side, you know, as I said, we're doing it by committee right now, and I'm kind of that point person. I've got a lot of people helping me do that, but that is kinda currently where we are on that continuum. Our future plans, we wanna get a lead person, a a a condition assessment person. We are looking to probably package some other things that naturally tie in, like asset management, RPM process. Some other functionality things might be design guidelines, SOPs, just things that kinda align with that traditional facility condition assessment approach. And then, you know, making sure you focus on that continued collaboration with without with the whole team. So a couple takeaways real quickly. Clear expectations and deliverables are very important. Get that timeline the resources on the front end. It is not something you wanna deal with on the back end. When you get into your rating system, keep it simple, good, fair, poor. Don't try and do all other types of things because it'll just make it complicated. We talked about what's included in the price. And the last thing is you're gonna get it in a PDF format. So make sure you can also get Excel and Word because that is that integration piece. Right? Somebody's gonna need, like a bread, is gonna need to be able to manipulate that information. So k. Okay, Steven. If anyone has questions, please type them in the chat because I'm sure you're thinking about all the things that their team's doing and thinking of questions for your own team. So you've done the FCA. You have all your data. What do you do next? Well, now this piece is tactical asset management. That's what we're talking about. And what it is is how do you improve the day to day operations? You have work orders. You have inspections. You have risk management. You have sustainability performance. It's all part of your workflow. So how do you streamline your maintenance? How do you improve your efficiency based on what you know about your assets? Well, ideally, in order to do that, you're going to use a technological advancement software. Now one of the things that people talk about is a CMMS or an EAM, and I wanted to go through that a tiny bit because it's there's so many acronyms in all of our businesses. Sometimes it's a little confusing. I'm sure you've all heard of both of these terms. But a CMMS or a computerized maintenance management system is actually an older outdated term. So we talk more about enterprise asset management for what we provide with Brightly. Obviously, there are options out there in both categories. And while a CMMS focuses on scheduling, tracking work orders, and that just that day to day basic operational efficiency, an EAM takes it a step forward. So it's not just about your day to day efficiency, but it's about the entire life cycle of your asset and is giving you strategic insights. So you have a CMMS. It's helping you with your routine maintenance, your work orders, your assets. If you have an EAM, it's doing all of that plus integrating asset condition risk, financial data, and helping your capital planning and long term forecasting. So if you have a CMMS or a work order ticketing system or something like that, that's a great place to start. But you need to think about how you can level up to more of an asset centric focus as you move forward. So this is just a map kind of explaining exactly what I just said, which is your FCA data is mapped into an EAM system, and that's where the piece Steve said is very important. Having it in some sort of Excel format, a data format where you can actually map it into a system where you can see all your assets appropriately. A lot of people have CMMSs, and they have them set up in a nonasset centric way, which will only set you up for hardship in the future. And what I mean by that is You might have locations. You might have certain things put in there, but you don't actually have all the assets in there properly to tag to work orders, to tag to what's being done, and you're not updating it. So that's the next piece we're gonna get into in a little bit, which is Probably the most challenging piece of all of this. And I'm gonna get to Brett actually to talk about it right now, which is, Brett, when you implemented an EAM, let's talk about how you did it and some of the things you faced. Yeah. So first, so our old system, you know, it was capable, but like we said, wasn't quite hitting all of our everything we needed. We had some changes on campus that had happened. We had centralized procurement a couple years earlier, which had been a something that we've done within the old system. And then, our we have a Workday campus with an RCM model. So our things like routine cleaning, maintenance, waste, and utilities is no charge where there's a lot of services that we provide that we do charge for. So when we changed and implemented an EAM, right, we did an analysis of our CMMS. We did a white paper. We looked at, a requirements analysis with a functionality matrix, did a cost analysis, and we documented all our business processes, and workflows with a flowchart that actually we had in our conference room that covered the conference room wall and and then some, with the pages that we came off of with that. You know, we we talked to management. We talked to our other stakeholders. Like I said, at the time, we had athletics and real estate. We're using our CMMS, but we're not part of our department. And then