The Asset Lifecycle Journey: Bridging the Gap Between Facilities, Capital Projects, and Operations

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us for this informative webinar on the asset life cycle journey, unifying facilities, capital projects, and operations. You know, as today's educational leaders grapple with economic and cultural headwinds, their top goal, you know, remains delivering the highest level of academic achievement. So whether you are affiliated with a small private university or a large k through twelve district, focusing on students is your top priority, which means assets and infrastructure can sometimes be an afterthought. Right? Yet facilities serve as the foundation for the rest of the learning experience. So what if there was a way to transform how education leaders view campus assets and truly turn them into an asset, you know, in every sense of the word? That's what we'll be exploring here today along with common hurdles and relevant solutions that offer a road map to this integrated approach. But before we get started, I have just a few housekeeping items to go over with you. Please note that the slides will advance automatically throughout the presentation. To enlarge the slides, you can click the enlarge slides button that's located in the top right corner of your presentation window. If you need technical assistance, click on the help widget that's located on the bottom left corner of your console. Now we do encourage you to submit questions at any time throughout the presentation using the q and a widget at the bottom of your console. We will try to answer these during the webcast. But if a fuller answer is needed or we just run out of time, it will be answered later via email. So please know that we do capture all your questions, and you are welcome to submit those as you think of them. Alright. Joining me today, we have Katie and Jim. Welcome to both of you. It's a pleasure to have you here. So let's just take a minute to introduce you and tell us about your background. Katie, we'll start with you. Sure. Hi. I'm Katie Grimajo. I am currently the senior education specialist at Brightly Software. But prior to that, I was the director of operations and facilities at the Windward School, which is in White Plains and New York. And before that, I was on the other coast at Campbell Hall School in Los Angeles. So being in your shoes as a leader of school facilities, I have been there before, and now I'm trying to help my former colleagues utilize technology to make their lives easier. Hey. We are glad to have you here. Jim, welcome as well. Thank you for having me. My name is Jim Lindsey. I'm the senior director of sustainability here in Austin, Texas, covering, k twelve higher ed and municipalities here in, Texas in our neighboring states. I've been, in the sustainability realm with Siemens for, going on three years. Prior to that, my background included about a ten year, tenure, in educational technology with Apple. And, and also I have a background in assessment. I was with the college board for six years serving k twelve and high ed. And, by degree, I am a, I I taught English for fifteen years. So I have been in these facilities for Yeah. Thirty two years, and I'm very excited to, to to be with your with you all today. Alright. We've got the experts here. So let's let's just first, you know, make sure we're all on the same page here. You know, educational institutions have just a wide variety of assets. We've got from laptops to the building itself. So as we start this discussion in talking about asset life cycle management, you know, which assets will we be referring to today, Katie? Yeah. That's a really good question. I travel a lot to various conferences around the country, and I know Jim does too. That's actually how we met in person. And one of the things that I am constantly asked is, what do you mean by assets? Assets? What are you talking about? And there are different things that are called assets that often are confused in school facilities. So we're not talking small assets, consumable assets, things like the iPad your child is given and they need to return at the end of the school year. We're not talking about the large scale real estate portfolio. Sometimes if I talk to a superintendent or a school leader in a university, they'll say, oh, I'm not in charge of that. I'm in charge of facilities. But what I mean are the facilities assets. So those are those middle ground facilities, the HVAC, the roofing, the plumbing, and all of the things within a building that would cost a lot of money to replace if they were to break and that you need to plan ahead for. Yeah. Great breakdown there, Katie. Thank you for that. So, you know, that does seem like an antiquated way to to approach such critical assets, and yet we all recognize the challenges our schools face, which means it's often maybe easier said than done. So when you're aligning facilities, operations, and capital projects, you know, why don't we walk through a few of the challenges that they encounter? Jim? Sure. I'd be happy to share a little bit about that. One of the challenges that we find is that schools, be they k twelve or high ed, they can get very caught up in a reactive versus a proactive mode when it comes to their facilities. That reactive mode is, you know, caused a lot by our aging infrastructure. With the average educational building of forty nine years of age, yes, you heard that right, institutions face, critical maintenance and renewal decisions. Now deferred maintenance means that things are liable to break eventually and cause more of an issue. And there's a crushing amount of labor that goes into band aids or what I call Frankensteining a building if they're if your team is responding to thousands of tickets per month, if that is the workflow of the team, then it's very challenging to be proactive. Pro proactivity becomes, a dream for the future. And it can be very hard as well to get funds for anything that isn't directly related to a service, a direct service. Oh, our air conditioner broke down. Let's get a redundant system. I actually had to do that this weekend for somebody. Yet we know that That's the worst thing. Yep. Yet we know that education, it's affected by by poor facilities with climate change, extreme weather events, schools being closed more often because the heat is too the heat is, you know, index is too high, leaky roofs. All of these things go into to the building maintenance that we have to become reactive with. But the fact remains that though with the original, point that you made is that we're here for to educate students. And students in well maintained facilities perform, statistically speaking, seventeen percent better, on testing compared with those in substandard conditions. So it's it's it's up to us to, provide the best for our students. This is this is, one way you'll