Translating the Data: Ensuring Your Capital Planning Funds Are Cost Effective

Hello, everyone. My name is Steven Blackburn from district administration, and welcome to our Ed Talk here today, which is entitled translating the data, ensuring your capital planning funds are cost effective. And all of this is brought to you by the general, support of our sponsor with us here today, Rightly, a Siemens company. Now just for some quick housekeeping items, and we'll get right to the main events. At the end of our main presentation today, there will be a live q and a with our panelists. So you can submit your questions. You can do that from now until the very end via the red ask question box. It's at the very bottom of your screen, the red box with the question mark and the chat bubbles. You can also safely download some resources that are that are related to today's event, and you can do that via the blue box with the paper clip. And, again, that's near the bottom of your screen as well. Additionally, at the end of the presentation, so after the live q and a, a post event survey will launch on your screen automatically. So one of the things we do is just ask you to please stay on to the very end. But if you need to jump off early, because we know we you'll all have, very demanding jobs, you can, start taking the post event survey, before then by clicking on that pink box there. And lastly, are you be pleased to know that everyone who is here today and those registered, all of you will receive an email from us at d a, with a link to the slides as well as the on demand video. So look out for that in your inboxes. And now it is my pleasure to introduce our main speaker. And we have Katie, Gramajo, who is a senior industry marketing manager for education at Brightly Software. Katie, it's great to have you with us today. You may now begin. Thanks, Steven. So thank you to all of you for attending in person. We were joking ahead of time that everyone just clicks and watches later. So I appreciate those of you that are here with us today, and I'd love any questions as we're going along, and we'll try to answer them at the end. But if anything's important immediately, I'll also try to answer it as we go through. So let me just introduce myself quickly. I know Steven mentioned I work for Brightly Software right now in our education marketing. But prior to that, I was you. I was the director of operations at the Windward School, which is in New York City and White Plains, and I was director of operations sustainability scheduling. You know, schools have strange titles, at the Campbell Hall School in Los Angeles. So I was you, and now I'm here to helpfully guide you in ways that might help your facilities capital planning. So we start with a question that is often confusing when we talk about asset management. Brightly always says asset management, but what does that mean? Most school business officers, if this is you or one of your colleagues, may not understand what that means in terms of school facilities. It's imperative to understand that effective asset management goes beyond just an inventory tracking or real estate maintenance, and it's actively managing and planning all those building systems. So small scale assets are not what we're talking about, which means laptops with little QR codes so you know if a student broke their laptop. Laptop. It's not what I'm talking about. If we're talking about your full building portfolio, your financial assets in terms of a large scale real estate asset, not what I'm talking about. What we're talking about is the middle ground facilities assets that are components within your buildings that would either take your building offline if they were to go down or are large expenses to replace. So those are HVAC systems, roofing, electrical, plumbing, those sort of things. And those are the biggest headaches for facilities directors. So what we try to do is implement a comprehensive facilities asset management program to lead to your long term savings and create better risk management. One of the things that schools obviously deal with is getting your budget passed, and the financial transparency is the key to getting your budget passed, whether it's by a board of ed, a board of trustees, or, even just the head of school if it's a private school, something like that. But the business leaders will come to the facilities leaders, and they will ask for transparent data driven financial reports that will actually show your budget based on real results in order to build trust with that board of education that needs to approve your budget. So as a facilities director, you have to be able to provide that detailed information behind what you're requesting so that it will get approved and so that you can actually prove that this is what needs to be done now with the financial decisions to back it up. Schools will always need to align their financial strategy with the mission of the school, which is obviously education for the students, student achievement. And so facilities upgrades sometimes get pushed aside if they're not deemed as necessary in in trying to focus on more student focused budgetary items, which could be a staff. It could be something else, a program. But facilities upgrades affect student achievement directly. So in order for you as a facilities director to get that point across, it requires collaborative planning and strategic sessions with your board of ed, communicating with them what you need and using fact based data, including even third party assessments like an FCA, which we'll get to, to provide justification for your budget. So we have a poll. I'll let Steven explain if you have any trouble with the poll, but it's pretty self explanatory. What's the biggest challenge in your organization when it comes to your data for facilities management? Take a second to answer our poll if you have a second. Perfect. Yes. Thanks, Katie. Yeah. So if to participate in the poll, you