From Work Orders to Strategic Planning: Berry College’s Journey with Facilities Asset Management

Hello everyone. I'm Katie Gramajo. I'm here from Brightly Software and we'll just give everyone one more minute to get in. I know it's hard to get on these webinars sometimes and we're just talking about how sometimes you gotta watch them later. You don't have time but we're glad you're here with us. All right, so today we are talking about from work orders to strategic planning with my friends from Barry College, and we're gonna talk about their journey with facilities asset management. So as we get started, all of you know, you're here from Brightly and we're Brightly Software, which is the Siemens company. And we are a leader in asset management for the last twenty five years. We support lifecycle management, capital planning, predictive maintenance, sustainability and compliance. So you can read that blurb if you would like, but I'm sure you know a lot of that. I'm gonna jump right in and introduce who's here with me today, Leah and George. Why don't you guys introduce yourselves? Hey guys, I'm Leah Cobb. I'm director of auxiliary initiatives and partnerships here at the college, which includes a lot of different projects and one of them being implementation of the Brightly software in conjunction with facilities teammates. Yes, hey George Cummings, Assistant Director of Facilities here at the college. Know implemented asset essentials and Leah was obviously a big part of that, oversee a staff of approximately one hundred housekeeping and tradesmen. Great. And I'm Katie Gramajo. I work for Brightly now but I used to be just like you guys. And I was the director of operations at the Windward School which is in New York and Campbell Hall School which is in California. So both coasts, nothing in the middle and we're gonna get started. So, okay, we are here to talk about capital planning. Why is capital planning so important in terms of facilities? Well, your capital plan has to align with the goals of your institution. And more specifically, it actually has to be grounded in real time data about your assets. If you have outdated data, then you will make poor decisions with your investments and you will not budget properly and you will end up with a maintenance backlog and expenses that come out of nowhere that put your budget in danger. So the most important thing you can do is connect with your facilities team to get that data and make sure it's accurate and is prioritizing what you're modeling moving forward. So when we move forward, we're going to talk about how to manage your facilities, provide the condition assessments that you need, what you can do with that data and make sure you use it to create a plan moving forward and what they did in Barry College. So Barry College's capital planning journey began with the need to actually align their facilities with their priorities and implementing an EAM or a CMMS is the beginning of that journey. And we're going to talk you through what that looks like. So something we always say here is asset lifecycle management, which sounds like something that may not actually pertain to facilities and is more finance focused, but it is facilities. It's taking your facilities data and linking it to your capital strategy. So tracking your facilities assets from commission to decommission, predictively modeling what might happen as best you can to plan your budget and be as strategic and focused as possible as you're creating your financial plan for the future. So when your CFO, your superintendent, this is school focused, but whoever's in charge of the money comes to you and says, what do I need to spend the money on for the next five to ten years? You'll actually have proof of what that is and know how to back that data up. So where do we start? It sounds like a great idea but we need to start somewhere. I'm going to walk through a roadmap of exactly what you can do with your school to create a more resilient operations. This framework that we have here is a pretty graphic that basically shows you a transformation from getting your asset info into a digital transformation and what can come out of that. So first you get your foundational asset. That's your cataloging, your equipment, your infrastructure, creating a baseline for your future plans and getting all that information from a facility's condition assessment, which we'll talk about in a few minutes. Then step two is tactical. You're taking all that data and you're putting it somewhere so that you can actually streamline your maintenance day to day on your operational day to day work. You will create a reduced downtime and improve your efficiency. Then once you've done that and you're running along smoothly, you're going to be more strategic in terms of your long term planning. So you have capital planning, risk assessments and aligning your maintenance with your district goals, which a lot of times are just to be as resilient as possible, but also sustainability and things like that. And then finally, the piece that we're all hoping to get to that very few have reached so far, but we're on our way there is digital. We have a digital transformation where now everything is predictive, it's automated and it's integrated and everything's happening proactively in our facilities management. Now that's the goal. So don't let that scare you. No one's there yet. We're just trying to get there. So we're going to follow this roadmap and try to get to a place where we have predictive maintenance, automated workflows, asset location tracking, ideally climate resilience and sustainability, integration with your security and your maintenance and prioritizing your compliance and your automation. So starting with step one, asset data, catalog your equipment, your infrastructure, your systems and establish a baseline. Like I said, this is about knowing your assets, having a centralized register, having evaluations of everything, having condition assessments and creating that baseline