Do You Really Need an FCA Every 5 Years?

Objectives today include learn what a facility condition assessment entails, discover the pitfalls of a run to failure mode, learn how to collect the right amount of data to inform decision making without it becoming overwhelming or cumbersome to manage. And discuss how well executed FCA can provide reliable data that remains current for ten to fifteen years aligned for robust long term planning. Our presenters today include Luke Anderson and Scott Newell. Luke comes from a background in energy automation, HVAC controls and has been with Brightly Software for nearly fifteen years. After receiving his FMP in twenty seventeen, Lucas focused on both sides of the asset management world, day to day operations and long term strategic capital planning. Scott Newell is the Chief Strategy Officer for Alpha Facilities. With more than nineteen years of industry experience, Scott has built a career delivering facility solutions to clients nationwide. Scott specializes in facility conditions, suitability assessments, energy plans, master plans, program plans, and funding plans for a wide range of public agencies. Now, I'll pass it over to Luke Anderson, the strategic solution consultant with Brightly Software. Luke, the microphone is all yours. Perfect, awesome. Thank you and thank you everyone for coming. I think today's gonna be kind of fun, it's a little bit different. We are gonna have slides, we got about twenty or so slides, but the slides are really going to be more of a guide for kind of a back and forth with Scott and I. We've done a couple practice runs on this and Scott and I keep going down tangents and little rabbit holes and we've a lot of contents, a lot of fun things to talk So we're going to jump right in, we're going set the stage a little bit and we're going to jump right into the idea of a five year, kind of five, seven year FCA cycle. So, just before we start, I always like to begin with this slide when I have these types of conversations because everybody here that owns a building all is in the same boat, metaphorically and literally. That boat has a hole in it and there's water coming in. The buildings you own, they are degrading every single day. The bucket that you have to get the water out of your boat is your budget, is your capital expenditure budget. If your bucket's bigger than your hole, you're gonna be okay. Water's gonna come in, you're gonna bucket it out. Assets are gonna die, we're gonna replace them. If your bucket's too small, that water will eventually overcome. If your budget is not proper to your asset life cycle, eventually your building will become so poor that there's almost nothing you can do. So we have to avoid that by having good data. So I want to get to the very heart of the question here and that is good data. We're not talking about having an FCA, we're talking about having good information. So how often do we need good information? How often do we need good data on our buildings? So the first thought here is why are we thinking about things in a five year cycle? So Scott, I know you've been doing this a long time and the idea of this five year cycle has come up a lot, and we're going to get real deep into it. But let's just start with you and just a general thought on why a five year cycle? What's your insight into why you've seen that? Thanks. You know, I think it's mainly been driven around funding. It's a big ask. It's a moment in time. It's usually something that folks they say, we need to rebaseline. Maybe they're going out for a bond, for example, or they want to go for a huge appropriation request, and so they want to go out and get this new piece of data. We also know that the data, it comes to a condition assessment, really does start to degrade after a two to three year period, and so you start to triage that in year three and four, and then the cycle starts over. So, what industry has said is, well, you need to go out and redo all of this. And of course, that comes with a huge budget request and a different methodology sometimes, remobilization, and so it's become more of a reactive huge thing to do rather than thinking about it a little differently in a way that it can be sustained in perpetuity and done in a cost efficient way. And you're absolutely right. The goal here should not be to reassess. The goal should be sustaining your data so it's accurate for accurate decision making. Yeah, nailed it. So that's exactly our goal today, that's our agenda is to give you guys some strategies and some ways of thinking and some approaches that change the way we think about an FCA so that we can actually look at it more as strategic tool. So, let's start, let's go back to the very beginning. Some of you, this might be, Oh, boring, he's going to recover what an FCA is. Everybody here knows what FCA is, but some people may not. But I think it's worth talking about for a few reasons. I have another slide after that's going talk about some different strategies, which I think will be kind of interesting, but I want to just start at a very foundational level. Facility condition assessment is coming in, looking at your buildings, it's understanding really some major components. What condition is it in? What kind of useful life is it? And what's that cost for that end of life? So, those are the three things that the condition assessment really provides. Can you go through a little bit, Scott, what those major systems are and kind of what technical side of the FCA looks like quickly? Sure, and as mentioned, we're going to get into the different methodologies later presentation here, but let's assume you're going with a comprehensive level three, uniform at standard FCA. And so the way we look at that, it all it's all of your major systems and your subsystems, subsystems, and so as you can imagine, your mechanical, electrical, your plumbing, your roofing systems, your fire suppression systems, and then things on the outside of the building, your walls, your windows, your lights, everything you can think of from that building. A lot of those also include sight lighting, pedestrian paving, your roadways that are attached to your organization, inside from floor to ceiling, your floor finishes, your walls. I think I mentioned your conveyance systems, and then everything going on with your ceilings and everything in between. So it really should be a comprehensive look at your entire infrastructure. As you can see, we have right up there, nameplate data, so we are a big proponent as we move into a technology enabled world that as you're going through and all of your equipment and your assets are identified, they should be coded at this time too. It's going to help tremendously with organizing your work orders, mobilizing your staff, and really being strategic and sequential with how you generate and execute work. Things I think are real important to think about when we talk about an FCA, and the first is you talked about things like walls, things like carpet and floors and appliances, but then we also talked about things like fire suppression, larger asset systems. So, I don't want to bark too down this and we'll talk about it a little bit more, but I get a lot of people that always ask me what level of detail, just at a high level, what level of detail should I be getting to? So, I'm