just click directly where the slides were a moment ago. So just click directly on the slide there. And if you're having problems interacting with it, you can always put your answers in the chat, or you can send it to us in private via the ask question box there. So I know, yeah, we've had a few responses. We're at ten percent attendees, so we'd like like to get a little bit more. So Look. We have chat as fast as you can, and we'll we'll move on. Alright. We got some more. We got some more answers. Any I'll give you one more second, then I'm moving on. Alright. We're getting there. Great. So what's the biggest challenge using data? Lack of clear data analysis tools seems to be a big one. Backlog of aging infrastructure. That's another big one, which is how can I even bother with data analysis when I'm trying to catch up on my deferred maintenance on my aging infrastructure? So that is a common thread we hear. When we get our budgets fast, we need to build a compelling case with data. So to develop that narrative, you need to align your facilities projects with your organizational goals and show how your strategic upgrades solve multiple interconnected challenges and will deliver a measurable impact. So what that means is if you need to get something done for your team, how can you explain that it will combine multiple problems into one solution which will help with the capital project approval? A good example is a public school district that I know really needed a large printing center. So they had they did all their printing in house, and they had a department that was working on it, but they needed a new building for this department to be a centralized printing center. The way they got that bond passed was creating a building that was not just for printing, but was also a logistics and mail carrying center, which took all the pickup and drop off of packages away from school buildings, which in turn helped with bus lines and parent pickup lines. And those things that are visible to the community helped get something passed that wasn't necessarily as visible, which is a printing center. So I always suggest you think about the whole picture when you're doing that. If you're in a public school and you're doing a bond referendum, they need to be voted on most of the time by your community. And in order to do that, you need a comprehensive plan with data to communicate to those people. And we don't know what your community knows. We don't know where they're coming from. And the more information you can give, we'll give you more strategic responses from those people. So when you wanna start that, most business officers want to trust the facilities director. They wanna trust that you're gonna provide them with the information they need. If you're the finance leader, you're looking to get that information so that you can present it to the board and request the funds. So the place you really need to start is having your up to dated FCA within your CMMS system, which will provide real time accurate data to pull from. But if you're going for a larger capital plan or a bond request, it often even requires facility assessments. So things that they will consider are your building age, your capacity. Key, your enrollment trends. Are we losing students? Are we adding students? The future needs for HVAC, ADA compliance, planning for your enrollment change, like I just said, as it either declines or grows, and potentially partnering with your municipality engineers to get those growth predictions is a giant condo complex coming in, and you're gonna have a bunch of new students. Something like that can help you plan large scale facilities needs and aligning that with your strategic goals. So something that we at Bright started thinking about was this foresight framework. I'm not sure if any of you have heard of this before. Feel free to chime in if you have, but I found it a very insightful way to think about how to provide a comprehensive view of making a decision. When you're trying to make a decision when it comes to prioritizing facilities needs, it's best to start with the most obvious thing, which is hindsight, reflecting and learning from the past. So in facilities, that would be analyzing historical facilities use, maintenance records, past renovation projects, and educational performance data to analyze how the infrastructure impacts learning challenges. So you had you had an HVAC unit that that goes off every time. You've had to close that section of the building because it's freezing, and those students have been displaced. That's a very clear historical problem that you can note. The next thing would be foresight. So how do you predict and prepare what's coming next? We talked about that a little bit in my last slide, which is demographic shifts and enrollment trends, but also what are the technological advancements coming up? What are the future educational programs? Are they starting a whole stem robotics team and you need a robotics lab? That would include that you need to change your infrastructure to fit that if you don't have something like that. Or a theater for a theater group as someone who loves musical theater. That's one that's near and dear to my heart. So you need to be able to predict what the school is going to be doing, and that can be done in a multitude of ways, including conversations with administration. Then you need to take the data that you have and be able to interpret that data with insight, and that will help you respond accordingly. So you're gonna leverage your data from your facilities assessments and your community surveys and decide what you're going to do next. Something that we will be talking about soon is you might include an asset investment planning solution that would help you with your insights on your facilities information. And then finally, you've made your decision. You'll be able to have oversight, monitor the results, provide feedback, and reassess if you