with your facility's condition assessment to know your infrastructure health. So now we're going to have a poll and I think I just click the next one for it to work. There we go. Please take our poll. Do you conduct a formal facilities condition assessment? Yes, I do regularly because it's required only when prompted by specific events. No, but we're considering it and no, we're not and we don't have to. Please take a second to click the poll and then we'll go to the results. Okay, couple more seconds. Everyone click the poll, you can do it. I'm waiting for some more people. All right, I think we've got a decent amount. Let's see what we've got. Yes, we conduct it regularly and as required only prompted by specific events. No, but we're considering it. No, and we're not gonna. Okay, good. So you're in the right bit and I can see how sometimes specific events might prompt it. I know George, you have a story about that in terms of what you guys have done. So we're going to keep moving. So what is a facilities condition assessment? Most schools are strongly encouraged or required to do them every three to five years. They're usually conducted by engineering professionals who evaluate your facilities infrastructure throughout everything, HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and then help you prioritize your improvements based on that. These are great to create a very detailed report. Sometimes they include cost estimates. Sometimes they include lifespan projections, compliance. They're a good place to start. However, they're stagnant. In the past, when I used to work at a school, we would literally get a binder. Sometimes now you'll get a spreadsheet or a PDF, but it's just a document that's giving you a report. So as soon as you get it, it's going to be out outdated as soon as you start making those changes. And unless you have someone regularly updating it, it's going to be a manual and tedious process. And that's where we lead into implementing software that can help you keep that data up to date. So even if you're not required, we highly recommend a condition assessment and there's a couple of different ways to do it. So I'm going to lead into Barry College and let Leah and George talk a little bit about how they did their facilities condition assessment and what they did with it. Yes. So we had originally started doing at the college FCAs in the early 2000s and you know, the FCA kind of, was independent of the capital budget, right? And so they weren't working in conjunction with each other and we had useful data in both categories of course that weren't necessarily figuring out how to link that together. And as this slide shows, we are a very large campus. We're twenty seven thousand acres and our two thousand students are spread over two really different campuses that we have. Even though they're on the same, you know, property, they're about three miles apart. And so we have a lot of historic buildings that date back to the 1920s all the way to buildings that were obviously completed in, you know, this year in the last decade and not and so, how do we kind of take some of those FCAs and those known issues that we have and really start looking at implementing them into the capital budget and that's where utilizing first our CMMS then our EAM with Asset Essentials really helped us figure out how to use that data and start working towards a plan in which we can implement everything that we needed to do. So again, with the FCAs, as you can see here, we had a lot of in-depth knowledge, right? So when you conduct those in FCA, a team, an external team, and sometimes an internal team is going to go through every building, every system in that building, every structure in that building and look at, you know, the basic lifespan of individual pieces of equipment or the building as a whole, etc. They are very time consuming. They can be very tedious, right? There are a lot of technical aspects that maybe your existing facilities team doesn't believe align with what the FCA says, right? So, you may have a new building, new HVAC equipment for example, that has been causing you problems. When an FCA is conducted, they're not necessarily aware of those known issues that you guys have and so, you can take that data and either help supply the FCA team or when you start to build out your own plan, know that you can take some of that data and merge those two things together, right? That FCA is only as good if you are updating that data. You know, they don't know necessarily that, you know, when they come back either in a year or five years, whatever your timeframe may be, whether you've completed some of those tasks that they had on the previous FCA, right? That takes a fantastic I'll just jump in there. I like what you said about there's an internal component that has to be part of it. You can't just take their word for it because this is their first and only time perhaps seeing these things and you know them better than anyone. So they're the first step. Yes, exactly. And again, you know, an FCA will kind of outline maybe a one year, five year, ten year capital plan of when to do those things That may not align with what your facilities team or budget team has either financially or what makes sense, right? And so, that's something to consider on an FCA. All right. So let's talk about when you're doing your FCA, George, how did you decide what to do? And like you said, what problems did you come across and where'd you end up in the end? Yeah, exactly. So on those FCAs, like talked about a bunch of detailed data, right? As a facilities manager, that FCA may say replace this window in this building and this door over here, so on and so forth. That's a good baseline, right? That's a good starting point. But you really want to help map that out. And so what we did is take a lot of that data and figure out how we could make it part of a larger project and then see if it was part of what we had on the capital budget side to really implement those things as