going to transition the slide here to give you a guide to talk about that and kind of different levels, but can you talk a little bit about that concept of kind of thinking about things as a system versus single asset in terms of gathering data? Yeah, and as the slide is up right here, you know, I want to want to harp on what we think to be one of the most important things before you go out and execute this work here, and that really is defining your use case. Traditionally, what we see in the marketplace, folks will generate a RFP or some type of solicitation that says we need a condition assessment, and obviously a wide array of firms will come in and respond to that, and even sometimes the scoping of that has specifics that they're looking for. Largely though, before stepping into that, really think about your use case, and I'll give you an example. The first part of my career was working for the Colorado Department of Education, and so I was on your side of the house, and I was in charge of the first ever statewide facility assessment. Never been done in the state of Colorado. They didn't know how many school buildings were out there, and so at that time we of course went out, we talked to a bunch of firms, and generated an RFP based on the best knowledge we had available. We hired a firm, we said give us everything, everything that you can possibly give us, and they did, and created a really robust database. At the state level, we were charged with giving out funding, and a lot of that was derived from the findings in that assessment. What we come to find out a few years into this were two things. One, a lot of the data that we had collected had never been looked at or touched, and so we had gone through and spent what I would assume is extra money on things that we didn't need, or there were some duplicative things. Furthermore, as we started to try to roll this out as a useful tool for our LEAs, we found that it didn't have enough detail in some cases for them to use it in a tactical way at the school level, and so the thing we lacked was what our use case was at the state level. We had statutory requirements, we had funding requirements, and we didn't go through that first, and so we could have either saved a lot of money or redirected that money in ways that could have provided more benefit. And so when looking at this list right here, it really does walk you from a very high level assessment down to a very granular level, and I would say it really does depend on what you're going for. If you're really looking to go for a bond, for example, or go find some funding, you may need that higher level one or two, and that looks at your highest level system. So we'll use a roof, for example. You might have a building that has five different roof decks, and maybe those five different decks are different systems. You've got metal, EPDM, shake shingle, whatever it might be. At that highest level, it's just looking at your roofing system in aggregate in total, and it says your roof is in this condition. As you move down that level, it starts to break up those roof decks by system and then by the subsystems, so the little parts and pieces components that make up that roofing system. It gives them an individualized condition rating, and then those condition ratings are rolled up into your entire roofing system for a total cost. So if you're going for something like financing, you want to find an appropriation request, you might need to do that higher level. It's less expensive. It gives you a general rough order of magnitude. If you're looking to stand up a CMMS system, do rigorous capital planning, things like that, you really need to go down to that three, four, five level. That gives you a very detailed understanding of what's going on. It helps identify the life cycle, and then it helps you generate a comprehensive capital plan, capital renewal schedules, PM schedules, and really use the CMMS appropriately. That obviously costs more, but if that is your goal, that investment makes sense. You also have enough data to populate these solutions. They get mapped in correctly. You're not having any gaps that you have to go and figure out later on. Back to you. No, that's good. So I have kind of a dumb question, and I know it's dumb because I know the answer, but the challenge is that you just mentioned it happened at the state level of Colorado, and I've talked to hundreds of people across my career where it's the exact same scenario, but how do you or how did you at Colorado when you didn't have data, when you didn't have a list of schools, you obviously didn't have a list of HVAC systems, fire suppression systems, electrical systems. How did you guys do capital planning? Well, at the state level and so it's that's a good question. At the state level, we didn't. That wasn't in our purview, and Colorado is a local control state, and so it really was on the onerous of the school districts. So school districts would go out and hire their own firms to do these types of assessments or they would do them internally, and so certainly there wasn't a uniform way to look at everything. Now as I said, what we would typically see happen at the state level, even once we had it done, we'd have ours. Would come in maybe with theirs, which was better, and then you'd have to reconcile those, and so, a little bit of planning, a little bit better, defining of their use case and how we could support what have paid off largely as we moved into the future. Yeah, yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Yeah, and a lot of the organizations I've worked with that don't have that data, a lot of times the best way they can do it is to say, Okay, everybody write a list of things that are broken and we'll see what we can fund, then the next year happens and we kind of do it again and we see what we can fund, and the next year happens and the list just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. It kind of becomes this unescapable kind of spiral into deferred maintenance. Well, good. So we know what an FCA is. Think we've got a good grasp there. Any other final thoughts on the actual FCA process, Scott, before we jump in back into that idea of the myth around just doing them on a consistent basis? Maybe just the packaging real quick, because I know it was on the slide, but obviously the way that then you take those findings solely from a condition assessment reporting standpoint, Every single system gets a cost and a deficiency associated with it, and that total gets aggregated to a complete deficiency number for the entire building or campus, however you're organizing it, and that number then gets calculated into the total replacement cost of the building, and so typically an assessor will have cost databases that say, this type of building in this part of the country should cost this much to replace if everything was wrong, and you'll get that number. And then we will have our deficiency number, so everything that we found to be wrong, and you will divide that into the total replacement cost and get what's called an facility condition index. And everybody has a different interpretation of how to interpret that metric. From a planning standpoint, we really look at it as a number that if you want to track an infusion of cash to keep that baselined long term, here's