we talked about, you know, what it would take to train our technicians, what it would take to train our campus to how are we going to brand this, and then how are we going to deploy it across all of campus. So actually, in the fall of two thousand nineteen is when we started to implement our new EAM, and we took a phased approach to our launch. We we cleaned we we took made an effort to clean up our assets, which we thought was a great effort at the time. We cleaned up our cost centers, all all the data that we could. We scrubbed it before we moved it into our new system. And then we we put our PMs into the new system and trained our technicians internally how to use the new system while we continued to be reactive on the old system. It was a little extra work. I don't know if it was the right choice or not, but we wanted to make sure that before we rolled out the new system to campus that our technicians knew how to use it and we weren't gonna drop have anything fall through the cracks or drop anything. And also getting them giving them time to get comfortable using technology because we like I said, we did have an aging workforce, some of them were not comfortable using the iPads. We had open door time where the I have a training room right next to my office. And after the training sessions, I just spent a few hours in there in in a day, and made that time available where they could come down, ask questions. I could just stand over their shoulder, just making sure that they were comfortable and were not afraid to ask the questions and that we could engage with them and make sure that, you know, we're also seeking their feedback throughout the process. Taking notes down on the board and letting them know, yeah, we're gonna look at that. I don't know the answer to that yet, but making sure that they felt heard throughout that process. And, you know, then after a few months, it was actually September of two thousand nineteen, campus wide, we then opened up we we trained campus, through our central training hub that we have, which some people engage with that, some people didn't, and then we launched that campus wide. And I think it was successful because at that point now, you know, we didn't get inundated with new requests. We'd we'd worked out some of those bugs before it became open to the campus. So that was, you know, officially our implementation, our launch. And I figured what I'd do really quickly, is kinda run through our timeline. So that was right before COVID. So run through our timeline from twenty twenty through today, as quick as I can because it's a there there's a lot of stuff that's happening. I actually feel like we're constantly implementing new things and and evolving and and putting changes in place. So, you know, come twenty twenty was when athletics who had their own business processes and kind of different expectations from what facilities had, they, you know, were rolled into facilities and became part of facilities. So we had to train their technicians. We had to put technology in their hands. And then we had to, you know, measure you know, we were we had metrics that we were using internally, we pasted those onto athletics, it just did not look the same right away. So, you know, we had to train to hey. These are the things we're looking at, and, hey. These metrics don't actually make sense for them. And then when COVID hit, there were several different kinda requirements, whether it be PPE or barriers or, approvals for different things that we had to put into place. And, actually, the system had flexibility for us to put those business processes, and the system could support those. Come twenty twenty one, we, you know, we really big on reporting. Lot of great information that we were getting into the system, and the built in reports are great, but I'm somebody that's always like, I wanna make sure it fits exactly the use case case that we're we're using it for. So we implemented Power BI and our first attempt at dashboarding. We we we put some dashboards in the team shops, but they were updated manually and and not, not live. So that was great. And then, we created a process for on our campus, restricted funds and gift funds need approvals before they can be, before we can charge against those. So we put in a process to do that. And also at that point in time, once we got into our new EAM and really started using that system and recognized the types of things we're trying to get out of our assets. We recognize that, hey. Yes. We've got our assets in there, but they're not all in there. We should have more in there. We should have more information about them in there. So we engaged with a consultant, a third party, for asset digitization, to go through building by building, different phases and really get a great asset registry to build the rest of our our information off of. Brett, let let me jump in here and say I'm gonna switch to this slide here because I think you've talked to a lot of it already, which is all the results of everything you've been saying with and I do I have to point out, and I like that you said exactly what I said, which is if your aren't incorrectly, you're just gonna have to do it over. So you might as well really think about it beforehand. Yep. So then come twenty twenty two, we actually added credit criticalities for our assets, and we added a audit process for our critical work orders for those assets. Twenty twenty