part of a larger capital budget, right? Were these things that we'd already discussed in house that that FCA didn't show? And if so, when were we planning on doing that, right? And so, we were able to take a lot of the smaller things and group those together as far as part of larger projects and really looking at, you know, the life cycle of the building and and you know, helping put all those things and get a hard number that we could be more easily updated instead of individual action items. And I'll go to your timeline. Let's go through. Did you do? This is where you came from and where you ended up. Yes, exactly. So again, when we started in the early 2000s, we were getting this data. We had these FCAs, you know, the financial administration side wasn't necessarily aligned with the facility side. So, we were kind of operating independently of each other. And there was an obvious need on both sides of the aisle to try to work together, right? And so, that kind of started when we introduced School Dude, inventory direct for our warehousing and central stores equipment. And we were able to kind of merge some of those things together. And initially, we had started doing some action items off the FCAs, right? But we weren't really showing that we had done those things on the administration side. And so even though we had tackled some of those large projects, we weren't able to, you know, really follow through as part of a capital budget or even check off things on the FCA that we had really done, right? And so, we really decided that we really needed to focus more on fleshing out our capital budget and managing that capital budget, right? We had by the mid 2000s added a lot more square footage. Those buildings were obviously in a lot better shape and we had kind of neglected some of our older and aged buildings and those FCAs obviously showed that and then we were able to present to administration the fact that we really needed to group some of these things together and really help flush out the capital budget to help tackle some of those things, right? And then of course once we started to implement asset essentials that was really the congruence of everything together. That was your FCAs, the capital budget, you know, taking all of our work orders and you know, seeing what we had done reactively and even on school dude and whatnot there, we were able to merge and bring over a lot of that data and input that in to what we have been able to accomplish. And so, you know, currently where are we sitting? It is emerging of all that data and tracking and, you know, budget side, maintenance side, work order side, FCAs merging all that together and really flushing out kind of a ten year plan that is much more easily updatable and is a clear road map to both facilities administration and financial administration and upper management on of what our roadmap looks like, you know. So whether or not there's money to do everything, it's at least, you know, it's down on paper and we can say we've at least talked about it, you know. At least you have a plan. That's where we got to start and then we'll get the money. So I do think this is a really good transition into stage two, which is you did your asset inventory. You have all that step one. Step two, like you just said, what's the day to day changes that are occurring? So how do we focus on tactical operational improvements for work order responses, inspections, making sure we're on top of all of those things? Part of that can include sustainability and ESG reporting. It can include actual just tactical build outs of your info with automation and what other integration you might need. But ideally, big piece here is reducing downtime, improving responsiveness and setting the stage for that next piece of strategic planning. So while we move on to what a CMMS is, everyone calls it a CMMS, but I'm going to argue that Asset Essentials is an EAM. So CMMS is an older term for computerized maintenance management system. There are some great CMMS options out there. If you're talking about enterprise asset management, that's the next level. That's the next piece that takes it further. So CMMS, you're focused on scheduling, tracking work orders. EAM is taking it to the next piece. You're managing the life cycle of your assets and you're actually getting the strategic insights into it. So you're building on that day to day routine maintenance and tracking and you're integrating asset condition risk, potentially your financial data. And then that will lead to supporting your capital plan and those data driven decisions. So while a CMMS is great and sometimes we are referring to all of these as CMMS as a joint bucket, sometimes we like to think more strategically and that's why we'll refer to it as an EAM. So what we're doing here is we're taking our FCA data, the output that George just talked about, and he's mapping it into an EAM system, particularly Asset Essentials in this case. So it will be mapped in there and the output ideally is operational efficiency based upon that integration that will allow you to make real time decisions. So I'm going to go back to Leah and George and let them tell you exactly what they did when they started using that system. System. Yes, so, when we started, we've got a little timeline for you guys in case you want to tune out for just a second. But we started in July of last year, with demos, the contracts, agreements, things like that. And really collecting that data that George talked about earlier was important, to the internal discussions that happened August through October. And we took all of that data that was collected and started in October, officially on October fourteenth, and worked on that through November. So then November through December we reviewed the data. We did a lot of system configurations. We went through Brightly's training program, which was fantastic for us to learn what our options were, how we could configure the system to best work for us and our needs, before we