what it would look like. If you want to make an improvement on that deficiency number, here's what it would look like. If you do nothing, here's what's going to happen from your costs over time. Some use it as a marker to identify, rebuild versus replace, and so that old adage that if that percentage gets high enough, you're now throwing good dollars at a bad building, and it would make more sense fiscally to replace the entire thing, not considering historical significance or community engagement or things like that. So that's kind of how those findings are looked at. There are also great benchmarking metrics if you want to benchmark one building to another within your organization or benchmark your FCIs to national standards just to see how you're faring against other organizations. So, actually I'm to pivot a little bit. It's a really good thing, I want to bring that up. Let me just show, I'm going share my screen real quick and then we'll come back, but the FCI I think is exactly what Scott just said. It is a benchmark. Benchmark. It is to say where do all my buildings lie against each other. What it's not is something in my opinion, and Scott, this might be a good back and forth if you've got any additional thoughts, it's not something that we should be using as a driver for all of our decision making. It's piece of the puzzle, it's a piece of the pie, because what it doesn't bring into factor is risk. We can calculate it to a certain point based on assets and based on those criticalities, and we can have a backlog they put in, but if we've got a backlog of four hundred thousand dollars but that's the fire suppression system here and the backlog of one million dollars here is maybe the parking lot, that's a different story than just knowing my FCI is a one percent versus a thirty five percent. Another funny piece about this, I actually worked with a organization, a private organization who their five percent was their FCI number. Every building five percent, if it hit that number they had a massive update, massive change, and then I worked with a government client, their number was thirty percent. Thirty percent was their goal of where they're going to keep their FCI number. So as Scott said, it's not a hard, fast, good, fair, poor like you're saying, it's very much a range based on what is important to the end user. Yeah, and I will add to that, you're absolutely right. Well, no, please. Go ahead. Yeah, no, I'll finish that thought. A delay, you're good. Yeah. You switched back to your stock there, so I think that's why. You're absolutely right on that. One of the important things I like to think about, we are talking about this today, this is all data, how you use the data. The question we'll always get once we do all of this work and provide the report is now what do I do with this? And so to your point, that metric is an unweighted, unprioritized repository of everything you have, and so how you organize it, how you capital plan with it is essential because the flooring, the worn out carpet under that unweighted model has the same level of urgency, same level of risk, the same level of failure prioritization as a rooftop unit. Now, do know that both of those have different impacts on the building if one of them was to fail, and so our job, once we have all that data, is to figure out how we want to sequence all of it in a way that works for your organization and meets your prioritization forecasting schemas. Yeah, good points. I think we do have about a three second delay, so apologize to our attendees so that we don't talk over each other. We might have slight pauses between our talking because we're just making sure. But yeah, kind of chugging along here, I want to get back to our original thought here. So, what caused this five year standard? And honestly, I thought about this at first, when we talked about this and I personally thought about it, five, seven years kind of makes sense because if you think of a building outside of your walls and your foundation, your substructure, things like that, your wiring, most assets have anywhere from a ten to maybe fifteen year life cycle, maybe twenty if you're lucky on some things. So, five to seven years kind of represents that halfway mark that says, Hey, we know how everything is, come back clearance and check how everything is, so at its core it sounds reasonable from an administrative standpoint, we budget every five years for these types of activities. But from an assessment standpoint, know, Scott, we talked a lot that it creates a lot of challenges when people do it that way. So walk a little through that initial kind of challenge with that first idea of that five year. Why did it become that procurement strategy, how do we shift it to a data strategy? Yeah, and I think as I mentioned early on, I do think it is a procurement strategy because they are expensive, and it was just how often you could maybe go to your board, your commissioners, and ask for this level of money. The reason that I think five years came up is the natural degradation life of data like that, and so you get an assessment done year one through three it's relatively accurate. Year three and four you're triaging it a lot, you come in with the dataset, but then you also come in with your binder of here's all the things that aren't accurate in the report, but I'm going to tell you what they are today, and then by that last cycle it's okay, so much has changed, I really can't have a defensible data set either way now, and so we probably should redo this, is why I typically see that's that threshold is just the degradation curve of the data itself. Interesting. So when you guys do an assessment and you walk into a building, they've had their assessment five years ago, how different can it be, or how different do you typically see it to be? Well, that's a great question, and I think this is where folks hopefully find some hope in not having to redo all of this. You would probably be often sold on, oh, we need a complete new dataset, or the methodology that your previous provider did is so different that we need to go back in and redo everything, and in some cases that might be true, but we do know that there are a bunch of non renewables out there that it doesn't matter how many times you assess them, you're not going to change them. We also know there's a bunch of other things that, are less risky to the organization, so their risk of failure if they fail, as I mentioned, worn out carpet is it's not going to cause you to close the building for the day. And so really, there is an approach where you can say, We need to probably get eyes on our critical systems, and I would call critical systems your MEP systems, your roofing, your fire suppression, things that do change a lot, do have, the ability to have their life cycle degradation curves get wonky really quick based on a sundry of factors, and those things you probably do want eyes on. The rest can be done in a hybrid virtual update methodology really. Now maybe you're switching softwares or there's some other reason that you do want a new baseline. That's great. You can obviously do that, but I do think there's an ability to be able to get your data current updated, and get the most critical things reassessed in a way that would allow you to run it in perpetuity for a cost