The Future Proof Campus: Taking A Data-Driven Approach to Facilities Investments

Thank you. Thanks everyone for having me. I'll skip right ahead. So as he said, I'm the senior industry marketing manager for education at Brightly, and that's because I spent the last twelve years in schools as many titles. As you all know, schools have some interesting title choices, but basically director of facilities and operations at the Windward School in New York and Campbell Hall School in California. And prior to that, I worked in a maintenance office at a private jet company and an HVAC company. So I've done a lot of facilities work. So we're gonna start this is actually a really brief talk. So I'm gonna try to get through everything and talk about the current state of educational facilities that you all know about. The deferred maintenance backlog is at a critical breaking point. We know this. Education systems are struggling with attracting and keeping students as well as providing top notch facilities, Recent changes in student preferences to community colleges, remote schools, trade schools, tighter budgets, aging infrastructure is really forcing the finance teams as well as the maintenance teams to do more with less. It is crucial to maintain our facilities. They're one of the most important things on campus besides the students and the teachers. And we all know that there's a backlog in tasks that need to be done as well as a deficit in our budget. There's actually a thirty six percent deficit and a hundred and twelve billion dollar backlog in maintenance for US higher ed facilities. Around twenty percent of our maintenance staff is nearing retirement if they haven't already retired, and most of them are taking historical knowledge with them. And all that to say, you have you're losing your historical knowledge. You're losing the people that have been there, and you don't have the staff to replace them. You also have students that are paying for schools. I was in k twelve, but it was also private schools. So when someone's paying for a school, they expect the facility condition to be at a certain level, and thirty eight percent of enrollment decisions are affected by your facilities. And what we see besides having the historical data retiring, we also see whatever data we have not centralized up to date on spreadsheets, on papers written, filing cabinets. So what can we do from there? If you're a financial leader in a school or a facilities director, you really need to figure out how to substantiate your budget request as well as get as much funding as possible to do that. So when you're faced with these barriers, it's important to not use an outdated manual process to have as many well up to date knowledgeable staff as possible and to be able to communicate quickly and easily with that staff, but also with your community at large. And when you're doing everything in a manual way, you don't really have real time data or insights. All all the data you have is as good as the person who put it in last. So, I'm sure most of you have heard about APA. APA, if you haven't, is Association of Physical Plant Administrators, but now we just call it APA. And they hold a thought leaders symposium with higher education and campus facilities leaders every year. And the twenty twenty three one actually brought together a report with strategies that I found very enlightening. So I just wanted to bring them up quickly before we go into what's next. Recognizing that workforce issues are challenging, empowering a workforce to want to solve these problems is one of the major themes in the report. So the main things that came out of the APA thought leaders report was that educational facilities leaders need to address the following, and I don't think this will be news to most of you. Keep planning for an uncertain future by assessing liabilities, risks, tracking assets, and thinking long term. Attract and retain a qualified workforce. If you have high-tech efficient workplace offerings, that will help do that. Better align your strategic plan with your budget by prioritizing your institution's needs and then aligning your budget to those needs. That's a challenging one if you have a strategic plan that doesn't leave a lot of room for maintenance. Promote and sustain an elevated position for your facilities managers in the organization. And the way to do that is improving your presentation and communication skills and demonstrating the value of the facilities to your campus administrators and organization. And finally, we all know since COVID, we've been trying to deploy a lot more technology in our lives in schools, but using that technology to make systems smarter, to consolidate data, to employ IoT sensors, which is something that a lot of people are starting to use, and consider the benefits of what other tools can be used in facilities management. The other thing that I wanna point out is that there were two main priorities in there that stuck out to me. One is managing your assets and your future capital. How do you ensure that your facilities are running smoothly and you have a plan to address your aging infrastructure? Your facilities leaders, if you are a facilities leader in this, you know, you're juggling so many daily tasks that even thinking about the future is almost impossible. You have aging buildings that create a major challenge to actually balance your current needs and fixing the problems today and let alone think about the future. Your strategic plan needs to be done with the idea of limited financial resources and picking your priorities appropriately to spend those resources. And in doing so, often our day to day short term costs are very clear. We know something's gonna break. We know what it's gonna cost to fix it. But forecasting long term capital planning is usually guesswork, and it's usually based on what a vendor tells you. And the analogy I always use is I know nothing about cars, and if I go to get my car fixed and they tell me something needs to be fixed fixed and how much it costs, I have no point of reference other than just guessing if that's what I should be doing and trusting the person I'm working with. So if you don't have that data, how do you know you're making the right choice? And finally, capital planning really needs to consider your asset life cycles, regulations, budgets, and account for surprises that we hate but happen anyway, which leads me to the point that data is key. Facts eliminate your emotions from your