said, yep, that's what we want, and then realize, oh, I wish we would have done this. So having a little bit of time between the demos and the contract and the actual project start date was very important for us so that we could all discuss what it is that we need. We could do a little bit more research on the FCAs and the data that we had to know what we were working with going into this project. So then January through February we went through system optimization and the go live support from Brightly and we allowed our techs to weigh in on this. We wanted them to play with it. We introduced iPads. We configured systems over or permissions. I'm sorry over and over again to make sure that you know everyone's comfortable with how this is working, who can see what, how the work order process flows from a work request into a work order. How is it assigned? How is it categorized? So we spent a lot of time on the staff training side which I don't think you can overdo at least for us. I think that really helps set you guys up for success because a lot of times when we speak to other people who have tried to implement technology with their maintenance staff, the biggest struggle is with the staff training. So I love that you gave them a lot of time. Yes. And let me jump in too. I mean, we're talking about starting from ground zero, we were paperwork orders that were handed out to roughly fifty staff members. And so taking them from a lot of trees, George. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And taking them to a you know an iPad and taking that out in the field and whatnot. I agree that was you know the most crucial step there. And just to piggyback off of that you know a lot of our folks were nervous. Mean they're really nervous they didn't really want to play with the system. Having that test environment that Brightly set up so that they could play in it, we wanted them to try to break the system. We wanted to see where maybe we had missed something or didn't think through something. So we really encourage them get in there play around as much as possible. Think of the craziest situations you can, and let's work from there. So that way when you know we moved into actual live environment, they felt really comfortable. Comfortable. You know I would encourage anyone that's looking at doing something like this to just make sure you've built in enough time for anyone that's going to be using the system to play with it beforehand. And then you know March or in February we spent basically the whole month of February on training in the test environment. March through July we officially went live for facility staff. We had a few processes and procedures that we needed to refine and think through, and you know that's still going on even today. You know, I think once you've introduced technology that affords you the ability to say okay well now that we're not stuck on paper we can be a little bit more efficient here. And once you've created that efficiency that can create more efficiencies over here. So it's it's sort of a trickle down effect. The longer you use it, the better it gets. And when when we say it go live for facility staff, we did not roll out Asset Essentials to our campus until August. So that gave them several months in the live environment. Know, on our side, faculty and staff were still emailing facilities team. We had certain people that were basically copying pasting the request into Asset Essentials, but that also allowed our techs time to complete work orders in the live environment. They were able, you know, although they had played in the test environment, there's still a little bit of nervousness going live. And so then in August, by the time faculty and staff and students are submitting hundreds of work orders, they're used to it. That's old news. So, I think that worked out really well. And, I think it's also helped on the budget side understand you know maybe electric you know the electrical shop needs another electrician because we weren't necessarily capturing all of the work that was being done back in the paper model. And so you know again the longer you use it the better it is, better the data is, the better decisions you can make. So I think on both sides you know it's been a little bit eye opening to see you know well this group is doing this and this group primarily is working on this and you know maybe we should rethink a few things. You know we're still learning but we're not going to lead into this because I think this is a good slide that you just led into which is what were your biggest challenges in doing this and how do you address them? You talked about it a little bit but let's get into it. So, the biggest challenges was you know again community acceptance, getting everyone on board, staff training was huge and I know we've already talked about that. We have an aging workforce in our facilities department and, not even in facilities. You know, we have some aging faculty and staff members that aren't quite as comfortable with technology. And so it's hard to get them to stop calling you and just actually put in a ticket. It is. I think yesterday we had someone that you know, hey you know we have this new system please submit it through the system. So you know I think it's just reinforcing again and again and again and eventually it will be that's all anyone has ever known. It has to be I always think it helps to remind the people that are hesitant to use it that this will help you get a response faster and you can actually track our response instead of having to keep calling us over and over again. Yes. Yes. And same thing. I mean, you know, with the staff members, it was really engaging them at the very beginning, letting them know this is something we're going be working towards, really gauging their input, allowing them to be part of the decision making process and not just let you know, higher ups administration, you know, force something upon us. So, we really ask for their input and kind of how they would like to model