three, we created a position for our data analyst because at that point in time, it was just me trying to run those dashboards. So we were gonna hire a data analyst. We put Team dashboards up in the shop that were updated consistently, and we started a quarterly leadership metrics, which was convenient because that was in January of that year, and then we had a new EVP come on in July of that year. And that is also the year that we implemented our online FCA platform. Twenty twenty four, real time dashboarding, manager dashboards, quarterly met budget metrics, Real estate then joined facilities, and we integrated them into and we also updated our summer inspection processes to be integrated in with our EAM instead of a kinda separate side process. And then finally, come to twenty twenty five, and we implemented inventory tracking for our campus police, their assets and equipment. And, the we have an internal events group where we started to, rent out, event supplies, and and we're able to move that in there. So all of this kinda, you know, really serendipitous timing, with all the changes going on on campus, with the grounds coming in, with just recently announced that we want enrollment expansion. Right? So what what are our future outlooks? We've actually been working on kind of a journey map for facilities and the softwares that we use. And, you know, through this process, I don't know what I would have guessed ahead of time, but we actually have facilities. We have seventy two different software solutions that we use to support all of our different groups. So we're taking a really hard look at, you know, how how do we use those, what what are the top things we're looking at. So moving forward with with the grounds and everything, we're looking at our capital projects, our space planning, and GIS, and then looking at our EAM and how it ties everything together, to continue to evolve our asset investment strategy. And then lastly, you know, it's come up, I I know, from our VP and from some others in internally, keeping an eye forward on how all these solutions that we use begin to employ AI as AI continues to evolve. Because I know we're all using it daily at this point, but a lot of companies are still figuring out how that slots in and and and, you know, how does that become useful for us. You know, all that said, I'm know, we're interviewing for a new position. And the other day, one of the the, candidates question back was, you know, what does a typical mundane look day look like working within facilities? And, you know, my my thought before we could come up with an answer to that for them, my thought was kinda, you know, when is facilities everyone? Gonna say there is there is none. That doesn't exist. Yeah. We're we're we're constantly reacting to the fires, always evolving, always looking to improve our processes, to get better. So Now kinda moving on to this side, Steve, I'll let you talk about how we have been transforming and getting better. Yeah. Thanks, Brett. Just real quickly, you know, we The the the transformational results, and we keep touching on it, it it's gotta be a cohesive strategy, right, that links all these data inputs into your strategic planning platform. Right? So that's kind of this overall process. And when Brett and I sat down and looked at this, we kinda said, you know, there's gotta be a couple things that are kinda core to this. Right? So we wanna be able to trust the process and the data, number one. Number two, we gotta create a valuable tool for not only technicians, but senior leadership. Right? It's gotta it's gotta work across that broad spectrum. And then with that, kinda create that alignment across the departments so we can improve that strategic planning process. But, again, and and Katie and Brett both touched upon it. That that asset level data, if you if we don't get that part right, all the rest of it is is just not gonna line up. Right? So when we look at our CMMS system, you know, that's our authoritative database. Work orders, PMs, the asset tagging, all that stuff sits in there. And Brett mentioned having a consultant work with us, which has been fantastic, that really kick started this process for us. Getting the data collection into a common language. We selected the uniform at two, and that was a big step in the right direction. And then that allows you to start identifying information gaps and various things. You you wanna create that availability of the information, whether it's QR codes, bar codes, whatever your process is. You that's where you're putting the photos, the o and m manuals, the asset data, PM tasks, things like that. So, and then outside of that, and this is what Brett does a great job with, is that quality control in the training piece. So just kinda thinking through what that looks like. On that asset piece, the the digitization of the assets, right, getting leadership support, right, not only internal to our group, but also at that EVP level was extremely important. And we we have that dollar commitment now. And Brett and I's goal internally, five to six years, maybe we'll have all those build out. So why is that important? One of the examples Brett and I talk about is Angelo Hall, which is one of one of our residence halls. When we started this process with a pilot program, we had thirty seven assets in the system. When we walked away from this, we had nine hundred ninety six assets. So Steve, I'm