Higher Ed Edition: Future Proof Your Legacy CMMS with Brightly

Good afternoon, and welcome to future proof your legacy CMMS with Brightly. Thank you for being with us here today. We're going to get started momentarily. Please bear with us. We're just waiting for a few more people to join us. Welcome, and thank you for joining us today. We're gonna get started momentarily as I see more people trickle it through and attend our webinar. Just give us a few more minutes. Alright. We'll get started here now. Good afternoon, and thank you all for joining us today. Today, we are talking about future proofing your legacy CMMS with Brightly, the higher ed edition. Before we get started, just wanted to go over some housekeeping items. You will be muted today during our session, but I'm sure you're going to have several questions for our audience, rather for our speakers. Please use the q and a feature on the left of your screen at any time during the session to submit your questions. We will answer all your questions live at the end of the webinar, or we will follow-up with you in case we can get to them live. This session will be recorded, and you will receive the recording by email. There are also a few resource links on the right side of your screen. Please feel free to click through them and download some of the content that is available to you, including a full case study on Kirkwood Community College. And now let's get started. Without further ado, Nate, the floor is yours. Thank you, Shruti. Thank you you very much. Happy Wednesday, everybody. Thank you all for joining us. I'm thrilled to be hosting today on behalf of Brightly. While we kick off, please take a quick second to answer our poll question you'll see on the screen as well during introductions. And as Shruti mentioned throughout today's discussion, throw questions in that q and a. We'll do our best to answer those as we go, but we'll reserve time at the end to make sure that we address them the best we can. As Shruti mentioned, I'm Nathan White. I've had the pleasure of serving our clients here at Bright ly for about ten years, one of which I'm extremely proud to have the opportunity to introduce to you today. He has so graciously graciously agreed to spend time sharing his journey throughout the last eighteen years with Brightly and at Kirkwood, more specifically the last three years in transitioning to Brightly's new asset essential solution. So welcome, Troy McQuillan of Kirkwood Community College in Iowa. Good afternoon, Troy. Thanks for being here. Hey, Nate. Hey. Good to see you again. Good afternoon. Good afternoon, indeed. Troy, as we get started, tell us a little bit about yourself. Let's get to know Troy's history. Yeah. Afternoon, everyone, on the the webinar. I'm Troy McQuillan. I, I'm here at Kirkwood Community College in in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Currently the vice president of facilities and public safety here for Kirkwood. I'll tell you more more about Kirkwood in a little bit. But, I grew up in Iowa. I'm a farm boy from Northeast Iowa. I've never left Iowa. I've been in Cedar Rapids here almost my entire I'm dance practice and all those fun activities. Thanks, Troy. Thank you very much. And now that we've got to know you a little bit, tell us about what brought you to Kirkwood and how you started. Yeah. So Kirkwood is is really been, I'm an alumni of Kirkwood. So, obviously, when I I graduated, I moved on for my four year degree at another college here in Iowa and then quickly came back to Kirkwood, to start teaching. So my professional background is grounds maintenance. I taught for ten years in our golf course management program, which taught students become golf course superintendents, sports field managers, and lawn care operators. About eight years ago is when I had the opportunity to move into administration, and I've been doing that for eight years. So went right from the classroom right into this real world experience of facilities management here. So total, been at Kirkwood for eighteen years. Awesome. So the last eight years in that facilities management role, give us a quick overview of the facilities at Kirkwood. What's it like there? What are you serving? Yes. Thank you. I think this is, we're very proud of our facility. So Kirkwood is a two year community college in Cedar Rapids. We have a full time equivalent enrollment of fifteen thousand students. Forty percent of those students are actually high school students taking concurrent enrollment or college credit classes while in high school. They mostly attribute to our seven locations that we have. Our largest location is here in Cedar Rapids. It's a six hundred and fifty acre campus. We have seventy buildings on property, totaling about one point nine million square feet. We have a full time staff of about ninety, which includes maintenance, custodial, public safety, grounds, fleet services, mail services, s, and I guess anything else that that comes our way from facilities and public safety. So I have, five managers, directors that report into me, as far as public safety, maintenance automation, grounds, custodial services, and budget management. And that's just a little bit of how we're set up. Thank