made the right decision. So we know the current state of educational facilities. It's not great. I won't waste too much time. We already saw that in our poll, but deferred maintenance is at a critical backlog. Maintenance teams are strapped. They are working hard, and they are struggling to keep up. And if the facilities aren't up to snuff, then the enrollment declines. So it's a larger problem for everyone involved in school facilities. You have tighter budgets, you have aging infrastructure, and you have to figure out where to spend the money. So how do we do that? Well, we have to create our budget, and we have two kinds of budgets that all of you know. But the main budget that the facilities plan is usually focused on is our OPEX budget, our operational budget. The day to day costs of running the school, your utilities, your overhead, your maintenance, your salaries, those things that are always budgeted for every year. Hopefully, you get the same amount. The harder thing to budget for is that capital budgeting, which is evaluating which high cost long term project expenditures are worth pursuing. So for a facility, that would be new building construction, critical health and safety improvements, fixed assets like buildings, equipment, land, or rebuilding existing equipment. So when your superintendent or your CFO comes to you and says, what is your capital budget? How do you figure that out? That is usually the hardest part in a facilities director's budgeting process is knowing that long term planning. While you're also juggling day to day tasks and tickets and dealing with all the requests for daily maintenance, it makes it that much harder. So that's exacerbated by the fact that you have aging infrastructure. So you have to balance your current needs with trying to plan long term objectives. So how do we optimize that budget? Short term costs, straightforward. But forecasting your capital budget is often based on assumption. It's often based on my vendor said that this is gonna break in the next five years. This has been breaking a lot, so I'm pretty sure this is next. And we don't want assumption. We want concrete data so that your word is trusted. Data is knowledge. That's exactly what I was just saying. So who made this slide deck? Anyway, so how do we address the concerns we discussed? It's data. Using those concrete data. That concrete data will remove the emotional impact of facilities prioritizing. It'll let you justify your request, defend your decisions on what needs attention first, and reduce the chance of complaints about what your priorities are. Condition data is your best friend here. It gives you crucial insights for short term and long term planning, and it'll give you the exact state of your assets so you can make smarter budgeting decisions. Strategic asset management is a term that's thrown around a lot in our world, but what it means is that you're thinking ahead for maintenance and operations. And you are able to use asset life cycle modeling, which will allow you to figure out how long your assets are going to work, are going to last essentially, will help you in your decisions about what your future service level is and when replacements are. In an ideal world, reactive maintenance is only ten to fifteen percent of what you're doing on a day to day basis. But realistically, in most schools, it's probably most of it. So trying to make that move from prevent from reactive maintenance to preventive maintenance to capital projects is what we're gonna talk about. And how do we do that with data? It's time for another poll. If you have two seconds to answer this poll, what kind of data analysis tools does your organization currently use for facilities management? Do you have a custom built solution or report? Do you use a spreadsheet, an Excel spreadsheet? Do you use software that you already have, or do you have no data whatsoever? Please take a minute to quickly answer this poll by just clicking in that slide. And I'll just jump in again. Just yeah. It's right where the slides were. Just click directly on there. And if you're having any issues, again, just put your answers in the attendee chat. Or if you wanna send them in private, you can send it to us via the ask question box. So we have about thirty two percent of you. I could say a little bit more. But We're getting there. Wake up and click a button really fast. Great. We're getting there. Now we have fifty percent. Okay. So I'll keep going because I don't wanna waste anyone's time. But it seems like we have a lot of custom built solutions and or reports, and we have a couple of the other options, which is software reports, manual spreadsheets, data analysis, tools. We don't have anything. So where do we start? Sounds super overwhelming. It's a lot of words, like asset management and data, but we don't even know where to begin. If you're one of those people that hasn't even started, don't panic. It's not it's not as hard as it sounds. So the first thing we do is we have this beautiful pyramid that gives you some guiding steps for where you are, which is short term reactive maintenance to where you wanna go, which is predictive future focused maintenance and facilities planning. So what I would wanna do is begin with your asset information and your facilities condition assessment. That's going to start where you are and help you move from reactive mode. Most of you probably have a facilities condition assessment and probably have an official one that you're either required to do or do on your own every five or so years. An FCA will help your school administrators make decisions about prioritizing and budgeting, But the problem is an FCA is immediately obsolete because it is a it is a document that is non changing. So you have an engineering firm come and charge you a lot of money to do a very detailed assessment, which includes your mechanical systems, your electrical systems, plumbing, fire, all of the things that you