wondering if that I'm wondering if that'll answer the question that Jordan put in the chat, which is what categories of assets are you tracking? How did it change so much? Now don't tell us all nine hundred ninety six, but give us an idea. I'll let Brett speak to categories. That that's that's kinda his thing. So Brett? Sorry. You're muted. Get on mute. Okay. Can you give us an idea of what kind of assets you added while you when you were doing this process? I mean, we went through we went through the entire building and basically defined where we stopped. So we we stopped. We I I believe, Steve, we stopped them at the card readers. Right? Yes. So everything up to the card readers. And we said, no. The card readers are not. You know, the the doorways are not, but all all the equipment, all the categories that will fall underneath that inside those buildings, up to the wall of the the exterior wall of the building. So Yeah. And and, Brett, that's a good point. We did have card readers, and then nobody liked the stickers on them for some reason. I don't know why they didn't like the stickers on the card readers. But, yeah, it's your category is traditional MEP, but I think the key to that is how deep do you go. Right? That system, subsystem, subsystem, like, you you've gotta pick. And, again, that's a a great question that somebody asked. You've gotta establish where you wanna be on the front end. Because, again, once you go, you start going, and and you've gotta kinda have that vision and that plan established. So, again, all that stuff rolls up to that strategic piece of it. Right? And for our us, internally, the biggest challenge was getting our staff to understand why. Right. Why does what they do matter to leadership and the strategic decisions? And, you know, that is where, you know, they're using it for capital planning and forecasting the budgets and deciding whether we're gonna do new construction, renovate. For us, the key to success was breaking it down into manageable bites, I'll call it. It was such an overwhelming process that what we started doing internally with our renewal coordinator is monthly updates, Grabbing the PMs that are out doing projects, grabbing our maintenance managers, and sitting down with them real time and talking about the things that they're doing. Our process before was twice a year. We were doing it twice a year, but I had to stop what they were doing, think back to where they were. It wasn't as efficient. Know? So now we're getting into, you know, things like percentage completion. Right? If you're doing a light upgrade, LED, Four floors, we did floors one and two. We've got fifty percent of the building done. You know, custom cost versus RS means. We're putting in some of the things we're seeing at Wake Forest cost wise. And And then, you know, getting that staff interaction with the data. Right? They've got to see this working. Right? They just don't wanna hear about it. But we did with our managers, our maintenance managers, was we went into the the platform. We pulled out anything that was fifty thousand dollars or less, and we use that in what we call a wish list. So at year end, if we've got some additional dollars, we had a good year, we'll look at some low hanging fruit and just knock those off, right, and get those assets renewed. So, again, that shows them the real time thing. And for the project manager side, we're pushing this data out now at the DD level. Right? Before, we weren't scrubbing the data. We weren't prioritizing the backlog, ABC, those types of things. So, again, just ways that you can start introducing some easy wins to the staff. Katie? Great. And I think that actually someone left has a question that I'm gonna answer in our next section. So, hopefully, this will answer one of these questions, which is okay. You've done all of this, and I see there's other questions, and I see we're gonna try to answer some by typing in the chat. And if we don't get to you, we'll answer them at the end. So you have all your information in an EAM. How do you move strategically into capital planning? What do you do next? And that's the proactive piece of this. You're optimizing your facility's knowledge, and you're actually budgeting it. And when you're doing that, you're planning your strategic plan should focus on your capital investment, scenario modeling, and sustainability. That will actually align your operations with these long term goals. Like, we've been talking about at Wake Forest. There are always institutional goals that are happening alongside just the day to day maintenance. So how do you do that? And then how do you also add that what if scenario where you can't plan for it? And you don't know what's gonna happen, but at least we can plan for as many scenarios as possible. And that's where we lead to this next piece. So now we have another poll for you. How familiar are you with asset investment planning, otherwise known as AIP, and how it's used in facilities capital planning? Take a second to fill that in. I think it's a newer term where you might kind of know about it, but maybe aren't a hundred percent sure what I'm talking about in terms of facilities. But if you are, I'll be impressed. Alright. Yeah. We know what it is or we don't know what it is, and the eight percent of you that use it and know, I'm impressed. So let's talk about what it is. AIP is a software that is in addition to your EIM or your