you so much. What I'm hearing is lots of hats, lots of areas that you cover, which is probably very relatable to a lot of people on this call. And throughout that, eighteen years and thank you for the overview of the layout there. But you've been a client of Brightly's for, I believe, almost sixteen years since, two thousand six there, on classic and current. Tell us a little about your experience with Brightly. Yeah. So my first experience actually started part time. The prep my predecessor who was in this seat, before me actually got me started, working part time on the capital, forecast, module that was available in the in the classic Venus Direct. Yes. So if I get those names right. But, yeah, that that that was really where I got started. My predecessors really contributed for bringing on the platform of maintenance direct, PM direct, and then also utility direct. And so, obviously, had a had quite a bit of experience when I became full time into this role using that using the classic modules And lots of positive experience, of course, lots of data, lots of asset information, lots of work order completion. So, yeah, that was my that was my experience. I really have not had any other experience with any other CMMS system other than, the SchoolDude platform and now Brightly platforms. So Well, thank you. You mentioned that the predecessor had brought us on, was originally there back in the early stages. But what do you remember back from that two thousand six era when you first start started? What were some of those motivators or drivers to bring School Dude on at that time? Well, I I think when I think back to that time, there was so much construction happening for Kirkwood. I mean, we did, between two thousand and six and two thousand and eighteen, we did over two hundred million dollars in capital investment to our campuses. And I can remember that as construction projects completed, these books, these six inch binders would begin showing up on the desk of as builts and OEM manuals and asset information and panel tags and all these things. And we had nowhere to put it other than to, of course, shelf it or file it in some cases. So it was one of those situations where we desperately needed to to provide direction to the team. And it was good to it was just a a start. Like, where can we a basic start to be able to compile, of course, the information, but to provide our maintenance team, our custodial teams direction to go. And then, also, we needed a a user friendly platform for our our customers, our our building occupants to report back what they're seeing. Of course, no one's staffed to be able to see every square inch of your facility every day, so we relied heavily on our users, our requesters, to put in, work order tickets. And and since the beginning, and I know this may differ from other locations, we allow every full time Kirkwood employee, as a requester. So we have a single sign on system, and they are able to request work orders. It's not just the the building administrator or the receptionist or the secretary. It is anyone that has a a k number. In our case, they can log in to make a maintenance order or work ticket request for And k number being that key, that's like like a Kirkwood email address for for example. No. That that's a great layout as well of your structure of getting information in, getting started with CMMS. And, I think a lot of people people call it making those dust collector binders into a living document that you can control, grow, and maintain. And you guys lived in that sweet spot for a while. It takes a lot of time. You mentioned all the way through to two thousand and nine. And you guys lived in that sweet spot for a while. It takes a lot of time. You mentioned all the way through two thousand six sixteen, I think you had those projects. So fast forward a little bit for me because while you're in there, you're crawl, walking, running in classic. Now it's about twenty twenty one. We are about to make the jump. You're thinking about asset essentials. What were some of those motivators and drivers then? How did that change that ultimately led you to think about asset essentials? Yeah. So, we had so when we left the we're in classic, and I will be honest, Nate. I mean, close your ears. We did switch briefly to, another CMMS platform. It was a much larger finance and finance and payment request, and it was good. It was overwhelming. So as soon as I started to see what I would say that the glaze over in people's eyes, I just we gotta make a call. We gotta figure out what the next options. Yeah. We called and and had a heart to heart or a a checkup for where Kirkwood was going and then learned a lot on that call about asset essentials. So we we developed an exit strategy with the CMMS platform that we were we were moving towards, and we, rallied the team. We developed a, an onboarding team for asset essentials as a group of four individuals, some of them on the call today, that help us launch this off. So this was this was really the success point of of moving this thing forward. So, I would say, you know, this was a this is, of course, always a team effort, but here's the thing I'll share is that we knew just having that brief stent or