Summertime Tips and Tricks for Facilities Professionals

Shruti, are you here? I'll get started if you're not. Hello, everyone. Good afternoon. There you are. Good afternoon. Yes. Thank you for joining. We just had this little technical glitch, but thank you for staying with me here. Thanks for joining the webinar today. Just a couple of quick housekeeping items before we get started. So as a start, you are muted during the session. Please use your, q and a feature on this platform to ask questions. Katie will get to them at the end. This session is being recorded, and the recording recording will be sent to you, by email. Please also feel free to kick click through some of the downloadable content that is available to you on the right hand side of your screen. Additionally, we promised everyone, that you will receive a an egift card for a summer treat for attending this webinar. So as promised, thank you for attending, and we will send that to you, in your email, by the end of this week. That's it. Again, apologies for the glitch. Katie, the floor is yours. Let's get started. Thank you. Hello, everyone. So I'll just jump right into it because we're doing a quick webinar today, and I'm sure you all have a lot to do. I'm Katie Gormaho. I'm the senior industry marketing manager at Brightly, specifically in education because I used to be one of you. I was the director of operations at the Windward School in New York and director of sustainability scheduling and operations at Campbell Hall School in California and in the Los Angeles area. So let's talk about summer. When do we get a vacation? As facilities leaders, I I was joking with my colleagues the other day when they were asking how we felt, but everyone is happily running out of the school building for the summer. They're leaving a huge mess behind and the facility staff has to come back to work on Monday, and that always hurts a little bit. Happy summer, everyone yells, and we go to work. So the best way for you you and your team to be able to take vacations and find a week off here and there is to plan ahead. Now we're already in June, so I'm sure most of you have already started a lot of this planning ahead. But I'm gonna run through a couple reminders of things to try to get done this summer. And, hopefully, if you missed anything, you can add it to your list. So one of the things I like to do this is called a Gantt chart. You can definitely make them in your own way. This is just a sample of what one might look like. But I always like to have one to give the staff a timeline of when certain projects need to happen based upon the months and when they need to get done and when we have a deadline for certain areas of campus. So you can do one in Excel. This one's obviously in PowerPoint. I used to use Smartsheet a lot, but I do find them very helpful as a visual aspect for your staff to see when certain projects need to get done. So when you're starting, the first thing you probably already did is get your budget online, get it approved, get your contractors lined up. And then the more challenging part I usually found was planning around summer school or camps or any other events that are happening on campus in the summer. You think you have the whole campus to yourself, but you never do. It's always part of it. So one of the more challenging needs is when you need to coordinate your work with minimal disruption for summer camps and find what you need to make priority. Usually, you can think outside the box to schedule them in different areas if needed so that you can get to the spaces that you need to get work done. So when you get into your list of checking things off, we have a lot of preventative maintenance that we should be doing. Summer is a great time to do it. If you can get your equipment on a schedule to do it in the summer, if it's not already, talk to your vendor to try to do that if you're using one or if you're doing it in house. But I'm not gonna run through this whole list. You will get a link to it at the end or you've already seen it. I have a list on my blog that has this all in detail. But, basically, you've got main categories you wanna make sure you do preventative maintenance on. You got your HVAC, your plumbing, and your electrical. Now is a good time to check it all, clean it all, replace filters, and do all the things that will make sure you're in proper running order for the school year and hopefully prevent any breakdowns when possible. The other one that I find is the best to do in the summer if you can align properly with your fire department or whoever needs to do inspections are all your health and safety inspections, testing, and replacing smoke detector batteries and c o two alarms, checking all the fire extinguishers, dealing with any safety lighting, ceiling tiles, floors that need work. And then this might be a great time to do some energy efficiency upgrades. So not just sealing windows, doors, replacing things that are damaged, but also when it's summer, at least on the East Coast, the amount of light you have changes. So you can change all of your timers if you haven't done that yet to have lights on less since it stays sunny later. But anyone with kids knows, then it makes it harder to get kids to go to sleep. So it's nice, but also challenging. And then the next thing that I think almost everyone will be doing is the deep cleaning. Now that usually gets left till the end if that's possible. Because as we talked about in the beginning, you have your summer camps, you have kids on campus, you have people on campus, in offices. So timing of all of this is really important and having a detailed chart, like we talked about in the beginning, to schedule it would be useful. You could also use something like event manager to put in events that are cleaning events or h or, maintenance events. That's something that I used to do as well. So when you're deep cleaning, you obviously are gonna do your HVAC system, your restrooms, your food areas, classrooms. Offices are always challenging because they're the ones that people are in all summer, but hopefully you can figure it out. And then one I always struggled with was painting. I met a few facilities leaders that wanted to repaint everything all summer, and that's not really, in my opinion, a good use of