that makes sense. Right. That's where we're starting to merge a little bit in this conversation a little bit too. It's not really a number. It's not the five years, not the problem. It's every seven years, not the problem. The problem is that we are getting data, we're ignoring it, we're doing nothing with it. It's going stale, it's going bad, we're having to go through this process. And it's not a data issue, it's data process issue. Work is happening, events are occurring, nothing's getting logged, nothing's getting changed, it's just kind of into the ether. So that kind of brings us to, oh go ahead, yeah, I'll give you a chance to respond to that. Yeah. No, you're totally right, and I don't think the industry has given them a platform for the FCA data. We've got great platforms now for your work order system and being reactive, but we haven't given a great platform to allow you to self-service with accuracy that FCA data writ large. That's right, yeah, and that's what the ultimate goal is, and that's where we want to see organizations Two is this idea or this concept that the asset data, the asset register that's gathered during an FCA. Yes, it is accurate day one, it's very accurate. It's very accurate year one, year two, year three as we've talked about. Year four, year five, that accuracy starts to grade. Year seven, year eight, you're probably not even looking at it anymore, what's the point? So, how do we keep that alive? Well, can do an assessment every five years, just leave it on the shelf and reassess it every five to seven years, but that's the whole point is you don't have to do that. Tie it to that CMMS. We think about the work order system, we're going talk a little bit more later about the work order system, but if that work order system can contain the same information, you can update it, hey, here's what system back in twenty twenty three was great condition, and in the past three point five years we've spent eighteen dollars zero and had fourteen failures. Eight of those failures are the same thing and that problem is happening every year. That process is probably not in great condition anymore, it's not in excellent condition, it's not the fault of the successor, but that's the thing that that chiller which was in great condition is now in probably fair to poor condition. Well, that same information can come from having that work order hearing. So, when we tie that, when we bring the asset to the register and we tie everything with the work order side, that's what makes we've alluded to that long term planning side so much simpler because we have that ability to know what exactly is going on with the asset that we're dealing with. It's no longer finding out that the asset has failed in the year that it has failed, it is understanding that an asset on its trajectory to failing, we should anticipate a failure in a given year. Yeah, and the only thing I would add to that right there is that goes back to that use case again, and if that's the goal, which it should be, you really need to make sure you understand what you want for your asset registry, what technology solution you're going to what their requirements are, and what is going to be your cadence for managing that update cycle, that reactive proactive cycle. Are you going to leverage industry? Do you have people on staff that can really be on top of that? That is all important things to vet before you go ahead and populate everything. Yeah, absolutely. So a lot of times when we hear folks that get the assessment, there are some kind of big challenges that we tend to see. I know, Scott, the to react to me, that number two right there, that updating, and then there was another point that you had made that I wanted you to expand on. But a lot of times we see and we talked about this is that data, that report is given to you in a binder, it's referenced and used for one time or two time use, but then it just gets filed away or gets placed, people leave, right? Updates never occur. So a lot of times, and I think that's what it was, was that result right there. You said something about confidence in data, and I hadn't thought about confidence in data in a long time. I had usually kind of assumed confidence in data was purely tied to the age of data. Data. I hear people that will come into their council and be like, Oh yeah, this data is ten years old, we got to redo it, it's no good anymore. So I thought that was interesting, kind of losing a confidence of data is another driver as to why we're seeing that more cyclical kind of procurement based data as opposed to data driven. I'm one hundred percent, and you're absolutely right. Everybody, know, I will say has a nuanced version of how they do the assessments, and so if it is not collected in a comprehensive way, if it is not mapped, correctly and even just the terminology. Sometimes we see building systems in a certain part of the country that are unique. For example, I will say in the Pacific Northwest, I don't know if a contractor in the sixties just went all up and down the whole coast with these certain types of glue up panels that I don't see anywhere else. But you see these things that, if they're not identified correctly and mapped correctly, then you're not going be able to use it correctly either. And so the integrity of the data, is very important, and then obviously how you're using it once it's populated, is equally important. Hundred percent, and this is good. I asked a question in the Q and A. Think it's a really good question. I'll read it just so everybody can hear it, but talking about the challenges in government, it's not just getting support from the elected officials for funding, but now it's the public support who doesn't want any government spending. No taxes, no spending. We don't wanna see you doing things, but then we also complain when things are broken, they can't go to parks because they're flooded. Right? They don't wanna deal with the lack of infrastructure of not maintaining it. So, he was kind of curious about how does this data apply from dashboards, how does this data get used? And I think, Keith, your question is going to apply in a couple of aspects here, but when we think about the raw data of what the condition things are, this is not an opinion, right? This is not what Luke is telling you, this is not what Jim has done, this is not the opinion of the facilities director, this is Scott and his team or your contracted people. They should be experts in their field telling you what the condition of the building is. So to me, that's the first place that gives confidence that we can hopefully use to start sharing at least our current state. But on that question, Scott, how that information has helped to use the story to sustain and buy back public support? That's a great question, and it's not an easy answer because it's so specific to the locale and what their values are. Yeah. True. But in general, you mentioned the word dashboards and and obviously public transparency, and so certainly we at Alpha and and Brightly have moved into digital era where you don't see a PDF report coming out anymore. We have digital reports and dashboards that help tell that story in a more dynamic way, and it's really putting the right metrics up there. So for us, it is looking categorically at the major systems that I