CMMS. If you use Brightly's, ours is agnostic, which means you could have a CMMS that's not ours. Obviously, I have a bias, so I will not talk to you about that. But you could use it if you would like to, and it's a different piece in addition to it. And that's what you're talking about, Gaynor, which is could you use an EAM to generate information on how many work orders there are per building? A hundred percent. That's an EAM job where you can say, we've had this many work orders and this many tickets on this one particular roof leak, and then you could use that data yourself to decide if that's a priority level for you. And that's something that with an EAM, you can work out your own different, solutions on how you wanna take that information and use it. If you have an AIP, it can do that for you. So it will actually prioritize those investments based on AI level, information. So it will actually create based on location, based on cost of products at this time, materials, and it'll take that plus your risk score for your asset to help you decide what a priority is for when you spend. So it's prioritizing your investments. It's improving your budget, and inevitably, that would extend your asset life. It's creating it's taking your data automatically from your EIM. So as long as your staff is closing those tickets and marking it with to which asset it goes to and you have everything in that system, it's going to take it and automatically pull it to this other system that is now the finance level, where it's creating a capital plan, it's creating a budget, and it's helping you give that budget data to your finance team who's asking for it, to your board, to whoever is asking you for what you have. So how does it work? Because that sounds amazing, and we don't know how it works. What it actually does is pretty basic. It takes your asset inventory from your EAM, and it's starting with that information and keeping track of it. As you're doing the work, like I said, as you're updating it, as you're doing repairs, you're tracking it. When your AIP is pulling that data from your CMMS or your EIM, it will help you create preventive and work order maintenance schedules. So it's gonna connect your asset condition with PM schedules and create those for you. Something that we're doing is then how do you create those based on the information for the asset based on the asset type, the brand, the age, and figuring out what that PM schedule is based on that, which is something you could inevitably figure out yourself. But you could also do that here. And then finally, I'm gonna speed it up because we're getting towards the end. You can use that to use industry benchmarks, which has future cost projections, end of life estimates, and risk scores. And then finally, that will help support your budget request. Like I said, it gives you possible budgets up to thirty years in the future with support of what your projections might be with data. The analogy I always use is the car dealership. I don't know anything about cars. I go to the car dealership. The vendor says to me, your car needs this, this, and this, and it's gonna cost you a ton of money. Then I say, I guess so because I don't have the data to say otherwise. So this is what you're essentially getting from your asset investment planning software. So what that is, the process that we just talked about is you've got your EIM data collection. It's adding a risk assessment piece, and then it's adding a financial model to it, and that creates a comprehensive capital plan. I'm sure there are a lot of questions about that. So if you have them, throw them in the chat. And if we don't answer them now, we will reach out to you after this and make sure we answer all those questions. But I wanna get to our final piece because Wake Forest is really spearheading something new and exciting, The digital campus. Everyone's talking about digital campuses. What does it mean? It's that final stage of ALM, asset life cycle management. Once you have your foundation and, again, this is all a work in progress that Wake Forest is piloting with us, and we'll get to exactly how they're doing it. But how do you make everything as automated as possible? Can you integrate your building automation systems, and most of you have multiple and different buildings on a large campus, into a unified platform where you can have centralized control? How can you do full remote building management and allow your teams to monitor and respond? Do you have a digital twin model, which is a virtual representation of your assets where you can simulate and predict what the performance might be? Do you have a single pane of glass unified interface to view that? And can you respond faster because of this real time data that you're getting? So you're moving from reactive to proactive, but then you're moving to predictive, which is the goal, And that's the most resilient you can be. So I'm gonna just give a little quick look ahead at what Wake Forest is doing right now. We are working with them and Siemens, which is our larger parent company, to integrate their multiple BAS systems into a centralized platform. And what will happen when we when this all works out the way we plan is that the Siemens operations manager is a product that will connect their BAS and all their IoT sensors to create automatic work orders in their EAM based on real time data. So, Steve and Brett, do you wanna