priorities, which is also key. If someone is coming to you with budget requests and everyone has certain, goals for the school and their departments and what they need, how do you justify your request without emotional decision making? It has to be data. Condition data provides valuable insights for your short term, long term planning. If you have thorough knowledge of your assets, that will obviously inform your budget decision, and you're going to be strategic in your asset management for long term. And finally, we wanna be we do not wanna be Our reactive work should only be ten to fifteen percent, which was in a report that I quoted here from facilities net. But if a facility is mainly reactive, it's really hard to actually prevent to plan a preventative maintenance plan and to do large scale projects. So where do we start? I have a three step plan of what I suggest we do, And most schools are required to do a facilities condition assessment in FCA every five or so years. If you're not required to do it, you might do it on your own anyway. You can do it internally or externally, and we're gonna talk about that. So the journey to a truly strategic asset management plan begins with gathering your asset information. If that information is only in someone's head, then that doesn't help. If that information is in filing cabinets full of paperwork, that's not ideal either. So I would say you wanna start with a facilities condition assessment if you don't have a recent one. Truly get to know your assets, what condition they're in, where they're at, all of them across your campus, multiple campuses, multiple buildings. And at this point, you're purely in reactive maintenance most of the time. So there we go. So you're doing an FCA. Normally, they're conducted by engineering professionals, but you could do it internally if you have the staff that knows your buildings in and out and is very detailed. You're gonna assess your school's complete infrastructure, buildings, HVAC, plumbing, electrical. You will receive a detailed report with your upgrade cost estimates, help give you an estimate of lifespan as well as compliance. However, there's definitely a downside to an FCA, which is that they are stagnant. So as soon as you have one, it's gonna be out of date very soon. Pros and cons. I'll I'll break it down for you a little bit more. The pro is that you have a very detailed, usually binder, though maybe PDF, of everything that you have, your structure, your mechanics, your electronics. If your staff is heavily involved in that, that will help make sure you don't miss anything, that you have everything up to date. And I'm actually coming out with some FCA checklist that we can send your way later. The con is, as I said, if you're using an engineering firm, they cost a lot. If you're required to, unfortunately, that's something you have to do. They're time consuming, and the data is depreciated immediately just like driving that car off the lot. I'll go back to that metaphor. Unless someone in your team is going to be constantly updating some sort of manual spreadsheet FCA, you have an in house all of your asset condition data. You have an SCA. You have an in house assessment. What is next? We're moving to step two, which we would call tactical asset management. That involves enhancing and having a very accurate preventative maintenance plan. Having a very accurate preventative maintenance plan. That is another word that now every time I say it, I think about is it preventive or preventative? We have a whole video on that at brightly. I say preventative, so potato, potato. I should have added a poll for that. And the goal is to minimize your facility's downtime and ensure that you have an efficient day to day management. So you've got your asset information, and we're gonna optimize what we're doing. If the goal is to strategically manage your facilities, you need a process to do that. One that works today and continually in the future because having a plan is key. We created a model called the APM model. It is a mnemonic device that says something you probably already know about, but helps process it in a way that is tangible for your staff. Once you have an FCA, you ideally will maintain it and won't need to do it unless it's required by your district. So the APM stands for assess, which is thoroughly understand your building conditions, your components, your assets, your system. That was step one. And then prioritize your urgent tasks. So what's a safety hazard? What's something that desperately needs to be repaired to keep the buildings running? And then you're gonna plan. What's the next way to address the items at the top and bottom of your list? So hit the low hanging fruit and plan for the larger things that need to be done. What needs to be fixed? When is it going to get done? How much will it cost? Who needs to be involved? All those things we know. Then you're gonna execute your most critical items on your list, ensuring that everyone has what they need to do to do the task. And then the tough one that I don't see a lot of people doing is maintaining your FCA by having either a capital plan and process or having software that will do that. So you can just let your facilities run. And a great way to do that is to have a CMMS software. So now I'm gonna go to my first poll if anyone is out there. And did the poll go through? I think so. If you have a minute, It did. Great. Please answer by poll if you have a second. Do you have a CMMS software? Yes. No. We do it manually in a spreadsheet, or you do the old school post it notepad. I'll give everyone a second to answer if they have a minute. Perfect. And I'll just jump in and say that to participate in the poll, you just click directly on the slide. Here's where you've been seeing the slide or the whole presentation. Just click directly on your screen. And if for whatever reason, like, you you were having problems interacting with the screen, you can also, submit your answers, in the attendee chat, which I have open at the bottom of your screen. I'm gonna highlight it. It's the blue icon with the two, white chat bubbles. It should be highlighted now, so just in case. But we have about forty nine percent of of you having We're gonna see the results. We're gonna go on. There we go. Alright. We're about fifty fifty for having a CMMS software. So let's go to my next slide. Okay. What is a CMMS if you don't know? So fifty percent of you know, and you can tune out for the next two seconds. It's a computerized