switch to a CMMS system that we needed to regain people's trust again. And, obviously, all of you on the call today know that trust kinda it starts with relationships. So we kinda we did, like, a boots on the ground type relationship build with our team on CMMS. At this time, public safety officers were not very engaged with with, maintenance direct. Our grounds department was not very engaged. Our custodial department was not very engaged. Each director and manager sat down with their team and asked about, you know, likes and opportunities and where they see these things going and even some worries. You know? Are you worried that we're tracking your work? Are we worried that I'm not putting as much production output? No. No. We just we had to rebuild that relationship and trust first, and then we just we we grab the most technical, savvy folks on our team and put this implementation in place. That's awesome. I think that the element of getting to those who are boots on the ground or closest to it to understand where those gaps are and rebuild that trust is probably something very relatable. As you grow and use systems for a long time, I think having their inputs strategy, now you've decided, you've evaluated, you've got your exit strategy from the other CMMS and asset essentials implementations about to start. What were some of the concerns or thoughts that you gathered leading into implementation, and maybe how did we partner with you on those to make sure it was smooth? I would say the first one is what happened to make sure it was smooth? I would say the first one is what happens to all the old data. I call it old data, but the other platform's data. We made the decision to offload that data into an Excel file and keep it on our, our intranet site. So it's accessible. So we did start over with our data. But if anyone wants to ask what happened from two you know, twenty twenty back to two thousand and six, we could we have it. We have it available. So we did that was one of the other the first major decisions. We already we already really liked the way that our building locations and sites and spaces were set up in the platform, and we just continued that model as we went. The other thing is that, the other biggest change we made in questions I had for Brightly with onboarding is we wanted to keep all of those requesters. I wanted something very simple for our customers to use to complete a work order ticket, and it was nonnegotiable. And the other nonnegotiable was the fact that, we are all gonna be work control agents. So we actually auto assign work requests to the departments based upon the category that the customer picks. Now the customer will sometimes doesn't always get it right, and that's okay. We are look we have the relationship with each team member to pass it to the appropriate department, custodial to maintenance, maintenance to public safety, and so forth and so on. But we wanted that ease to be able that to happen we we have folks fill out the work orders. Of course Mhmm. We take phone calls for emergencies and those types of things, but the amount of times that our dispatchers and our office assistants tell people to complete a work order, and you can hear the eye roll in the back Yeah. Round of them saying, well, can't you just put it in? No. We're getting people used to submitting work orders. And I will say that the mobile pieces of it has come on quicker over the last couple years for folks, especially as people become more comfortable with apps and their their smartphones, those types of things. So we've been happy with the amount of requests that we get on the mobile platform as well. That's great to hear. So you've addressed some of those concerns. We're starting to talk about now you're out of implementation a little bit, but you mentioned two things I kinda wanted to touch on a little a little bit more. You'd mentioned that you had a couple different ways the team works together because you have these requests coming in. The the the need for this to be a simple process, from a request to getting it to the right hands. Your team being able to share information, and getting it to the right work category. We have a question kind of right here in our q and a that I thought aligned with that. But who vets the request and assigns them? Is are we touching on that process? Could you touch on that a little bit more for me? Yeah. So, the way we're set up, let's just take an example. So let's say a maintenance request for, for a light that's that needs to that's out in that request. So most of the requests go to the two people. So we auto assign two people to the work order when it's when it is pending. And so all of our requests come in as new request, and there are two people auto assigned. It's the maintenance manager and the mate they're number two, just in case there's a vacation day or whatever day it might be. If there is something that rises to thing, well, okay. This light fixture needs to be replaced, and it has a certain cost aspect or it's a a a smaller repair of something much larger, the maintenance manager and or their number two will pass it to the maintenance director for approval in that case. So we have redundancy in both of those. In