chime in about that at all before we keep moving? Yeah. Thank you, Katie. So like many of you on campus, you have your traditional BAS systems. Right? We've got three on campus plus a a very robust metering program for our energy plan. But currently, you know, the focus, like everybody, is optimization within the buildings. So we've got full analytics in thirty five of our buildings. We've got scheduling in over seventy of our buildings. As you can imagine, and I'm sure you've dealt with that daily alarm management can be a challenge for your maintenance teams. Right? So the the question we always ask, when is too much when do we have too much data? When is it just overwhelming? And, you know, we're trying to understand because we're in this really interesting pivot point skill wise with our technicians, that right balance of hands on versus software skills. Right? And what's the mix, and what does that look like, and how do we maximize all the data we're getting? So, you know, Katie mentioned this new integration platform. And for us, go back to that manageable bite process that we do at Wake Forest, that pilot program. We're gonna focus on critical alarms, things like your air handling temps, relative humidity, freestat, pumps, boilers, anything of critical nature. We're gonna record it, log it, sort it, create some accountability around it. You know, in in one of those goals one of many goals that we're looking to get out of that is managing what we call those nuisance alarms. Right? How do you define those? How do we manage them? You know, we we accumulate so many due to you know, maybe it's decreased manpower or whatever it may be. We've gotta come up with an effective way of managing all that data. So Katie mentioned this is gonna generate that automatic work order. So we've gotta be poised to kind of accept that. Do we go in with those critical alarms and do them in a, you know, a small handset of our buildings? Certainly not gonna do it with all because, again, we're gonna overwhelm the maintenance teams, but really excited about what that looks like in the future. Yeah. And so this is exciting because, like you said, what you've done is you've taken the the first step, which is getting that data, and now we're moving beyond that to Brett's team being fully, efficient and getting everything done as best they can and planning for all these moving pieces that are happening on campus all the time. And now we're moving into the future to hopefully make everything easier as we go on. So I think we addressed most of this, so I won't read it out to you directly. But, obviously, when you're doing a change like this, there's a lot of challenges. And when you come up to those challenges, you have to have a plan. So I'm gonna ask Brett and Steve in as in a brief response, what's the hardest thing you faced in this in this journey you've been on, and how did you address it? Yeah. You want me to go first? I'll I'll jump in. You know, we Katie's got some bullet points that are on the screen that just speak. It resonates. Right? So from that acceptance point of view, it's you know, the what and the how is usually always understood. It's the why piece. Right? Again, showing that correlation between data and process, making it a manageable process, explain the big picture, but break it down. I think that's really important. I deal a lot with the aging workforce, that skilled labor gap. That is a huge issue. I know we're all experiencing it. Statistically, you know, I looked forty percent of the workers are gonna retire in the next decade. What was really interesting to me is fifty five is the average age of a skilled tradesperson, where forty four is the average age of a working adult. So when you start to line all these numbers up, it's obvious where we gotta focus our our our our efforts. And, you know, on the skilled labor gap, it's, you know, we're asking so much of our group, you know, and they may be less experienced moving forward, less knowledgeable, resource strapped. You know? We gotta kinda manage all these things between hands on software, things like that. Brett? Yeah. I mean, I'll say that, you know, making sure that we have good data and and making sure that every level of the organization understands why getting that data in, is super important. You know, we've built these dashboards to to help us make decisions. But If if we're just pencil whipping things or if, you know, if we're not paying attention, you know, we're measuring it, but we're not paying attention to it, we're not gonna improve. And, you know, I think having we've got an assistant director right now over maintenance that's that's really taken us to the next level. We we've got the boards out there, but now we've got somebody that's paying attention to them. He's communicating, with the staff from the bottom level all the way through the top on, you know, making sure we're holding people accountable, but also balancing how much work we're getting done with how how much time are we spending on the data and things like that. Steve and I, you and I have had those conversations around that. Right? Like, we we want the data, but we wanna make sure that we're getting the work done as well, you know, and and making sure that we're just really measuring things, that that make a dis difference and and affect the decisions that we're looking to make. So yeah. Great. And I think we're getting to most of the