everyone's time all summer. I would suggest a rotating schedule where you paint certain classrooms fully every other year, every couple years for those smaller spaces, especially offices. Offices do not need to be done every year. And the more communal dirty spaces, like, we know which ones those are, gyms, cafeterias, lobbies, that might be something you paint more frequently, but I would definitely do a schedule and not just paint everything every year. Another one that we always had to do was railings outside, and I guess that will lead to my next slide. And my mouse just disappeared. There we go. Exterior. So exterior is something that you could do while you're doing everything else or you could do it at the end. Depends on your schedule. So, we've had a couple of people join late. There's a Gantt chart at the beginning of this slide deck that I'd be happy to I think we'll be sharing this. But when you start with your exterior audit, part of it is obviously safety. Every playground should have an annual playground inspection if possible. It is legally required in some states. I'm not sure if it's required in all, but you wanna check all your safety, your fences, signage, everything outside, parking lots, parking lot lights, anything that could lead to flooding. I dealt with a lot of flooding in, Westchester County during hurricane Irene, if I believe correct, and that was rough. So cleaning out gutters, downspouts, foundation cracks, and then obviously your landscaping will be addressed over the summer. Hardscaping is checking sidewalks, safety. We talked about that. Pressure washing, everything that needs to be pressure washed is a huge summer project. And then finally, pest control, making sure you have your exterminators out, that you're vigilant with what needs to get done. It's also a really good time to do it because it's not great PR to have pest people on campus when there's a lot of people around. So once you get your list together and you've assigned it out to your staff, you have a chart, you have a calendar, you could put it in an Outlook calendar or a shared calendar. How do you ensure that you're tracking the work you're doing, and next year, you'll remember it, and you won't have to reinvent the wheel every year? If you have asset essentials, great news. If you have another CMMS, you can do it that way as well. A CMMS is a great place to start. I'm gonna assume a lot of you have them since you're here, and that would be where you wanna put all of your preventative maintenance, corrective maintenance scheduling, and then you can track it. And then literally just copy paste every summer. It'll make it easy when you have to budget for the following year. So that seems like the simple part, but then there's another level that you'll wanna take it up to should you wanna try to improve your planning for the following year, and that would be your capital planning. So when you have to create all of these projects, the first thing you're gonna be asked by your CFO or superintendent is how much is it gonna cost? And that's your capital plan. And you wanna plan that in advance. And sure January budgeting season is a great time to plan it, but if you can plan it in advance by year, that's even better. So capital planning software or asset investment planning software, AIP, which we sometimes refer to it at Brightly, takes your CMMS data and adds the financial details to it. So it can actually help take your preventative maintenance and your proactive budgeting and make it a long term budget, creating reports you can plan years in advance, which actually will help you be able to plan your construction projects, capital planning for future summers to accurately make sure you know if you're going to be building a new gymnasium, then you can't have basketball camp on campus next summer. So the farther out you can plan those things, we all know, the better, and it will help everyone. So that would be your next level that you wanna take it to. So we have this beautiful little graphic with a very flattering photo of me, but there's a detailed list of this whole project checklist on my blog, so you should have that link. And then another thing we talk about a lot here at is your facility's condition assessment, which is something that could also help with your summer planning because then you would be able to have all your data on your facilities ready to go, and you wouldn't have to worry about checking and inspecting as much because you'd already have it planned out accordingly. And there's couple other links here. So before I wrap this up and let you get ice cream, does anyone have any questions they'd like to ask? I went pretty fast. I thought it would go slower. Great. So I would like to ask all of you if you would like to shoot me an email or you wanna reach out to us, let us know where you are in your summer planning. Is there anything that you're using our software for, another software for, anything you have challenges with to make sure your summer planning is as efficient as possible. And if there's anything we can do to help at Brightly, we'd be happy to. Other than that, I think we went through all the main things on our list, and hopefully, you'll get a vacation. Plan accordingly so that you can. Thank you, everyone. Just wanted to remind everyone to ask a question. Please use the q and a feature on this platform. If you have other questions that you may not necessarily think of right now, that's fine too. Feel free to contact us, and Katie is very happy to answer any questions that you have. And, again, thank you, Katie, and thanks everyone for joining the webinar today. I have a quick question. Sorry, Trudy. I'm just if you're currently using our software and you want information about some of our newer products or training, please reach out and we'll connect you to customer success. Trudy, do you have an email going to them so they can reply to it? Yes. Absolutely. I will be sending out an email later this week with the link to the egift card for a summer treat as well so you could potentially respond to that email if you have further questions. We'll connect you to who you need to get to. Thank you very much for joining our quick fifteen minute webinar. Katie, thanks again. Everyone, have a great day. Thank you. Take a vacation.