think nontechnical folks can understand your roof, your plumbing, your HVAC, and showing where those currently are at. And then from there, when you look at how you prioritize all these needs, and I would say through a dashboard, for us, we have three that seem to be most generally accepted from a public digestibility standpoint, and one is the risk of the system failure. So if it's currently at or it's already exceeded its useful life, we will show that and say this has a high risk of failure. The other schema, because sometimes smart folks might poke holes in that and they say, great, well, that electrical panel, I get it. It's been up there for a long time. It's past its useful life from an assessment standpoint, but it's functioning. It works. There's nothing that says it's going to break down anytime soon. So they can poke holes in that. So the other one is the system importance. I've kind of used that example a couple times today. These things here are very important. If they go down, if something happens, they're either going to materially affect that building you might have to close the building for the day or have a material impact on your budget, and so these systems are really important. You need to focus on them, and you can maybe put less focus on your finishes and things like that. The third schema we tried to outline is the building's importance, so if you have an organization and we'll use, let's just say a typical city organization, you've got your administrative buildings, parks and recs, your fire, and then maybe you have some support buildings. Maybe you have a greenhouse or a pavilion somewhere. You might code your buildings and say everything in that building. If it's a fire station, for example, we're going say every single thing under that roof, regardless of the floor or the boiler, is important. Where the pavilion, we're going to say is less important to our daily mission. And so there are different ways that you can present that information that do tell that story. The other thing, and this is a little outside of this webinar for today, but it's important for context, is bringing in other organizational KPIs to that same dashboard. I use schools for an example because I think it's the easiest. We will often put on our dashboards other things like the academic performance at that building, the rates of absenteeism at that building, the demographic trend over time, and then incorporate some other metrics. We have beyond FCI's things like adequacy and suitability assessments, so that'll tell you whether that building needs to be modernized. So outside of the condition, what are the spaces doing? Do they need to be modernized? That's an additional cost. Capacity and utilization, is anybody even going there? So putting these different metrics all together allows your building to start telling its story, starts to show correlations, and so hopefully when you then go into a boardroom where you're competing against maybe the HR department, the curriculum department, the community engagement department. They've all got their own KPIs. So that's what I would say to help organize your data, to help story tell in an effective data driven way. Yeah, beautiful. I want to cover one other thing on the data and the data governance, then I want to come back to this question because there's some industry standard strategies on ways that we can look at assets to essentially take the opinion out of decision making. I always alluded to a doctor, right? If my wife comes to me and she says, Luke, your cough is getting kind of bad. You should get that looked at. Yeah, okay, okay, I will, I will. If I go to my family practice doctor and I'm there, he hears my cough, goes, Luke, that cough sounds pretty good, we should get that looked at. It's an immediate yes. That doctor tells me this is the things I should do, take my HSA card, right? I am here to, I do not, it is much cheaper to fix my problem now to let this cough get worse, and that's the same way we should be looking at that FCA. That's how we take out a lot of the opinion of it. So before we go into that scientific side of it, I want to talk a little bit about the data governance and the governance gap on data governance. Now, is I'm going give just a brief overview, and then, Scott, if you give a background on where you've seen governance and how you applied it in your career, I think that would be great. But it's understanding what is the hierarchy, what is the detail, what is the process to maintain this data, it's governing the data over time. It's not just saying now that we've got it, what happens to it, it's what's happening to it over that longer period. Scott, is that a good general high level of what data governance is? Yeah, definitely, and all that we've kind of covered in some, but data sustainment component often gets missed too, so how are we going to sustain this over time? I think one of the things that I hear a lot of is ownership. I think that is getting a lot easier ownership of data, who has access to update data, who is who knows the methodology of the data, that's getting easier with technology. You go back twenty years ago when you when spreadsheets were the best option or were one of the only options. I've seen spreadsheets, there are thirty tabs wide. That everything's interconnected. You change this, it changes this, it edits this, and when that person leaves, they created that spreadsheet. Everybody uses. When that person leaves, what happens? There's only one person that could maintain it. We have to start back over. So that's one of the pieces, making sure we don't have a silo or a bottleneck who owns and maintains that. Well, good. So I want to get a little bit into how do address problem? How do we approach? Did you have anything, Scott? Didn't mean to cut you off. I forgot about the delay. No, go ahead. No. Alright, perfect. I know we're thirty eight minutes. I want to leave time for questions at the end. I'm going to jump through. But two pieces of information I think are really important. We've talked about this idea of consequence of failure a little bit. Scott's mentioned it. A way to think about consequence of failure is what is the impact if this thing dies, right? If the automatic door at the front dies, if one of my six elevator dies, what is the impact? If my only chiller at this school in July dies, what is the impact? Some things are severe, some things are less severe. When we think about managing infrastructure and we think about potential of those assets to fail and the consequence of them failing, we can get general buckets of how we should be looking at those assets from an approach and maintenance perspective. Now, these three colors for the high, medium, and low risk zones, are going be based on your preferences. What is your level of risk tolerance? The most critical asset you have. If this asset fails, people are going to lose their job, people might get sick, we're going to be on the news, these are the most critical things we own. How far along their life are you going to let them go before you start doing proactive maintenance and start having a plan to mitigate it? You're to let the most critical thing you own go eighty percent of its life before you put a plan in place? To me, that's a lot of risk. So the idea is for you guys to start