it which you know, was kind of Brightly had laid out for us but that helped them be engaged in that, right? And then, again, allowing them to play around in the test environments, the sandbox accounts, all that kind of stuff. Taking their input, answering their questions, doing some staff training and lunches and all that kind of stuff. Answering their questions, showing them, you know, in-depth how to use it. Again, the iPads for every single person, you know, that education discount really helped us buy plenty of iPads. And that was how we felt that we could get everybody on the same page. So, you know, does everybody have a cellphone? Is everybody using that? Sure. You know, but when it talk, when you come to some of those technological changes, it sounds a little more daunting to those employees. And so gifting them an iPad, allowing them to, you know, do other things on that iPad within, you know, an academic setting, and showing them how asset essentials was going to showcase their work, Better response times, amount of work that's being captured that maybe wasn't before on a sheet of paper with hey, do you got a second kind of request? We can really show a lot of those things and ask them to put it in there and then it kind of became an internal competition about who could really get the most work done, you know, and so Absolutely. Yeah. Without a doubt. And then what were we able to do on the you know administrative side is capture a lot of that data so that we could you know talk about needs in in specific locations and again couple needs into locations and shops and trades and what with part of the larger capital budget and, you know, those FCAs. And just to piggyback off of that, I think one of the biggest things that everyone should keep in mind when going through this process is that you have to believe that your techs are capable of doing this. Even when they don't believe that they are themselves, know I think that's huge to you know basically assume competence and encourage. I think positive reinforcement and encouragement makes a difference. I think Leah, we have question. I'm going to read it out now because I do think it pertains to what we're talking about right now, which is asset inventory, as you said, is a very slow process. You said earlier that FCAs were used to support this process. Was this done internally once the FCAs were completed through the Brightly or was it done through the Brightly implementation team? So once you had the FCA, how did you start putting the asset inventory into Asset Essentials? So we had some data in School Dude and we decided we're going to start completely from scratch. And kind of like George mentioned earlier, we had a new FCA completed right around November, December of last And we took the internal knowledge that our facilities team had looked at that, compared it, combined it, and then that's what we gave, our Brightly configuration team to import into our system. So we wanted to start with brand new fresh data. So what, like Lee said, what we did is we took that external FCA and we had our all of our shop supervisors kind of do an internal FCA and we coupled those two things together and found out, you know, kind of a you know, some quick needs that we needed in the next two or three years and then we're able to flush out the internal and external FCAs and then import those into Brightly or Asset Essentials is, you know, as like on a fresh start, you know. And I like what you said that you can take an FCA that you have and update it if it's recent enough. If you haven't and it's recent enough, you could use that without doing a newer one. Yes, absolutely. The other reason we went ahead and got a new one was the old one was about four, five years old so it was time anyways. Yep. All right should we go to the next slide? That's a good transition too. Okay so you implemented, the staff is using it, what were the biggest things you saw out of your first year? So one of the KPIs that we're really focused on is preventative maintenance. And so being able to track and convert a lot of our work orders into preventative maintenance versus reactive maintenance is huge. And we know that ultimately this entire process is going to be about a two to three year initiative and we're pleased with the progress so far and that you know we will ultimately have more PM schedules uploaded as time goes on and we think of you know we just talked about that with some of our faculty staff homes. You know as we think about things we're able to import those PM schedules so that's great. It was almost completely reactive before. So the next one is having technicians using mobile devices to access the work orders has decreased the amount of time it takes to actually get a response. All of campus has been pleased with being able to get, you know, have eyes on where is my work order in the queue, know what's going on with it. If a student placed a work order and you know mom and dad want to know what's going on, the student can look and say oh well it says they ordered the thermostat two days ago they'll be back tomorrow and you know so there's that communication component that we did not have before and you know it was just inefficient for our techs to have to run back and forth to pick up a piece of paper and you know write notes on the paper and then you know it's sort of a black hole there for a little while. So just the efficiencies from going mobile has been great. And then a little bit more streamlined inventory management so we can utilize our warehouse space much better and we have better budgetary accountability because we have better eyes on what's going on in the system. And part of the project was we went through and culled a lot of the inventory parts and pieces that have been there for thirty, forty years that we don't need anymore but no one had gone through and gotten rid of. And so you know now we actually have space for the pieces and parts that we need and that's really been nice to have. So and you know