learn about how to do that. And, you know, Laura, I'll jump in here and just say one of the other things that this slide talks about is staffing. There there is an aging level of facility staff that are trying to retire within five years and probably deserve to retire after the hard years they've put in, but you don't have you don't have the skilled labor coming into the workforce right now. You don't have people that want to do these types of roles, and so you're not getting that staff. You also have a tighter budget for staff. So a lot of the times we're not replacing one to one. The administration is trying to see, do we actually need to replace that person? And so that really causes a problem. And then finally, I would say that the staff retirement is also causing a problem because a lot of people I've worked with, all the knowledge is in their head. They know the buildings inside and out. They know it like the back of their hand. They can tell you what needs to be done on every asset in their building, but it's not written down anywhere. Or maybe it's scribbled on a napkin or something, but it's not actually digitized. And so that institutional knowledge is not there. If you don't have that information and you have a new staff member coming in, no matter how skilled they are, no matter how talented they are, they will need to start from scratch to figure out what level your assets are at, and that puts them at a disadvantage. And back to what Jim said of a backlog of tickets that you're just trying to stay afloat, there's no way you'll be actually proactive in your asset management. So trying to make sure that the staff is available and the staff is well trained with historical knowledge. And then another thing we've seen in schools a lot is, cultural resistance to change, especially in schools. I find that there's, a challenge in adopting new technology and possibly a confusion as to what that technology will do, which means sometimes your staff may fear that the digitization of their skills will either take away their job or misrepresent their performance when in actuality it helps you show how much work your staff is doing. We'll get into the details of that, but facilities teams need to be able to show what they're doing and how overworked they are in order to get more staff. So we holistic approach so they can work smarter, not harder. Mhmm. Yeah. Great thoughts there. Keep going. Yeah. That. Yeah. Let me I'll add to that. The smarter, not harder. You know, in order to get there, you know, it brings up another challenge that we see related to the software that people are using in their buildings. Now we've spent the last decades pulling in systems that do one thing and then they do another and then we have some, you know, some one one software system does the one thing, another one does the lighting, another one does, you know, sense whatever. Well, what happens is you often will bring in a lot of those systems that do not communicate with one another. And university departments or school districts, they might have these different softwares, functions for different purposes. But, the asset management solution that we wanna be looking at should be agnostic. So if we're going to have, like, an umbrella of an overlay of all of your software services, it's important that all institutions know that they should be looking for an agnostic, solution. And by extension, any institution can still use, the software they've already invested in if they take it an agnostic approach with the the overlay of their of their software that they bring in to manage all of it. And that's what Siemens and Brightly can do. So we streamline that that situation to make it more effective and ensure that all of these investments, it's not a baby at a bath water moment, that all the investments you've already made are still utilized. So I encourage all of my customers when when they're at when they're looking at upgrading their systems and things like that, you wanna look very holistically, and that's gonna help you the most. That's gonna feature proof you. So one thing you wanna do is this. So you gotta ask your vendors. Can you tell me how in what ways your software solution is either proprietary to the tech that you're offering or is it agnostic? The question is the core of your go forward. With an agnostic, software interface, your chosen vendor is is obligated to enable solutions that work with your environment. Yeah. Great points there. And, you know, there's a saying in business, you can spend a lot of time doing, which is all those Band Aids like you talked about. You're just doing. You're just doing the next task. But if your business and the way you operate, you don't take time to design, which is to find a better system, then eventually, it's gonna break down. So you guys have set that up really well. And and metaphor to so many things, not just infrastructure. Right? Yeah. So, you know and I would say a majority of schools are grappling with these system issues. Right, Katie? Yes. And I think the biggest problem is where do I start? It feels super overwhelming. You're like like we've been saying, you're just trying to get through the day and answer all the emergency tickets that you're receiving. And to start a process like this does take time, but it ends up being worth it in the long run. So it's one of those things where just take it one step at a time. That's what we tell everyone and start from the beginning. And what I like to call step one is that's where you're getting your turning your insight into action. You're getting your facilities condition assessment. You're getting your asset info. So what that means is you need to get a list essentially of everything you have, and you can put it in a hierarchy, and you can know what components go to what systems and what buildings and what district and what campus and have that list. If you do an official facilities condition assessment, that's something that an engineering firm does. Some schools are required to do those, every five years or so. Some are not. But the problem with an official facilities condition assessment is oftentimes the engineer you're using is just going to do the way they always do it. It's kind of like when you get an inspection on your house and they give you the paper that says here's the things and how old they are and what we think is going to break soon. It's similar to that, but that data never goes anywhere. It stays in a document or a binder, and no one's doing anything with it. So first of all, you need to take that report and make sure it's a living document that's being updated. If that's input into a CMMS, an EAM, which are, input into a CMMS, an EAM, which are acronyms that we will get to to explain a little bit more in detail, but, basically, they're computerized maintenance management systems. If all your assets are placed into something