thinking about what is that risk tolerance that we have, and then understand that all assets, and this example is for a roof, but all assets degrade in a pattern. It may not always be linear, it may not always be exact for everybody, but majority of assets are going to exhibit very similar behaviors as they go through their life cycle. So, what we start to identify is more predictability around those asset lives. So if Scott comes out and tells me, hey, your roof looks great, you got a little vegetation coming on here, so we should probably do some, some weed treatments, very inexpensive, but we should keep this roof to be in great condition. And four and a half years later, five years later, you go out there and there's been ponding and some ridging and you've got some all other issues that are occurring, your assets going through its life cycle curve. This provides us opportunities, one, at tracking it through a work order system, tracking it to say, hey, Scott told us it was good five years ago, but we're noticing other problems now. We're helping the asset maintain correctly on its life cycle curve. Again, this isn't the opinion of what Luke thinks the roof condition is in, This is rated in math based on an initial assessment and ongoing data. So I wanna keep chugging here. So, Scott, I'll give you a little second if you have anything to add there, but I'm gonna pull up those those other polls that we have. Just quickly, I think the proactive approach that we're really looking for now in the future, when you have a great solution already online and you have folks like us that come in and augment it, we will be able to not only reassess, but we can look at things virtually and notice, and we'll use that roof example. Boy, since the last time we came out here, you've had a very large amount of work orders generated for this beyond what we would normally see. That's an opportunity for us to either say we should probably come reassess it, or based on what we've seen with the amount of work orders, we're going to change the lifecycle profile on this, to reflect reality of where it's currently degrading, and that's a nice way to keep your assets, more current to their life cycle and more accurate than just letting it run down a traditional linear curve, because we know even on one roof you might have a whole bank of RTUs and half of them are fine on that same roof and half are generating work orders for other things. So it's a way to true up and keep that life cycle more accurate. That's a really good point. Who wants a yes or no, and I'm going to make a prediction that says eighty yes. At least I hope that's what this is. So I'm gonna go ahead and push it. Do you guys have a work order system? Not asking if you have Brightly. I'm not asking if you our or anything connected to this group. I'm just saying in general, a work order system to me could be paper, could be email, could be a process, any kind of system in place. So ideally, we have software, but just in general, I wanna I wanna understand how many people have a work order system. So, I'll leave it up there for a minute. And I'm afraid we're not gonna be able to see the results, so that's I'm not going to we've to figure these polls out. Alright. And then moving on to the next one, another easy question. This one I wish we could view now that I think back on. I wish we could share this with the group. But I wanna know how many people have had an FCA. So we'll give them a second. Oh, it looks like my moderator's got my poll results in. So I'll give you guys just a second to answer this one. Who's had a facility condition assessment? Ten more seconds here. Here we go. I know we're getting close on time, I don't wanna wait too long. Ah, now Scott, I'm kicking myself because I think your poll question would have been great because I'd like to ask the next question, Scott, when he asks this question, what's the next question you always ask after this? How many still find the data accurate? Yeah. And what I typically see is a higher percentage here and then a dramatic drop. Yeah, yeah I wish we had time. That's interesting, it's good. So I hope it's still accurate, but I think Scott's probably right. It hasn't been maintained unless it's brand new it tends to present it pretty big. I know we didn't come here all today to talk about a work order system, but I do think it's extremely important to talk about just for a moment. I'm going go on my little soapbox here because work order systems truly have two different reasons for existing in the world. The first reason is purely about the operation of staff and data, organizing of tasks in a day. That's not what we are here to talk about today. We are here to talk about assets, their life cycle, and how we maintain those assets. So I'm going take that concept of go clean up this trash, go clean the bathroom, pick up the sticks that fell off the tree, the lawn has to look nicer. That task side of things really is not the CMMS aspect I'm speaking to today. I'm speaking to the CMMS side of documenting, tracking work when it's related to our assets, maintenance, repairs, all the day to day things that build in that give the information exactly this whole concept that we're talking about. And there are one hundred work order systems out there, go buy whichever one your team will use. That is the first most critical piece of this whole thing is that the team won't use it, if it's too hard, too complex, it doesn't have a good any of those things, if they won't use it, nothing else matters. The second thing, it has to connect to your assets, so you have to be able to say this is the chiller that we did the maintenance on, this is the pump that we replaced the motor on. Those two things, now it's about the buy in, about the change management. If staff doesn't understand why they're putting information in daily, what's the point? I'll use my own personal example here. We use a company called Salesforce here at our company, and every demo after this call, I'm gonna go into Salesforce, I'm gonna log what I did from one to two o'clock. I did this, here's the people involved, creates a record, right? That record is what I use personally to show my boss what I did all year, right? Shows all my performance metrics. Now it requires me to input data, but I know exactly why I'm inputting data. If your staff doesn't understand why they're inputting data, why are they gonna input it, They've got to understand that this information ties to the justification of tools, the justification of resources, the justification of capital expenditures. Nobody likes repairing the same piece of equipment over and over because leadership won't fund the replacement. That's very frustrating. So, I won't spend a long time on it, but I really believe that having that CMS system tied to the work order is one of those kind of secret keys to unlock the disassociation of the FCA and this five year myth. Well, I'm gonna skip a couple of slides. I think I'm gonna jump kind of a little towards the end as we reach the last five or ten minutes here. Scott, any thoughts on the work order system before we kind of just wrap up and talk about kind of the overall ROI? I think you covered it, except for one other, I would say, big thing, what I've heard from clients is it creates a lot of efficiency as well, from