the cases, most of the general work orders, the maintenance manager and maintenance, coordinators are are helping. In the event that both of them may be gone, the maintenance director is responsible for working on new request that come in. So all of our work orders sit in the queue as new request. And then as things are delegated to different, maintenance technicians, electricians, plumbers, they turn they turn into work in progress, and and we go from there. And one important thing also is that we did a lot of strategy about how frequently we communicate with our work request folks. Yes. And currently, we only communicate back with them when the work order has been completed. And, yes, our technicians' comments are important because the customers do see them, about when they've been completed or if it's parts on order, waiting for more information, or declined. That is when folks will see a communication back in the work order. They will not see communication back when it comes to, some of the things that we do internally, with switching people around and that type of stuff. Right. So You see utilizing those comments has become paramount. I can imagine declined as a pretty important one to make sure that you've got the right information up for those customers for your for your students and staff. Thank you for talking through that because I know that was very top of mind with what you were sharing. And now that you've talked about configuration, we're getting to that post live. Those adjustments you made, maybe to process or the ability to track data in asset essentials, there's there's growth is what we're talking about. How did that ultimately lead to post go live, we call it, right, out of implementation? How has usage adoption been? Tell me about the alignment with these goals. It sounds like things are going well as far as getting the request through. But how did it ultimately affect reporting or data accuracy so you can use it to justify some of the expenditures? Like, hey. We need to update, up up the count of staff, or, hey. We need to justify projects. Tell me a little bit about that. Yeah. That that is something that I personally worked with our onboarding consultants or implementation. I I'm not sure what they're called. You're project managers. Project managers about Yeah. Because, you know, we the the more data informed decisions are are just a reality of how our institution makes almost all the decisions. When we sit around the table and talk about budget or plant levy funds or or, repair and maintenance funds, they're always like, okay. So what do we, like, what what's the dollars and cents? So we've been utilizing the analytics portions of asset essentials. We have not, at this point, created any custom reporting for us, and or custom, module or custom custom reports for Kirkwood. But we do our division's required to put forth three to five KPIs, key performance indicators each year. Mhmm. I use three of them specifically from Brightly's analytics. I use PM to RM ratio. That's one important one that we we compare ourselves against in regards to some of our some of our, other community college folks locally as well as other groups using Brightly. And then also days to complete work orders. We look at that seven days to complete work orders and to see what things, you know, what things are taking us longer and what things on average they take based upon the work request. And the third one is is not something I report on a lot of, but just a little bit more on the asset. So the number of assets that we have related to those assets that have PMs. So we're just trying to get it's a little bit of a game because we're trying to get our PM to RM ratio up. So we're we're really working on more of a more consistent PM strategy, for our for our maintenance team and and automation team as well as grounds and and public safety. And I think that aspect of upping in gaming, as you mentioned, getting asset information, the PM two are reactive for those. I think everyone knows preventative versus reactive maintenance. Getting that up and ultimately extending the life cycle of your assets. Are there any, advantages around PM or deferred maintenance that you've seen in asset essentials that you'd like to talk about as well? I think so advantages in context of, like, how it's set up for us? Yeah. K. So, another new initiative we took on, the last couple years is we hired a consultant to come in and and tag and help us, name all of our building our building wide assets as well as all of our individual assets. So we were kinda estimating before when we had classic, I think we had, like, twelve hundred assets in the system. We now have well over five thousand, in the system. And this has been a huge process that, you know, just I just wanna give kudos to the team that's on the call today from here. They have just embraced this. It's It's one of our KPIs, and they're just they're knocking it out of the park. And, we we got all of our data back, pictures, OEM manuals, just a real comprehensive bundle of data. We put it into a spreadsheet. We uploaded it to asset essentials. We had to manipulate a few things that were different, but we're really happy with the results. We have