like that, then as your team is working on it, as they're repairing things, as they're replacing things, it's being updated. So you're not going back to the binder in five years and nothing's been updated, and you've made all sorts of changes, and it's not real anymore. So the most important thing we can do is digitize that data and take your static information and make it a more dynamic tool so that you can actually use that data to make decisions every day. So the next thing we kind of go from there, and I'll just walk you through these steps a little bit as we go through, and we go to tactical asset management. So you have your data. It's in some sort of technology. So what do you choose from? Like I just said, you have a couple acronyms that I'm sure you've heard. CMMS, which is the computerized maintenance management system. It's the day to day maintenance operations. It's what we were talking about earlier. It's managing your work orders, scheduling your routine maintenance, and tracking the details of those assets. The goal of that is just to increase your efficiency, reduce downtime, and be better prepared to keep your school open and running smoothly. Then the other thing that you may hear is an EAM. That's an enterprise asset management. It's basically a leveled up version of a CMMS, which is more strategic in terms of the entire asset life cycle. So it includes maintenance, inspections, and planning, which will help you be more sustainable and maximize your spend as you replace these things. And then we'll go to step three, which is strategic. And that sounds better. We're not just reacting. We're not just going through the day to day. We are going to now be strategic, which means we're gonna add that financial piece to your facilities data. And how do you do that? Well, that's called asset investment planning, and there are technological solutions, surprise, that can help you with that. So I find that that's one of the things that a lot of people have not heard of. Many people have heard of a CMMS. Most schools probably have one. It might be an old outdated one or my favorite and new one, but most schools should have a CMMS if they don't call us. But once you go from there, you're finally going to start being strategic. And where are you gonna get the rest of your information? Well, if you have asset investment planning software, it's taking that facilities information, and it's translating it to the world of finance. So essentially when your CFO or your superintendent, depending on where you're at, comes to you and says, Katie, what's my five year capital plan? What's going to break? What do I need to budget for? What do I need to get approved? Most people who don't have something like this are using their personal knowledge and potentially vendor information. So you have a vendor telling you, oh, this is gonna break next year. You gotta replace it now. Just like I always use this metaphor, but it's such a good one for myself is I don't know anything about cars. And if I bring my car to a mechanic and they tell me, you gotta fix this, this, and this, I say, okay. Here's my credit card because I don't have any data to confront them with and say, no. I don't need to do that. So the best way to do that in a way that you know you're not being told what to do by a vendor, but you actually have data is to use software like an AIP to prioritize what needs to be what needs to be fixed, what needs to be spent, to transparently budget so that you have details to show your board of trustees, your CFO, whoever is asking you for that budget, and to proactively plan for infrastructure upgrades. So it might be a bond that you need to request. If it's a public school, it might be just a capital plan that you need to get budget for or an endowment if it's in private school to cover a new building, a new huge HVAC system overhaul because it's overdue and we haven't done it yet. So this will help you actually compare the details of what you have and figure out what your priority should be. It can take the information directly from your CMMS or EAM, and it's agnostic, Jim's favorite word. So it doesn't have to be something at least ours is agnostic. And why that matters is it then it can take that information that your team is updating on the work orders and actually update it by benchmarking with by benchmarking with local other schools, benchmarking with pricing going on in the area, and actually using that insight to support your evidence based capital planning. So the the long version of all of that is that it allows your finance leader to trust that you're giving them accurate information with data to create a budget that has accurate projections, but it's also giving you benchmarks to increase your likelihood of being approved. And it might have seemed impossible impossible to get to that place when you don't even have a list of your assets, but it is possible. You just have to take it one step at a time. So, okay. We've done these three steps. We're on the last step. The last step is a fully digital campus, which seems like a dream, but you can get there. And I'm gonna let Jim take that part because he knows it better than I do. Thanks, Katie. So, as we talk about the future of of asset management, we really have to talk about digital transformation. We'll we'll going forward, we'll require you to, you know your ticketing system is something that is of service to you. It does not it it it's not your it's not your constant to do list if you're gonna become more proactive. You know, it'll be just part of your work. So an asset life a life cycle management system is gonna offer you a much more holistic view to your work that enables your institution to, optimize asset performance and maximize your ROI. Now if you think through the slides that Katie shared with you, kind of the Chevron slides, you have to think about, kind of the Chevron slides, you have to think about, well, how do I gain stakeholder support to do that? Well, using this narrative is a very helpful way to do it. We have, you know, these things that we know, these things that we want to do, and in between, we have to collect an an an amount an enormous amount of data, but we need help doing that. So that leads us to the point that, you know, the what you don't know component of your work can end up being the most expensive thing in your budget. For example, I was working with us, a university, last year, that's using, our software overlay system. And and I was curious to know, like, where their where their real justifications and their wins were so that they can say to their CFO, hey. What we're using works. And here's here's what they shared with me. So they shared with me how, their their their measurement data, this is a water they're showing me their water, how they had very consistent, kind of bills month over month. You know, they they were seasonal, but