your custodial staff's time, the FTE resource requirements, to be able to go out and really get that work and also know exactly where all the things are that they are needed to do the preventative maintenance. So I've heard it does create great efficiency as well. You brought up such an interesting topic, and I'll tell a story. I was at an organization out on the West Coast, and the gentleman was speaking with their town council, one of their council members, and they had a couple other people from different departments. One of the gentlemen was from the facilities department, and he had made the statement that they are doing full PM across their asset portfolio. No problem at all, took him at his word, totally understandable. A lot later in the conversation, the topic of asset data came up and he stated he did not have an asset list, he does not have an asset list. And in the generalist way I could, challenged that and I said, well, it's difficult for me to believe that you're doing PM on everything you own if you don't have a list of what you own because there's no way you're doing PM on everything. And he actually agreed with me and he said that's completely right, just what was it, a month or two months, I can't remember what he said before, before we were there, they got a call about an air handling unit in a closet that had failed that they didn't know existed. So it's an interesting conversation to say if I don't have a list of my assets, how am I supposed to do effective planned maintenance? And that's something that's so connected from the work order side is if you've got a thousand assets that require an hour each per month and you've only got five hundred hours of people, you're not going to be able to do your maintenance. Good, so the final kind of piece, kind of final thought, the ROI case, right? Full FCA every five years, right? Stale data, poor information over life. It does give you fresh data, so every five years you have a two to three year window with good information. Makes curious. The third bullet that's up there is one that I think is kind of controversial. It's one that I would love to do some more research on, but I would be very interested to look at a seven year window and say, hey, two organizations both do an FCA year one. The first organization ties it to an effective work order systems, maintain that data over time. The second one, put it on the shelf, five years later get a new one. Year seven, who's more confident in their database? Who's got better capital funding? Who's on a better trajectory to a more efficient, more repeatable capital plan? My argument is the one that's tied to software, but I'd be interested in anybody to challenge that. Think it would be a good conversation. I think a big one too with the one that Scott alluded to was the avoided cost. Alright. We do an assessment every five years. If I tell you something's in fair condition today and it's got a five to seven year life cycle, playing with fire, playing with fire. One day we are gonna wake up and somebody's gonna call us and say, hey, that asset is dead. Hopefully, it's low criticality. Hopefully, that's put rope around it and we'll order one from Granger. Hopefully, it's not one that makes you say, crap, move these people, get a rental, now we're going to spend four hundred thousand dollars a week on a rental on something that only cost us a million dollars to replace in the place, so we really want to make sure that we're not just ignoring those types of very critical assets in interim. So, I know Scott, took all the juicy ROIs, but I'll obviously let you add if you have any other ROIs that you think are really tangible here. Maybe just closing points from my perspective, and this is hard for us at Alpha to say we do a lot of services, but condition assessments is one of our bigger services, and so when I say this it's almost an attempt to put us out of business, but we truly believe that you don't need an FCI every five years or redo it in a predictable amount of time. It is critically important to baseline yourselves, and so if you don't feel that your data is presently good, it's not comprehensive enough, it's not meeting your use case, it's not meeting the needs of the technology tools you've adopted, then you do need to make the investment to baseline yourself and get everything organized. But from there, I would have everybody challenge your contractors when you go out to do the scan. Is there a way that we can use data that we've had before? Is there a way that we can go out and update this in a way that meets our needs? Or internally, how can we go about maintaining this data in perpetuity? And that's honestly where we see ourselves going, where we see the industry going, especially as more technology solutions get smarter, more robust, AI tools start to really dive into asset life cycles, that it's going to get smarter, it's going to be, more correct. And so how do you build a governance structure and a data maintenance approach that can allow you to just trickle in funds every year, and there are things you might need you build a new building, so you need somebody to come out, collect that. You raise a building, so you need to decommission that. Maybe do a major renovation. So there are those moments when you might need somebody to come out and do the assessment. But beyond that, if you really work to build a program around data maintenance, you can stretch your dollars much further. Quick example, and then I'll stop. And this is granted a rather large organization, but we did the modeling. They're under this okay, we did an assessment seven years ago, we needed to redo it because we haven't maintained it. It's going be a very big over a million dollar contract to do that. We ran the modeling out in order to support that same approach from a data maintenance standpoint, we could keep that same client's data current for over twenty years, and that's fact. For the same kind of data maintenance support using the available technology tools that are out there today and augmenting the process, it just allows your data to last a lot longer. Well, you said something there, which I think is a great piece, which is if you have that data, instead of having to throw it all away, can we use that existing data in order to enhance and maybe reduce the scope of our next next step. And I think any vendor worth their salt should ask you or should say, depends on how you've maintained that data before they can say yes or no. Because if they just say no, then they're not even considering what you may have done. If they just say yes, what if that data has been sitting on a shelf for fifteen years and has never been updated, it's completely useless. So, with that I'll come to the final slide. I do want to pull this one up, this is a question we get a lot, so I just figured I would head it on here and just let everybody know. Brightly, that's the company I work for. We are on the software side. We are a software provider. That's what we do. Alpha is one of the partners, but they are professional services company. They are not software people, we are not professional services. It's a great match, but there is a definitive line between the two approaches that we provide. For questions. I was hoping to lose more. We had a couple come in, but yeah, thank you all