pictures of our assets. We have asset tags. We have our own little custom nomenclature of how we identify assets. Mhmm. So it's it's really been good. The one thing I'll mention, Nate, is that it was interesting working with the consultants because, of course, they have their own way of categorizing assets. And oftentimes, we'll say, well, why don't we just have Asset Essentials do this for us? So we would call asset essentials. Say, what about this? What about this? And I think that's where, like, before we would get ourselves in trouble where we would have a system that was so customizable that we would customize our way out of it even being being, practically do practical to use. Or our technicians would be like, what does this mean? Like, this is why do I have to click thirteen times to find the filter size? So we actually just abandoned some of that strategy recommended by our consultant and used what asset essentials already had canned for us, and we're in a way better situation because there was kind of some nonnegotiables that asset essentials has. Like, nope. You can't change that. Nope. That doesn't get changed. We would still ask, but it required us to make some changes. But at the end of the day, it's been for the good. We still get together twice a month to talk about strategies with asset essentials with that onboarding team, and we're still making tweaks here and there based on feedback from our team and from our clients. So, I'm happy to share the war stories of how we got to that point. But I think that's important to note with asset essentials is that, of course, there are CMMS systems that will promise any customizable feature you want it to have happen. What I've appreciated of being a really simple farm boy from Iowa is the fact that you can't. Like, you just you just make the tweaks and changes and communicate those of how it's gonna work with your organization. That's just for Kirkwood. For Kirkwood, that has been a really good, really good thing for us because we just wanna keep it simple. That's really what we wanna do. So Yeah. I I think that's a great testament to additional flexibility that Asset Essentials provides, but not to the point where you're creating one lane that or multiple lanes that confuse. It's it's staying within what you guys need. So that's great to hear. Well, we've talked a lot a lot about a lot, Troy. And a lot of what you've gone through, I know, is extremely pertinent to what a lot of clients are probably thinking, and I wanna get to q and a. But before we do, I wanna talk about how much we've accomplished in the last eighteen years at Kirkwood. If I, like, flash forward eighteen years from now, me and you are still here. We're doing another webinar or something like that. What excites you about what we could talk about over the next eighteen years at Kirkwood and how maybe Brightly can partner? I know you've mentioned asset investment planning. Is that in line, or what else do you have? Yeah. So asset events, that is top of top of the mind. We have three point we get three and a half million dollars each year from our plant levy, which is a tax levy here. We have four deferred maintenance and facilities used. I would love and Colby, who's on the call, will laugh at me. I'd love to work a year ahead instead of in the fiscal year on that type of planning. So I'm I'm really gonna leverage our asset work today with Asset Essentials to help us get that big mind. Our technicians and our work order our work order, providers, we do not use tablets. We don't, you know, use iPads. Most everyone's got a got a laptop, but we have not been very mobile responsive. That is something definitely in the future that we wanna pursue. We're also looking at, some other maybe specialized reporting functions that we may ask Brightly to help us with or even some of you on the call. Like, what are some of my our peers using Yeah. For reporting out. And then the other thing is we just got finished with doing facilities assets. So now Mhmm. Our hotel and our other operations are saying, hey. What about our equipment? What about our ice machines, our stoves, our our, mixing mixers? So that there is a a need for some college wide assets that we likely might work with you, Nate, to kinda understand what's the best direction for us to go because we don't want them to commingle with our facilities assets. Even though our team will work on ice machines and sump pumps and all those other types of assets as well. So that's what excites me. That's what that's kind of the next steps. Surprise guys on the call. That's where we're gonna go, with Yeah. With kind of our next, future with the assets. So Yeah. I I think that's also in line so many especially in education, it feels like, there are so many overlaps because of the industry you serve that in operations, food service or, I I would call it food service or culinary, often align under that operations umbrella, but they're usually side by side even though the teams that serve them are usually the same. So I think that's also another way that growth will probably see it, especially if we talk about asset, life cycle management. Well, that's awesome, Troy. I think that that's very exciting. I think it's also