something that's hard to really put into numbers, right? Is the general feel of how people feel the facilities staff are doing, right? So, the requester submits a work order. They can be in direct communication. The techs and supervisors and the facility side can be in direct communication with the request right? They get notifications either through Email or when they log in about work completed, status of work, all that kind of stuff and on the facility side, that can be documented. You know, there doesn't have to be a conversation that wasn't documented about X, Y, or Z. All that is is communicated through there, you know, pictures, updates, receipts, anything like that, you know, is all kept within that specific work order and therefore in asset essentials. And for the most part, I would say we often hear people saying staff might think, oh, it's just checking up on me. It's trying to track me. But actually what it's doing is justifying the fact that you're doing ridiculous amount work and we can actually show how much work you're doing. And the reason you didn't get to that ticket is because you have thirty seven other tickets and we can prove all of that. Absolutely. And therefore, hey, we need more staff members or we have needs in this area, you know, without a doubt. Yep. Here is a question that we can bring to, we'll reach out to you from an SDR, if you guys have any questions, have you ever used our system with a third party contract laborer? I don't know that you guys have, correct? We have not. So we'll reach out to you with an answer on that question. Now let's go to the next piece, which is everyone is moving smoothly day to day. We are answering tickets. Everyone is happy. And now we're going to go to part three, which is how do we make this more strategic for the future? So we're moving into long term proactive planning that's going to focus on your capital plan and your budget, which is where we started in the beginning of this webinar. So we're planning our investments. We're using scenario modeling. We're trying to be sustainable. We actually can plan for the what ifs and the emergencies. We have sustainability dashboards and we have project management. So here we have another poll. Please take two seconds to answer this poll. What best describes your familiarity of asset investment planning or AIP software? Yes, we use it and we know we don't use it, but I know what it is. Or C, I don't even know what it is. Tell me about it, Katie, and I will. So just take one second to answer the poll. I need a few people to answer the poll so I can move on to the next slide. There we go, just jumped. All right. So, it seems like we don't use it, but I know what it is. And no, I don't even know what it is. Great. So for both of you, I'll tell you more about it. So asset investment planning software is the next piece. We are often asked, is that the same as your EAM? No, it's a separate thing. It's the next thing that's in addition to your EAM. So if you are using asset essentials from Brightly, it would be the next software that's called Origin that would take your information from asset essentials and move it into this capital planning asset investment piece. So AIP in general, what is it? It's going to help you prioritize your investments to improve your budget and ideally extend your asset lifespan by keeping up to date with what needs to be improved and what needs to be repaired versus replaced. It actually automates your data collection based on your Asset Essentials use, and then we'll provide insights for you into what the risk score is for each asset, what you might need to replace sooner rather than later, and how that works. And you might say, that's crazy. How does it do it? Well, I will tell you. So how does it work? It actually is pretty straightforward. If you're maintaining your asset data information in Asset Essentials and your technicians are closing tickets and writing what they did and putting the parts used and putting the PMs that they're doing. It takes all of that data and links it into a new system that's keeping track of your repairs and updates and creating a asset health score. So it's giving you analysis of where your asset is. So for example, if you buy a HVAC unit and the life expectancy is twenty years, but we know you haven't been doing your filter replacements and you haven't been doing your PMs and no one's been repairing it, then the life expectancy goes down. We know this, but this will actually show you it. If your team is doing all the repairs, it might go up because you're constantly working on it. So it also will show you, which we know unfortunately happens. Sometimes a brand new unit is actually failing a lot more than an older unit. So you need to take all of those things into account. In integrating with that CMMS EIM data, it's taking your asset inventory and your predictive work orders history and giving you an analysis. So that third bucket is providing an analysis about your assets. It's actually going to use benchmarks. So local benchmarks, RS means data benchmarks to give you insight into your asset and future cost projections. It will actually give you end of life estimates based on risk scores that it calculates for each of your assets and will help you calculate the potential cost to replace those assets based on where you are in the country because we know prices are different depending on where you are. And then the best thing about it is that you use all of that to support your budget requests. So if you're going into a board meeting or a budget committee meeting and you need to request the next five years, I need to replace these units. You will actually have data to prove why you're choosing them. And I think that's the biggest piece. I always use the example of cars. I don't know anything about cars. And if I go to a mechanic and they say, Katie, you need to fix all these things and it's going to cost you five thousand dollars I say, here's my credit card because I have no point of reference