questions, and we're getting to the end here. So I wanna leave another minute. If anyone has any other questions to send, like I said, we'll answer them as we go along. But this is the goal we've all been talking about. Your everyone is starting in the same place, reacting as fast as you can. The Donald Duck image, plugging the hole, and then the other hole leaks, and then the other hole leaks, and the other hole leaks. We're all just trying to make sure you answer everything you can every day. So the first step is starting a digital journey, which is that EAM with your data accurately in in an asset centric way to move into a proactive state. And then finally, what's our predictive state? That's the digital piece. That's the final step and the goal that will allow us to be as predictive as possible. And if we are not, to be able to react efficiently and quickly based on remote operations and troubleshooting. So that's the final goal. That's the final pinnacle and work as smart as we can to make our lives easier because we all know that facilities is not easy. Does anyone have any final questions? We have a couple more in the chat. I'm gonna see actually, Steve or Brett before we end, do you wanna talk about this is a lot of amazing stuff, but it costs money. So how did you overcome some of your budget constraints? How did you justify doing technology like this? Yeah. Great question. So, again, where we started, what can you do in house? What can you do external with consultants and things like that? And and, again, it's prioritizing where your efforts need to be now depending on where you are on that continuum, that journey that we've been talking about. I think for us, we we talked about when we talked about the asset digitization piece, there was a brief moment where we said, yeah. We can do this in house. The reality of that was there's no way. Right? Because we talked about there's never a mundane day in facilities. You've gotta be out there taking care of campus. So I think creating and and hopefully some of the conversation today is creating that illustrative kind of a to z process that we've described, breaking it down and showing leadership where the true value is. And, again, there's no right or wrong way to do it, but the way Brett and I did it worked, thankfully, and it resonated with our EVP, and there was funds committed to it. So we are certainly at Wake Forest. We are definitely in that do more with less capacity. So it's it's just being very smart with how you approach that and and using consultants when it makes sense and doing what you can internally. But, again, you've gotta create that compelling case. It's a great answer. And finally, how once you've made the case, they've given you the money, you have the stuff, what are your KPIs to prove that you're using it and you're good stewards of that money, and how have you done that? That's all, Brett. Right. Let's hear it. Okay. And the KPI question that yeah. That was up there. So You know, we we've some of the KPIs we've got on the dashboard and the team shops, and then the managers have ones that that's kinda feeds into. And then Steve's got some that go up from that. So we've got, like, an aging report that's out there that's got, you know, the oldest work order is kinda just a a backlog. The oldest ones that are out there, the technicians that have it, they can click from that dashboard right into the work order, open it up, and see what and, you know, and and update that. We track the labor hours for each of the team and the technicians and overall, kinda hour summary for for the week for the technician, you know, and and we're really trying to get to those forty hours. So we do have overtime PTO, those types of things on there. And then, you know, the the the workload of each technician, how many PMs do they have, how many reactive work orders do they have, and kinda looking at the team and, you know, you're trying to balance that out from from one technician to another. And then I did see that question about that drone in there, and I will say that we had, an employee that went out to classes, tested to to fly the drone. We used to pay for roof inspections with drones, but we've got one now with the thermal imaging and the and the photos. And and, man, that thing is up in the air, I wanna say, almost every single day. We've we've seen steam leaks underground that we wouldn't have seen if if that thing wasn't up in the air with those thermal imaging images. So I I do think that there's a lot of value in even a campus of our size having a a drone and somebody that can use it. Great. I think we've answered every question. We have our contact info here. You will get this slide deck. I put a couple of our, I put our case study with Wake Forest, and I put some of our other higher ed specific resources for you. But please feel free to reach out to any of us. I we'd be happy to answer more questions. And if anyone has any other questions, you'll you can send us an email or reach out on LinkedIn, and we'd be happy to talk about it. Great. Thanks, Brett and Steve. It's great talking to you. Thank you. Alright. Thank you, Katie, Brett, and Steve. We appreciate this. This will be posted moment posted in the very near future via app. So if you wanted to rewatch it or you didn't, wanna didn't catch something, it will be available to those who attended today and our members. So thank you all, and have a great day.