they were they were what they were expecting. And I said, well, what what happened on October fourteenth or whatever the date was at two o'clock that I'm I'm seeing this change in your data? And they said, oh, well, at that time, we picked up on an ongoing, a water leak that started. And because of the system and because of the sensors that we we had on it, we were able to identify the, the leak, detect it right away, identify where it was, and start taking care of it. Now had that institution not had that system, the next step for them would be either someone reporting that they saw groundwater and or waiting until the next water bill. Now had they done the latter, the difference would have been a seventy thousand dollar difference. That's not good. So Not good. That's not good. So imagine the imagine the power of having an asset life cycle management system and this sort of software that enables you to say, hey, mister, engineer, go fix that, number one, and, hey, mister CFO, guess what we did today and and and how we save this kind of money for our institution. That's what the systems like this, are designed to do for you. And, Jim, I would love to I would love to just circle into what you were talking about because it made me think of one of our clients that had a similar thing happened where the sensors alerted them to a leak leak on a weekend where no one was in the school because it was a k twelve school, not in higher ed, so no one was there. And had they not seen it till Monday, it would have caused a lot more damage than being alerted in real time. So digitization really helps with that. Yes. I did have a school district that talked to me about this one scenario. It's just like what you're saying, Katie. There they, so the this particular, facilities department has, controls on all each of their I think it's fifty five buildings, but they didn't have, an overlay to view it all. And the only way they can really understand if something was going wrong in one of those fifty five buildings was to get a phone call. But that phone call also had its own phone tree. So in this in this scenario, what happened was that elementary schools, freezers or the electricity went down in that part of the building that houses the cafeteria. Right? And that happens over the weekend. So the first person in the building It always happens over the weekend, John. It has to. Five thirty in the morning, somebody yeah. Some poor person reports to the school Yeah. Opens up the freezers and realizes we have just lost ten thousand dollars worth of food. Okay. So that person can't get in touch with a building supervisor until seven thirty, eight o'clock. So that happens. Well, breakfast should be starting about then. And that person's building supervisor doesn't get to facilities till eight thirty, nine o'clock. So it's not till nine o'clock after the weekend and the Monday morning that the facilities people learn about this issue, and then they have to, not only fix it, but they have to withstand the burden of losing, you know, thousands of dollars worth of of food or compromised, safety. Right? So these are ROI moments that are exceedingly powerful, particularly when we call what we call it preventative maintenance. Right? But we also want to get into the world of predictive maintenance. We know that freezer is gonna go down at some point. But we if we have asset management control, then we kind of have a window of understanding when, and that enables our budget. Because in year one, three, five, we know these things will need to be replaced. We don't have to go I like to call it going back to the altar. We don't have to go back to the altar to say, oh, I need this much money to do these things that now we're suffering through. And then there's, you know, there's a procurement process through that. It's very painful. So, being predictive with your software is so powerful. Tough. I'll I'll hold there and and see if, we wanna move on to the next. Well, it kinda helps us segue into the next topic, you know, and I think you've I feel like you've already justified it just by those examples of of losing ten thousand dollars or something or a leak costing, you know, seventy thousand or something to fix. But there are a lot of great solutions out there, but budgets are constantly on everyone's mind, you know, as they consider how to justify paying for something new. So, you know, in our era of, you know, tighter finances and the continued expectation that universities and k through twelve schools will do more with less, you know, how can institutions get approval or buy in to make the purchase, Jim? Okay. So I'll I'll I'll be happy to talk about that. It's gonna take me a couple of steps. I really wanna encourage everybody to to rethink about, the, the slides that Katie showed earlier with the Chevrons because gathering that data and making your case is so important. That enables your stakeholder support. Right? And you're absolutely right. We the top question we get is how much this cost. And we we know that our institutions, our public institutions, our private high adds, they face annual funding deficits. We we understand that. But there's still the work that needs to be done. I mean, k twelve is in was eighty five, billion in deficits across the country, more for higher ed, in capital, maintenance and operations. And of course, you know, this is a business transaction, so it does require a capital outlay upfront upfront. But fortunately, there are a number of savings that universities and districts will realize through their improved, asset life management system. I was just on a call a moment ago, our Monday call with our engineering team, and they were training us on, their their their process when they work with us in the field of how they future forecast for our customers. And, actually, when you're working with companies like Siemens, we have the engineering capacity to actually do a lot of this incentive research for the customer. So our engineers actually part of our process is to, have the engineers do the incentive research for your state or your municipality or locality, right, and prepare the incentives applications for, the customer. Now that is a human capital, expenditure that you don't have to pay for. Right? That's that's a whole another skill set. And the next thing I want to share was, the residual, cost savings that you may, see when you make this sort of improvement. And the first one that people don't think about is an insurance premium savings or an insured insurance, expenditure savings. So you have if you have a, a more active system, you can have a reduced premium. So that's an important thing. We can help you work with your, insurance company to help them understand, and we can now help you articulate what will the improvements will be. That becomes a safety net against losing money on eventual claims. That's very