could possibly need. And they'll include your cost estimates, and they'll include what needs to be repaired and their predictions for your lifespan. But then you have it, and what do you need to do? Well, there's static data, and as soon as you start changing things, as soon as you start updating things, they're out of date. Some states require them. So even if you don't wanna do them, you still have to. But what do you do with that data be so that it is no longer out of date? If you already have a recent FCA, that's a good place to start, but it probably needs updating. And there is a possibility that you could do it on your own if you're not required to have an engineering firm do one. So the pros are you have a specialized you have specialized knowledge from an engineering firm that makes sure you have all the information you need on your status quo. If you're new to a role, if you're new to a school, it'll get you the basics. The cons are, like I said, it's very expensive. It's very time consuming, and the data is so depreciative. As soon as you take it off the lot, you've lost a lot of it because you're not necessarily constantly updating it unless you have an admin assistant or someone that's gonna be updating every time you do something to what you've done since it started. So the next step to take that data and move it beyond that is tactical asset management. You have your asset information, and now what are you gonna do with it? We're gonna optimize our daily operations. So improving our response to work orders, improving our customer service, reducing the time for resolution of these issues as they come up, and actually scheduling preventive maintenance effectively. One of the things that we talk about at Brightly is this APA model, which is just a fancy way of saying how do you assess the problem and move from there to strategically maintain facilities and be forward thinking. So having a solid plan is crucial, and the best way to do that is assess, understand your building components. That's what we just did in step one. Prioritize what needs to be done urgently, so safety hazards, that sort of thing. Plan, develop your strategy for what's gonna be critical on your list. Execute, which is the obvious one. Do what needs to get done and ensure everyone has what they need to do that task. And then the hardest one is maintain. So keep your FCA up to date. Keep your capital plan up to date based on all of these things you're doing. A CMMS is the best way to start with your FCA data and keep it up to date based on what you're doing and adding your PM plan so that you can be as proactive as possible. I'm sure all of you know what a CMMS is, but for those who are not a hundred percent sure, it's just a computerized maintenance management system, which will schedule and track maintenance work orders. It'll make these processes actually trackable and easier to respond to, but also more cost effective because you'll be able to schedule your routine maintenance, manage what you've been doing, and actually track your assets so you know what needs repairs, what has been failing the most, and you have data, keyword, to back up what has been a problem for you. When you implement a CMMS, it'll really reduce your costs and decrease your downtime. So we've streamlined our day to day maintenance. We've backed up our request with solid data. Now what do we do for those larger assets like construction, renovations, a full new HVAC? The the juice everyone wants to hear about, strategic asset management. That is the top of our pyramid. It's our long term proactive planning that optimizes both facilities and budgets, our capital plan, which involves strategically planning and documenting all of our investments, exploring our what if scenarios. So that means, obviously, possible outcomes and having a contingency plan for if it doesn't work the way you had thought it would. Having prediction modeling. So using advanced models to actually forecast your future needs and what the performance of those assets are are key. Project management, overseeing your projects and making sure they get done and aligned with strategic goals. And if you have a sustainability goal, a net zero goal, in integrating those sustainability goals into everything you do. So that leads me to asset investment planning. You have a CMMS, you wanna level up. What's next? You need asset investment planning. It is a software that transforms your facility management by enabling the investment prior to prioritization and transparent budgeting. Essentially, it takes your facilities notes and it adds that finance level to them. It adds everything you need for your budgeting piece. It will automate your comprehensive asset tracking. It has predictive analytics that are able to tell you your asset health, that are able to tell you the life cycle that they predict your asset will live in based upon the, asset based upon your PMs and all of the work that you've done. And it also has a way to make sure that you have transparent budget based upon those things. So I'll talk a little bit about how it works, but basically, it takes predictive analysis and gives you those insights in terms of the finances, not just the facilities so that you can plan with your facilities so that you can plan with your limited financial resources, and you have the data to back up what you are asking for. So how does it work? Just super basic. I'm not gonna give you a software demo or anything like that. There are multiple options for you out there, but it's a centralized asset information system where you take your condition data and everything from your condition data to the age of your existing assets are in a centralized asset directory, which keeps track of your work orders and the repairs as they're being done. It pulls this information from a CMMS, any CMMS. Doesn't have to be ours, but don't I didn't say that. And by you take your CMMS data and it links your asset inventory