whether or not I should do those things. So I think this helps you not just rely on a vendor's input, not just rely on a gut reaction or even if your gut reaction is right, it gives you data to justify it for the finance leader that may or may not trust just a gut reaction. So then you actually have data to prove those requests that you're making. So the biggest piece for me, I would say, is that it will help you make those presentations and help you moving forward. So you're taking your data collection from your EAM, which is what Leo was just talking about. And now we're adding a risk assessment. The risk assessment will help you financially model your capital plan. And that can be up to thirty years if you're using Origin. I'm sure there's other to do this and a lot of people do this with very fancy and detailed spreadsheets, but this makes it a lot easier than that and it does it for you. So the last thing I'll ask Leah and George before we move to our final step is you have your data in your EAM. How are you using that data now to inform your budget? It's a loaded question. Is. Multiple ways. I think, you know, so you're obviously, you're able to see the amount of work orders that are done on a specific asset. Is that a problem area? Is that part of a larger problem? And as we build those PM schedules into those things in different assets and whatnot, we can really start to outline some problem areas. And again, maybe it's justification for those things that we already do. But again, when bringing those kinds of things to finance directors, administration, you have that point of reference to be able to point to and say, hey, you know, this this asset is costing us this much money. We have this many problems, complaints, work requests, whatever it is and really start to maybe change your capital budget to focus on something sooner than you thought you would. Or, you know, in addition to those types of things. And we this year went through and updated the capital plan for the college and went out ten and tedious. But you know having a little bit of data and now you know having new data day to day, you wouldn't go and update it every day obviously, but you know as it's needed we now have data to help inform those decisions like you're mentioning Katie. Yep. So it's it's been great. And like you said the more you can even if you just have an EAM, you can use that data alone to say this is where all the work orders are going. This is where all the overtime is going. And the cost of all this overtime and repairs on weekends and nights is worth way more than replacing this unit that we should have replaced two years ago. And you can actually show that. And ultimately I think the direction that we are headed is introducing and implementing origin, potentially looking at event manager to tie in on our campus scheduling side because that will talk to Asset Essentials. So I think you know now that we've dipped our toes in the water and it's worked so well, know I think once we get to a very comfortable spot with Asset Essentials, it makes sense to continue, to sort of flesh out all the opportunities. Yeah. And I think the more data that you get over, you know, you know, this coming up in February will kind of be that go live time, right? And so now we'll have a year of data that we can really look at and compile and reassess. Not that, you know, at this point, I think we're at like six thousand, seven thousand work orders that we've done in, you know, nine months. And so we can really gather that data. Absolutely. Yes. Yep, absolutely. So yeah, really start fleshing things out, you know. I love it. And I think, like you said, that's the best part is taking your time, doing the one thing, proving that, and then what's the next step as you move forward. And as we wrap up this webinar, I'm going to get to the final frontier, which is the aspirational fully digitized campus. So as most of the listeners or viewers can know, we're part of Siemens and Siemens is a larger corporation that offers a lot of opportunities to fully digitize a campus. And what does that look like? Well, one, you have to start where Leah and George were a year and a half ago and that's the only way to get started. And once you have it in these steps that we've gone through, you get to your last piece which is the aspirational piece of what is as automated as we can get it to make our lives easier. And schools unfortunately are behind the eight ball in terms of automation. Factories, manufacturing, they're all doing it. Schools are not in terms of facilities. And so we're trying to help get us there to make our lives easier. So what does that look like? It means you have a building automation system that actually goes to a unified platform where you can see all of your IoT sensor alerts and all of your BAS alerts in one place. It has remote building management so that George doesn't have to leave his son's soccer game to go deal with the flooded campus because he has remote monitoring and he knows exactly what's happening when and it always breaks on a weekend or a Friday afternoon. Exactly. And you have possible digital twin modeling, which is a whole other piece that I'm sure everyone's heard. It's a buzzword like AI these days. But what it is is an actual virtual representation of your campus so that you can simulate and predict what might happen in the future. Ideally, you would get all of this in a single pane of glass software view where you can see it all. And we're working on that with our partners at Siemens. But in this time you have to start somewhere. So you will see all these articles, you'll see all these things that we're sharing on LinkedIn and in webinars saying you can have this amazing digitized campus with digital twins and fully automated everything. And that's awesome. You totally can, but you have to start somewhere. And so that's where we, I think this is a great place to explain how you guys got started and how you got started in an efficient way to not have to do it over