powerful. Now, I'm gonna steal Katie's thunder for for a second because it's really her example. But it's, it's from Waco ISD here in Texas just down the road from me. So, you can, yes, send me all day long if you like Katie, but I get a little passionate about about this piece of stuff. Yeah. Yeah. So Waco ISD, they had their they were able to upload to an insurance claim by a campus fire. Right? So because they had their asset registry, their, their, their, claim became much higher. Yeah. And I'll jump into that. You wanna you wanna get into the detail on that? A little bit. I'll just add a little bit. So their entire building burnt down. And when you have an incident like that, obviously, insurance is going to say, oh, you had seven million dollars of value in that building, and they're basing it on their estimate. Building, and they're basing it on their estimate. If you actually have proof of what was in that building, then you can get more money for your insurance claim. So they were able to double their insurance claim, I believe, from eight million to fourteen million based on the assets that they had listed in their CMMS system because they were able to prove everything that was lost within that building instead of just an insurance adjuster's estimate of loss. And I'll I'll just add one more personal example. When I was at the Windward School in New York, hurricane Irene, I think, it came in it was, like, early twenty twenty one, the week before school started. And there weren't there aren't floods in New York, and it flooded our whole school, the whole basement. Put together list of all those things. Because in my defense, it was a new campus, So we hadn't set it up yet. So not only was it a new campus, but we had no list of what was in that building yet to start quantifying the loss. And I'm sure we could have gotten more money if we had had a more detailed asset registry for that. Yeah. So, so that's kind of the insurance component of it, but the predictive quality of the software system that you would employ would require would also enable you to have, like rather than just lighting and just piping and just HVAC, you actually would have readable sensors that this software is attached to. Right? And those sensors can help you prevent a disaster in the first place. Going back to my example about the, broken water, pipe at our university here in Texas. And that enables the customer to respond far faster, and the the savings, is not only astronomical, it's measurable. So any facilities team would also have a working knowledge through this living data within your software. Yeah. And I will just add to that. I think we've talked about this a lot, but I'll just say deferring your maintenance costs more, constantly repairing something that's breaking adds up over time, And making that decision of when is it time to replace versus keep putting the Band Aid on is a huge decision that can be significant if you don't see it upfront. And it's harder to justify because whenever you go to the person who's in charge of the money, they say, what's the cheaper solution right now? Can you just fix it? Do I have to buy a new one? And how do you make that case to say, yes, even though this is cheaper to repair, the cost of the repeated repairs are not gonna be worth it in the long run. And you have software and data to track how often this asset's failing to say this one failed sixteen times this year, and this is how much that costs. That adds up to a two year ROI of replacing this unit because you can actually see that and give you that information. And facility staff doesn't have time to sit and run all those calculations. If you have software doing it for you, it's easier and faster, and, you know, you're right. So, you can also compare repair costs to replacement costs and showing what that long term gain is. I also would just bring it back to you can validate what your vendor recommends to you. You can actually take your recommendations. We all have vendors that we know and love and trust, but you can validate with data that you're going in the right direction. And you can see if your prediction of failure is accurate. Like Jim said, get to that predictive maintenance place where you know that it's going to fail and you know when it's going to fail, and you can actually avoid the surprise costs of constantly replacing things and having to not know if you should keep doing it. And I'll just have one final thought about that replacement versus repair. Another thing that's often overlooked by facilities leaders is the overtime and the staff hours. And how do you add that calculation into this broke sixteen times and I had to pay weekends and nights overtime to replace it, that adds to your ROI in in large quantities if you do all the math out. Yep. You know, another factor related to the ROI is the strategic ability of the team, you know, the the maintenance team alongside your you kind of have to be more shoulder to shoulder with your CFO because this is often a financial, conversation. Right? To thinking about future proofing your built things, against rising energy costs. This is important too, and this is something that Siemens engineers do a really great job at, and they could, do more of the predictive, components of how to save and justify some sort of capital expenses like this. The the traditional thinker is concerned that bigger buildings mean bigger bills. Think about moving from a smaller apartment to a larger house. Right? It's just natural that you have a bigger building and bigger bills. But if you rethink your building as a smart building, you can most certainly yield cost savings. And we can help make buildings not only more modern, but also more efficient. We've seen so many improvements to our, k twelves here in Texas over the years, and they're aesthetically gorgeous. You know, wonderful. Look like, you know, high schools that look like, you know, community colleges. Just wonderful buildings. And, you know, when this was happening in the last twenty years, I wondered, are these buildings truly aesthetic or are they aesthetic and energy efficient? And sometimes they aren't, sometimes they aren't. So you have to think that these things go hand in hand. So, if you have that future mindset, then you can, you know, work towards future proofing your buildings. And even when many capital projects are approved, you're often doing cosmetic work without an integrated building management system that considers cloud based systems. So the Internet of things and analytics becomes more and more important. And if now now is probably one of the greatest, times to learn about how software and AI and predictive maintenance can really serve you in your buildings because it's going to change your workforce too. The one example of of an ROI, you know, I talked about this about sensors on your lighting sensors on your on your rooms, on