where the industry is headed. So, thank you for sharing. And I think we're gonna head over to some Q and A, if you're ready for that. I think we've got about two or three for sure that we'd like to see. Remember, everybody on the call, anything that you have to ask, throw it out there. We'll get it to Troy, and we'll do our best to answer before You ready, Troy? We've got one lined up from, Lee Ledington. Does Kirkwood utilize parts inventory in Asset Essentials? We do. A hundred percent. Just to just high level, our parts and inventory manager, Scott, attaches the parts required for PMs in each of the, each of the PM descriptions. So those are listed. They also there's a stock or the inventory module that the inventory piece of asset essentials we are using. Yes. We are using it to its full capacity. Awesome. Awesome. We've got the next one followed up by, do you have a required FCA schedule? You mentioned doing data gathering, gathering assets. Is that being done through an FCA, or do you have requirements, and how often are you refreshing that? We we don't. We did we did one outside of, outside of the brightly, you know, platform before. That's kind of a a guidepost for us that was done in twenty seventeen. But now that we actually have way more assets in our system, we we now need to develop that strategy. So that's that's kind of the next steps. Right now, I'll be honest, we are working off of equipment replacement and deferred maintenance based upon, cost cost of that asset as well as just things that just haven't ever worked. So we're we're still in kind of the firefighting mode on asset replacement, And that's that's the thing I'm really looking forward to is kinda building out this replacement program for several years out. Yeah. Yeah. I think that goes right in line. As you mentioned, it's still kinda blocking and tackling in that way for now. But, ideally, like you mentioned, trying to work at least a year out and and start there and then kind of forecast maybe five. Makes a lot of sense. Which rolls right into the next question, honestly. But how have you been able to use AE to justify that's been a huge part for us to be able to Like, that's that's been a that's been a huge part for us to be able to justify. We, are doing just over thirteen thousand work orders a year. This is PM and reactive work orders. We've also transitioned asset essentials to do a lot of compliance work order work request. So this is the fire extinguisher checks, the ladder checks, the, emergency light checks, the fire doors, all of those things, which has been a a huge change for us with asset essentials as well. But to get back to the question, a lot of it's been labor, and and a lot of it's been funding priorities for different departments. And it's not a competition within the fund. It's because maintenance has a bulk of this work in asset essentials. But what I've done is run some of the more frequent equipment asset related work work orders that have come in and focused in on certain pockets or buildings, lighting as an example. There's Okay. Lighting platforms we've used, like, in construction of two thousand and eight, and we get around. We just had a maintenance meeting before this call. Like, okay. Why do we keep losing all these lighting things in Cedar Hall? What is the replacement plan? How much are we spending currently on ballast and bulbs? What is the LED retrofit cost? What is our labor cost with doing that? When can we get this done in in, you know, in the timeline? So that's been just, more of a smaller scale justification more than taking it forward for for, major budget planning or, deferred maintenance planning. I think that makes perfect sense. I think it's a great example that's also in discussion with a lot of the clients that I speak to today. So I think it's a great one. Well, I think that, Troy, that wraps up our q and a. If anybody has any other questions, feel free to put them in the chat. As we mentioned at the beginning, anything we didn't get to or that you submit after, we'll be sure to address in a follow-up. But I'll be the first to thank you again, Troy. I am so excited to share your experience and all that we've done together as partners. Thank you, for your time and your Any last words that you'd like to share with the team or, anything that you'd like to put out there before we sign off today? Yeah. Just, thank you, Nate. It's been a great partnership. Obviously, if anyone has any questions, happy to provide my information. We're always willing to do a Zoom or an email exchange or a call with what you're going against. I love learning things. My me and my team love learning things from you also. So whether you're a high school, a middle school, or a college, university, whatever it is, we can all learn things from each other. So I am, always up for learning with this system and platform. So I'm happy I could just share some of our some of our successes with where we're at today. Absolutely. Request follow-up for Troy's information. Let us know, and we can build that community. Continue to grow it. Brightly as a community is an excellent one to learn from each other. So thank you very much, Troy, and thank you all for joining us today. I Take care.