very much. If you guys have questions, there is the question on the side to submit them. Well, good. That was good, Scott. I, I think we covered a lot. I know we we definitely we definitely didn't get through all the slides, but we'll give it a couple minutes to see if there's any questions, and we can, call it a day. Great. If you guys are sitting there hoping somebody's gonna submit a question because you have it too. You might as well just submit yourself. Oh, yeah. Okay. Go ahead. I have a question. How do we account for Did his audio cut out for anybody else? Is it just me? It did clip out. I did not hear it. It did cut out. There's another question in the Q and A box. James asks, do you see even more collaboration inside the industry to merge energy audits, recommissioning and resilience assessments? I would say absolutely. We didn't really touch on that today, but really thinking about lifecycle modeling, like for like replacements, like for better, evaluating the CapEx expense, so the capital expenditure to buy something versus the operational expense, and then what that greenhouse gas reduction is over time. Boy, that is something we talk about every day now. There's layers of adoption. We have folks that you've got somebody that comes in, a new mayor, a superintendent, and they just want to make their mark in the next two to three years and then they're out of there, and so convincing them that's important. But really, absolutely, being able to pick the right systems to begin with and then model that out for what's going to save you operationally, and then if you follow the right PM schedule, that might extend the life another three to five years, and so your capital expenditure at that moment in time is longer. I think that's critically important. And to your retro commissioning comment, being able to go in and tweak it at specified times to get it back into the assumed tolerance of what it should be performing at. And we had a question come in. Isaac, I'm going to send you a kind of a follow-up email on this, but he's asking cost range of services. Scott, I know historically I've always said at the very lowest level you could pay two, three cents to get data on your building and you could pay a dollar per square foot to get data on your building. It all depends on the data, it all depends on what you're trying to do. So, entry level, I think that's probably, you know, entry level is going to change depending on who you are, but anything to add on that on potentially what kind of a range for cost is to get this kind of data on a building for those different levels that we saw? The range is good. Would say if someone's charging you a dollar a square foot, that's probably pretty but it really does depend on the level of rigor and the level of assessment you're looking to collect. Can certainly reach out and give you more specifics if you want to chat. Great. And then a question coming from Peter. How specifically does data get updated regarding condition? So I think to me that's a two part question. How does the condition get set and identified at the beginning, and then over time how does that change or get updated? And then how does one assure local current market cost data is used in a standard manner? I'll give a technology answer, and then I'll let Scott give a process answer. For the condition updating, there are tools on the market that can help with that. There is manual process to look at the history. A lot of times I've got clients that work with people like Alpha that come in at the end of the year or end of every two years and they say, Hey, show me your work order history. Hey this was labeled good, we're going to change it to fair, we're going to keep it at good. So, there's a lot of ways that we can manage that, but it's usually tied to the work order, and then local market cost data is a real tough one. Any database out there you go subscribe to is going to have gaps, so having a consistent database, having a consistent approach to pricing so that you can know what your factors and how to increase it. From a technology standpoint, the database is out there like RSMeans, Whitestone, DoD, or Fort Worth for that costing, but the local market rate is going to have to come from your input. Yeah, and just to quickly add, when we do a virtual or desktop update, we really are exporting data sets, in this case from AE, and we look at everything that was just mentioned, and at the same time we work with staff and say, hey, do you see anything else? We're going to go through our data sets. Does this still feel right? As I mentioned, sometimes we'll go out and do a blitz for a new wing that was renovated or a new building and add that in and then repopulate it, so it really is a kind of a mutual true up of those most critical systems. As I mentioned, the systems that have really long life cycles or really low degradation profiles, that's more of a carryover and a costing exercise, as we just mentioned, on how you keep those costs current. Yep. And James replied, he sees a lot of money going to where money is being spent for collaboration would be better for asset lifecycle cost analysis, couldn't agree more. I think that's a really, really cool point. Always admit it back to that doctor, right? You go to the doctor once every ten years and just ignore all your symptoms in between or are you actively kind of engaging with them? I'm going to leave the last question for you, Scott, it's from Eric. It's a really cool one. Love this. Oh, we got one more, so we might have to add to it. But how would you say an FCA would differ on a building that's pretty new and updated? What difference in systems? Kind of walk through how you guys would think about that. Yeah, that is a great question, we'll start out with the simple response data, it should be uniformly collected so it's all utilized the same way. However, when thinking about additional data sets, a new building, it's pretty much been designed, modernized and programmatically sized for assumably what's going on today. So in that case, when we go in, it really is asset inventory, equipment inventory, barcode tagging everything and getting it set up so you have cap renewal schedules, PM schedules dialed in and you can start running your building efficiently. While the same thing is true for that one hundred year old one, that's where additional data sets I believe come into play. Your suitability, your adequacy assessments, maybe different hazardous assessments come in for asbestos PCBs, things like that, and then your capacity and utilization. And so those additional data sets really do help inform anything that needs to change before making updates to the infrastructure. Yep. And I apologize. I had a hard two o'clock stop. I've got to hop right now. So thank you all so much. I'm sorry we went long. Sorry, guys. Thanks again everyone for all the great information today. We appreciate Brightly Software sponsoring today's event. If you want to learn more from them, please view the links in the related content module. And just as a reminder to everyone, to receive your CEU certificate, you can download it from the earned certification module on your screen. Today's webcast will also be archived on facilitiesnet dot com. And with that, I will conclude today's event. Thanks for everyone for attending.