your HVAC, on your plumbing, and they show, you know, with having sensors, then you're basically have a mission control which shows which parts of the building are being used at the time. And that helps you as well, be predictive about how to maintain control of temperature and lighting and things like that. Sensors on on this equipment can also help with routine maintenance. So rather than using a set schedule based on time, you replace, supplies in areas where it's needed most at the time. So an example of that would be like a a custodian only servicing a restroom that has lots of traffic, as noted by the sensor or only changing filters in rooms that are getting regular use, not that one's been closed for the summer. So, you know, if you're on a time schedule, then we just go through the buildings and we change all the filters on the HVAC well. If certain sensors are showing you that filters aren't dirty, then why spend the human capital and the cost of the filters to actually change them when they may or may not need it? That's a great example, Jim. I just have to chime in. That's a really good one because so many people just go, just change everything every July, every December, and they're wasting a lot of time and resources. If the filter doesn't need to be changed, you don't need to replace it. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. If you wanna go on to the Southern Methodist University slide, I'll talk a little bit about this example. Now this is the university where I talked about the water, break where they they, know, were able to report to the CFO that, this, water leak was happening and they were able to, you know, find it within a few minutes and get the repair going. So this is a very, you know, large campus and it's growing as well. Beautiful campus in in the middle of Dallas. And, their agreement with Siemens is approximately a hundred million dollar agreement over ten years. I'm sorry, over eighteen years where we did boilers and chillers. We did just so many things to help improve their their engineering and their energy. You can see the list here of their improvement measures. And, so their capital outlay, yes, was it it's a it's pretty high number, hundred million dollars. But there's their predictive savings, they came down to putting it all together on, you know, finding issues before they arise, having more, sensor based and software based maintenance versus time based maintenance, how much human capital that saves over time, and how much they reduce their cost of, outage. Right? And they've estimated that their savings is approximately ten million dollars a year. Well, basically, they've saved they they've spent a hundred million dollars to save eighty to save a hundred and eighty. And that's that's a very good ROI. That's a very good ROI. Now because they have predictive maintenance, they're able to measure it. So they have they can't just assume. Right? They can have actual measurable outcomes. So, another way to realize the ROI is to reposition a building from a static overhead to something that's creating an educational experience. I'll go into this next topic as well. So if you if you imagine, you know, you know, our traditional kind of, tiled ceiling buildings, which kind of hide all of the piping and wiring, things like that. There is a way that, and Siemens has installed a lot of them where we can do exposed piping and wiring so that students can actually just look up at the ceiling and start learning from, how things work. And we call that my little, phrase for that is calling that a a vessel, like a building that you learn in, like a a school building, a vessel in which to learn to a vessel from which to learn. So having sort of solutions like that with your piping and your wiring can really, empower, engineering students. This is very common for us to do in community colleges where we have a lot of certificate programs for for HVAC and and, and and engineering and things like that. And now we have more and more community colleges offering bachelor's degrees, in these fields. So, having active, buildings like this where we can actually see, how the piping and and all that works enables better, outcomes for students as well. Great, great Callback. Jim, that's a really good callback to what we said about the lack of skilled labor coming into the workforce. And if they're being trained properly in these programs, then hopefully that will solve itself in the future. Yes. Yeah. It's very cyclical, Katie. It really is very cyclical. So, you know, we can even go go as far as, doing more business to society work as well. Now I had a great conversation with with a a k twelve, a while ago, and they said, oh, you know, we're redoing our bubble. I think it was a middle school. And, one of the incentives that the constructor did for us was to give us two scholarships, for a few thousand dollars for seniors who were interested in going into engineering. And I said, you know what? That is a great, outcome. However, I would argue that there's a way we can do that more holistically because if you think of what you just said, you basically reconstructed your building and it and it helped your building. No doubt about that. But your, but your investment in back into the curriculum and instruction helps two kids. And that's a nice to have. But is there a way that we can do that to help more kids or all kids? Like more live more visible labs labs and things like that. Or, actually creating lesson structures for those students who can, become more curious. I like to call them engineering and energy curious students, graduating more students who are interested in in on our field. And, yes, we can do that. Yes. We can have a curriculum and instruction overlay for you to improve your stem instruction so that what we're doing for your buildings, we can also help enable for your, your curriculum instruction. One way one another way we've done that, is through, design challenges. Like, you could do a design challenge, that that we can support through the project, and it could be k twelve or high ed, and those are super fun and really, very empowering for students. Engineering and and students are always hungry for project to showcase. And we did one here here at k twelve here in Texas, last year that went really well. And we got a lot out of the students, and we are we are graduating not only more energy and engineering curious students, but we're graduating more more, underrepresented students, particularly girls who are in these fields. And that's that's important to us. So that's another way where Brightly and Siemens can partner, with an institution to actually have, you know, more CNI, outcomes, not just maintenance and operations outcomes. Yeah. This is a really just important perspective, you know, especially as schools are aiming to equip students with that hands on real world experience. You