to all your preventative work and and work order maintenance activities. So as your team's doing things, it's all being updated in the system. Then unlike a CMMS, it actually provides insights into your assets. So that's the leveling up part that I mentioned earlier. It has industry benchmarks that it's checking against. It has future cost projections. And even in the cost projections, it can do local cost projections and take into account where you are and how much things cost where you are. It has end of life estimates and risk scores so that you can say a certain level of risk scores. We all know certain components are more detrimental should they break than others. Air conditioning, if you live in Arizona, it's a nonnegotiable. So you would have a different risk score than air conditioning in Connecticut. Then the other thing it does is allows you to support your budget requests by using those insights to give you data driven budget requests. It helps you have a capital plan up to thirty years, thirty years in the future. Hopefully, we're all still here and hopefully not working, but we're here. And it will let you do a thirty year capital plan based upon the risk assessment, the estimated end of life, and the future cost projections to support your annual budget request. So this not only helps you give your information to your finance leader, but it helps your finance leader give this information to whoever is voting on their budgeting, on their bond referendums, on their capital requests. So with that data, AIP will let facilities and finance leaders present their needs and hopefully increase your needs your chance of getting approval on your budget. Strategically managing your assets is a journey, and you could start at the beginning and not it's not impossible. It just takes one step at a time. And when you're working really hard to answer every ticket every day with limited staff and limited time, all you can do is start with the beginning. Establish your base information, set up your asset data, move on to implementing a CMMS. If you have mobile capabilities, that would be even better because that's functionality for your team on the ground. Then you're gonna shift away from reactive maintenance to proactive preventive maintenance. And then when you have that under your belt, then you can move to predictive maintenance and asset monitoring where you can actually have advanced planning. And that leads to the last piece of your asset investment planning, which is strategically planning and budgeting for those capital expenditures. So the key takeaway is start with something simple and grow as you get the rest under control because there's only so much you can do at once. Realistically, there's five strategic objectives for smart campuses that really help with your limited budget. You can improve your comp you can improve your experience on campus for everyone. Facilities matter to campuses. They matter to students. They matter matter to the community. But on top of that, you can actually optimize your spend and make sure you're doing what you need to do. And you can help ensure that you're being sustainable if that's a goal for you or if it's just something that helps you save money. Either way, sustainability is here to stay and it's something we need to consider in facilities. And it'll ensure that you have resilient facilities in the future and hopefully they don't get shut down all the time. And finally, that will help with your learning. The students learn better when the facilities are working. It's as simple as that. So before we end, does anyone have any questions? I think you can put them in the chat or, Steven, if there's some other better way, but put them in the chat if you've got them. Yeah. Definitely. And then we have time for one question, but that's completely fine. And I wanna get I I wanna get to this one just because I love it when our audience asks about products. So, how can we get a demo? Oh, that's a great question. We will you will get a follow-up email, either today or tomorrow that'll have this slide deck, and it will come from me and all of this information will be in it. And if you just reply to the email, we will set you up. And this presentation is available after this. Alex, nice to see you here. It's available after this. You'll get it in the email. Perfect. Yes. And another question just came in. Will the slide deck be shared? Yes. That will be something that we at DA will be sharing. You'll also get the, on demand video from us tomorrow as well as the slide deck, so look out for that. So, alright, great. We are at the thirty minute mark, Katie. So I'll just say, to everyone who has submitted a question, if we didn't get to it, not a problem. We at DA will make sure that all of the questions that are submitted will be sent over, to Brightly Software. So and, actually, as I go through my closing slides in just a few minutes, if something comes to mind, feel free to put that in the in the q and a as well. And, actually, what I'm gonna do, right before I go through my slides, I am going to push out, the post event survey. So if you have no questions, please, start taking that survey because we'd love to hear from you. But first off, just another thank you to Katie for your time here today. And, of course, I just wanted to give another shout out to Brightly Software. Thanks, everyone. And you can email me or find me on LinkedIn and message me. If you have any personal, like, questions specifically about your school, I'm happy to answer them or direct you to someone that can. So feel free to shoot me a message. Oh, perfect. Thank thanks for that, Katie. So, yeah, thank you everyone for joining us here today. And like I said earlier on, we will be sending you the, presentation deck tomorrow as well as the on demand video. So with that, on behalf of, DA, this is Steven Blackburn. Thanks, everyone. And, again, thank you to Katie and Software. This is great. Thank you.