maintenance management system. Now it focuses mainly on your day to day activities, your work order response. It schedules your routine maintenance, attracts your work orders, and it tracks your assets for maintenance purposes. So it is mostly for day to day operations. It will help make your staff more efficient and reduce downtime because you'll be able to make sure everyone stays on top of everything that needs to get done. Supervisors can manage your work orders, assign the work orders, analyze your historical data in a computerized database, and actually also analyze your downtime and check out your costs that you've been spending. It'll provide you most will provide you with graphs, key performance indicators, and reports that will allow you to communicate what you've been done doing and what the budget requirements are. So you have a CMMS, you've got your day to day maintenance requests optimized, streamlined, and you're ready to move on to bigger projects, larger assets, construction, major renovations. That's step three, strategic asset management, which is our goal eventually. And that's why it's a pyramid because it takes a little while to get there. If you're not there, that's okay. But when you get there, you can start your long term proactive facilities planet planning, which will actually help you optimize your budget. And the word I hear I've always heard used in schools is capital planning. You have to do a capital plan. Your finance leader is asking you, help me with the finance with the financials for the capital plan of our facilities. So high level steps include things like reporting, what if scenarios, prediction modeling, project management, sustainability, all of those things. So where would we even start? I have my next and final poll if everyone's still with me. Have you heard of asset investment planning software? If you have a minute, click and respond. Yes. And we currently use it. Yes. But we have not started using one yet. No. I would love to learn more about it. And, no, I don't think I need this at all. You have very short time because this this doesn't give me a lot of time in this presentation. Please let me know if you know what asset investment planning software is. Correct. And, again, just click directly on your screen where you're seeing the presentation. We have thirty five percent this time. You're doing great. Alright. We're gonna go to the responses. So we're at fifty percent. Okay. Cool. So some people have we have fifteen percent that do have one. It's about forty five percent know what I'm talking about, and we have about fifty percent that doesn't know. So I would love to tell you a little bit about it, and then we can go from there. Okay. So asset investment planning software, which we usually call AIP, but I don't think it's a term that, schools use very often. So I try to explain what it is. What is it? It takes your CMMS to the next level, essentially. It takes the data in your CMMS system, and it will start adding those financial layers to that system. It will take your investments and help you prioritize based on data driven insights, which actually will help you have a transparent budget when you have to present it to a board of ed or a board of directors or whomever is deciding your budget. It will give you possible financial plan is, and it will give you up to thirty years or so of what a possible financial plan is, and it will also show financial modeling. So different kinds of models, different kinds of risk assessments. You can test what different options are and see what the cost will change depending on what you replace, what you fix, what your plan might be. So it optimizes your investments. It helps you plan, prevents being reactive, extends your asset life, and improves your facilities management. If you entail an AIP system, if you already have a CMMS, then you have most of the data you need. On top of that, it will help you with risk assessment and financial predictive analytics as well as financial modeling. So it automates your data, and it creates a centralized asset management software area where you can get strategic insights into the long term planning and the financial aspects of a capital plan. I hope that makes sense. How does it work? I'll try to explain quickly because I think I'm coming up on time. But, basically, it documents the condition and age of your assets into an asset directory. It lets you keep them updated as work is done and repairs are made. We know that's kind of what a CMMS does as well. So it connects with your data stored in your CMMS as well as your asset inventory and creates your preventative and work order maintenance and adds adds your preventative and work order maintenance that's been done to them. So now you have a historical asset record of all your PMs. The big difference from a CMMS is that now it provides you insight into everything you need to know about your assets plus industry asset benchmarks, analysis, including anticipated future costs, end of life projections for what you have, and risk scores, which are used in the final step, which is that it provides you with insights to create compelling budgets and capital plans. So it will allow facilities leaders or finance leaders, if they would like to use that software as well, to create budget requests with data to support it. Capital plans up to thirty years can be created with the data found in an AIP. So it will ensure that your capital plan is comprehensive, and hopefully, it will get approved. So I also like to say that it will translate the facilities data to the finance language because that's often hard for for facility these leaders. So I just wanna refresh everything I've gone through very quickly. It might feel overwhelming, but wherever you are on this journey, it can just start with simply beginning your asset data. Once you have all your asset data in a database, whether it be a spreadsheet or a CMMS, Admittedly, a CMMS will be easier, but you can start with the spreadsheet. It's a good place to start. Then you'll be able to implement your compliance, your maintenance, and move from reactive maintenance to proactive maintenance with a preventative maintenance plan and allow yourself to then move into future predictive maintenance, which is what we want. Goal of asset management is to to be able to predict the problems in advance, strategically plan your budget, and plan for larger capital expenditures and projects. Do we do we have any questions? Should I do any questions?