know? And so I'd like to explore though here the sensors a bit more, as we near the end of our time. You know, once a school has committed to reworking their infrastructure, you know, how can they take it to the next level? Jim? Yeah. So, this gets into, kind of the Internet of things. Right? So now we're we're talking about this intentionally, to be honest, because we really wanna help our our, you know, our colleagues in in maintenance and operations elevate their units into these more proactive, more software based, you know, units. And getting, a little more integrated into your building system is gonna enable that. And we call some of that now this is you know, I'll go back to Katie's point about going step by step. This is not a first step you would take, but this is is somewhere you would you would have as a North Star. So having more predictive maintenance in a digital twin, is getting very popular. And and and as we know, we expect that not only will it gain popularity, it will be an expectation in the next, you know, handful of years. Now, when we to look at the future of asset management and digital transformation, we have to look at digital twins. And they're they're basically your virtual representation of your physical asset as your of your physical process or your systems. They mirror and they synchronize with your physical system, so like a central utility plant, and they allow for the real time tracking and analysis. They we can only do that through sensors and softwares. Right? So digital twins can be used for for training, for surgical planning, future proofing, automation, and how to integrate, AI as well. And, one of the most powerful applications of digital twins is really in predictive maintenance. By continuously monitoring the performance and the condition of equipment or machinery that you have. A digital twin can detect early signs of wear and tear that enables your budget control. They can allow, companies to address potential issues way before they cause costly breakdowns. That's the goal. Right? But having such a, an active digital twin really is your it's it's like your it's your AI partner. And that approach not only reduces downtime, which you wanna avoid, of course, certain when we have this such weather like we do in the south, but also extends the, the lifespan of equipment, ultimately leading to the lower maintenance cost. So here's another example of that. So, one of our customers who does getting into more than digital twinning realized that there were some some roof leaks, and they may or may not had a have a relationship with their package units in the roof, and it turns out they did. And they're like, well, you know, they're fifteen years old. You know, we should probably think about replacing them. But after we we looked under the hood a little bit more through their data, we help them understand, you know, if you really did a very, really sincere cleanse and employed some other products, you don't would not have to, replace these for another ten years. So what we were able to do was predict out the replacement for ten years and, you know, the hundreds of thousands of dollars that they would have had to spend with a twenty five thousand dollar solution, for more sealing and and and, elevating their refrigerants and things like that. That wouldn't have happened had we not watched the watched the data through the sensors. We would have really been on the back end of it after things broke. So we met like another example in manufacturing, large manufacturing, digital twins are used to monitor the health of critical machines on, the production line. So sensors like that provide real time data on vibration, on temperature, on on on other performance metrics, which are fed into the digital twin to predict when a machine might fail. I think that the predictive maintenance that's gonna come out of digital twinning in the next ten, fifteen years is going to lead us, into this whole new world. And with the data, the maintenance any maintenance team can proactively address these issues and schedule repairs before they disrupt production and become more costly. Yeah. Great thoughts there and, you know, just some exciting aspirations there. You know, as we near the end of our time here, are there any final thoughts you'd like to leave with our audience, Katie? Sure. I'll just tag on to what Jim just said, which is the dream is that everything's predictive so that you're not reacting, that you're not in a situation of maintenance repairs that need to happen. But we know that I don't think anyone's there yet. Some people may be close. But in schools, it's very hard to get there from where we are right now. So don't let that deter you because this is a long term goal. All you need to do is start somewhere, whether that's beginning with your asset condition assessment and then putting it into some sort of technology. If you already have that, reassessing that everything is in there the way you want it in an asset hierarchy that makes sense so that you can analyze what you have. And then adding to that capital planning, adding to that budgeting and predictive maintenance so that you can actually prove your ROI of your investment and track your failures, your repair costs, your replacement value, and use that to make confident decisions based on data. If, if you do that, then you'll be able to avoid spending too much. You'll be able to pitch it, which is what we always say, strategic asset management. And that will lead you to this digital journey that eventually everyone will reach. And you might as well start now so that you can be ahead of the curve as everyone starts to get there. Would you say so, Jim? I do. Yeah. You know, the bullets are you wanna reduce your operational cost, you wanna extend your equipment lifespan, you wanna optimize your energy use, and you wanna improve the building, occupant experience. Those those are all together, that's what that's the North Star. Right? Great points from both of you, and thank you so much for this really timely conversation as well. So I wanted to shift to some questions from our audience today. So let's jump right in here with the time we have. And, this first question, it says, is this kind of holistic approach more feasible for smaller institutions or larger districts with many buildings? Or in other words, how can it be aligned to institutions across the spectrum? Great question there. Who'd like to start on that one or take it for us? Yeah. Yeah. I'll start with that. So, yes, going back to what I keep saying, and you're probably sick of me saying it, it's adaptable to where you start. Gather your asset and tailor your strategy to fit your institution size. I mean, we've worked with tiny private schools, k twelve schools, little community colleges, all the way up to huge, what we call enterprise universities. And as long as you focus on what's