again. Because I've heard a lot of stories of people trying and failing and then giving up and then starting again. So planning ahead to make sure when you implement technology, when you're trying to make this move from reactive to proactive to in the ideal world predictive, you got to start somewhere and you have to take your time to do it right. So faster is not always better. Taking your time is the best way to do it and making sure, like you said, all your stakeholders are on board and they're able to use the product, whatever you choose to use and use it in a way that will help them continue to grow in the future. So I think that's the whole story. Leah and George, do you have anything to say at the end or I'll get into a couple of questions before we wrap up? Yeah, I think we're ready for questions. All right. Okay, here's a good question for you, George. How do you balance urgent maintenance needs with your strategic goals? So you have a bunch of day to day needs versus what your larger facilities upgrade plans are. How do you balance those? So obviously your daily maintenance needs were, know, those aren't ever going to go away, right? So your bathroom issues, your kitchens, you know, those kinds of things, filter changes and maybe some more pressing issues like that, obviously aren't going to go away, right? But what we try to do is take some of those other projects and some of them, you know, much smaller, not high budgetary number by any means, and try to figure out how we could take some of those things and put them into smaller projects, you know, and really kind of designate people to do that in house that have the capability of having some better knowledge, maybe shop supervisor or whatnot and just you know, grouping those things together in things that made sense, you know, in time frame, time frames that made sense as well. Yeah, that's a great answer. And one final question, I think we have time for one more. And I think you answered it pretty well, Leah, but I'd love to hear one last answer. How have you responded to resistance to this process other than being open to retraining and retraining? What else have you done? You know I think ultimately starting early and recruiting, you know, people in different departments around campus. You know, when we first started to roll it out, for example, I went to our, our vice president for finances administrative assistant and made sure she was set up. She started using it. She really liked it and that helped everyone else in that area sort of jump on board. Know, if there's issues she was willing to help sort of troubleshoot you know and so having a few people around campus that were really on board and supportive you know I don't know that we really had a ton of resistance once the go live period got here from faculty staff and students. It was primarily within facilities and it wasn't resistance because they didn't want to. It was resistance because there was some nervousness and anxiety around the technology part and around, you know, big brothers looking over my back and and once we were able to show them this is this is what we see in the system. This is how it's going to help you. You know, this is really going to work well. A lot of a lot of that went away pretty quickly and initially, we asked them to do the very very minimum within, you know, a work order, right? Did you complete it? Yes. Yes. Yes. Completed it. A quick picture, all that kind of stuff and once everybody, you know, kind of got on board with that, they really figured out that there was a lot more capabilities that would benefit them, right? Being able to go back and look at work orders for previous things and see what they bought when they did this, X, Y, and Z and really look at asset history and work order history across the board really helped everybody get on board. But we started out with a very simplified version and allowed our techs and staff members on the facility side to really flesh it out as they grew more comfortable with it. And I will add this as well. Katie, are we getting close? No go. Okay so I will say this as well. George made himself available pretty much every morning for a certain period so that anyone that had issues the day before or you know had questions as the day got going could stop by his office, have a quick you know two three minute check-in you know oh you just forgot to deselect the filter. I think that helped a lot. There was no fear of coming to ask questions. So I think that's great. And I'm going to ask you one final question before we wrap up because I think this is an important one. How detailed, how granular did you get with your FCA? Can you give us an example of what type of assets you put in the system? So, you know, obviously we put, every single building in the system, right? And then, we have started flushing it out to air handlers, HVAC equipment, refrigeration equipment, stuff like that. But we really wanted to start with, a more simplified version of larger buildings as a whole, right? And maybe some major issues and major systems within those buildings. We weren't worried about paint and carpet and door handles and windows and that kind of stuff blinds, right? Insignificant because they're part of a larger project at any point. So we really tried to keep it to larger systems, larger buildings, and then start fleshing out those as everybody got more comfortable within that system. Exactly. All right. I think that's it. We have one more quick question. We will contact you, Dave, about specifically how to input the FCI into Brightly software. But I want to thank Leah and George for joining me and for being such great speakers and always being willing to speak on behalf of us. We have our contact info here. You can find us on LinkedIn. You can email us if you have any questions. I'm sure George and Leah are too nice and they'd be happy to answer your questions too. Please definitely. Want to say thank you to everyone for joining us today. Yes, thank you. All right. Bye guys.