critical, you can do it. So if it's a smaller institution, focus on your critical infrastructure, your aging HVAC system, residence halls, things that affect the day to day of student life. Focus on that and start to digitize over time. So even focus on your top building. So a good example is digitize your top twenty assets. If you have a big campus, use AIP to create a ten year capital plan and plan it based around that you may have limited funding. You may have limited donations in the next five years, but plan ten years for those top twenty assets. If you're in a larger, more complex, you know, campus with multiple campuses, thousands of assets, then you wanna get to that goal a little bit faster so that you get to that goal a little bit faster so that you can use the predictive analytics to actually help you create what investments you need. And you can also use that planning to plan accordingly to even get in, get, income from some of your assets, like your auxiliary facilities that you may be using or renting out. And then you can create that capital plan aligned with your school's strategic goals. That's key in schools that you may not hear in corporate, which is if your school has a strategic goal like sustainability, then that has to be included in what your capital plan is and what your facility's master plan is. So you can't just do what you think. You need to follow the school's goals and missions as well, And I think that's important. So if you have a large university, you would be able to not only do a capital plan with technology, but then you can look at some of the larger softwares like Siemens that will give you an insight into all your systems in one location. So we just a quick example we talked about was BMS or BAS systems. Every campus, every school has different ones in every building based on when they were built. How can you see them all in one digital asset at one time? And that's something we can help you with. Excellent. Thank you for taking that question on. Okay. Another, question here. At my university, we are often siloed by function. So what are some of the benefits of centralized control and oversight of all building operations, and how can I help communicate these positive impacts to those who approve the budget? I know we've touched on some of that. Jim, you wanna touch on that one some? Sure. Yeah. It it it is it's a good question to be a, kind of on the heels of what Katie was just saying because I think that if you think of your institution as a one as one and you have the cultural mindset that you are one university of insert state here, you are one independent school blank independent school district here. If you are if you are a unified front in that way, then the maintenance and operation, the facilities and buildings folks need to be at the table in strategic planning. And if you're not, then we will continue to follow the old path of reactive. If we're gonna make the investment in our buildings and that's gonna be a long term investment, that team has to be there. And they are the experts, and they can tell the story of how we work today and how we'd like to work in the future. And since it really is a fiduciary conversation, I don't think there's a CFO on the planet who wouldn't welcome that kind of, strategic unity Because ultimately, that is gonna serve your institution the best, and it's going to, spend money more wisely. So I think it's really a stakeholder support approach. Communicating those positive impacts is all gonna be surrounded about your data. And you already have the data you're using, but then you can from there, you can kind of do the more predictive data. This is where we wanna be. This is our North Star. You know? And and and we can make it a one three five plan. In one year, we'd like to do these things these things and these things. But as you're doing the thinginess of it, the building part of it, you also want to overlay. And this is how we'd like to make it more automated, and this is how we'd like to be more predictive. And, I really feel like that will help unsilo the silos at least in conversation and at least in the strategic way. Yeah. Great thoughts there. Okay. We're gonna do one more really quick. It says, what are some quick wins that can be achieved to help bolster support? Oh, okay. Quick wins. So, I would probably say the most manageable one for any, facilities, team is taking a look at, bill pay, where where your bills are on your mechanical, electrical, and your plumbing, and look at that consumption and know that, sensor alerts save a lot of time. So what you can do is you can align an hourly rate to report out to your team and to your leadership. And you can align not only how much, you know, the cost of that that, utility is going to be, but how much you're going to increase that you that utility in the next year. We usually use about a about a three percent increase per year. It depends on the state, depends on the municipality, depends on how your utility companies work. But if you can show that staggered approach, then you can align, like, a human capital rate to show how many hours are saved if you are employing a software solution or censored solution or both. And on that note, Jim, I would just add the key to quick wins to gain support is your staff has to see why it's valuable to them, which is what we talked about before. And so the CFO will eventually see why it's important to them. But in order for any of it to work, your staff has to be using it. They have to be using the mobile app to put the thing in the ticket that they've done. They have to close it. They have to put their work orders. They have to do all of those things. And so I find the best way to get people on board is to have them use it to show how hard they're working. So someone says, oh, you don't need more maintenance staff. This they're fine. And I see them eating lunch, and you're like, wait. Yes. They are eating lunch. Everyone eats lunch. But we need to actually prove how many hours you've been working, how much overtime you've been doing without just the hours. Like, we can actually show it as opposed to the asset, the campus, the building, and where those problem areas are to hopefully get more staff. And we've had that happen a lot where some schools, Waco is the one I keep thinking of, but some schools have been able to quickly gain support for a new staff man member who specifically just does preventive maintenance versus reactive maintenance. So now they have a preventive maintenance staff member, and then they still have the team that's doing reactive ticketing, but it keeps them ahead of the curve a little bit more, and they were able to do that pretty quickly. Excellent. Great thoughts from both of you. Thank you so much for your time today. Thank you, Katie and Jim, and all of you for being with us today. Have a great day. Thank you. Thank you.