Transform Your Sales Process for Facilities with airSlate SignNow

How to create outlook signature

hello everyone and welcome to today's webinar future proofing facility management with digital transformation i'm jennifer goetz the editorial director of facility executive magazine and this webinar is presented by tma systems before we get started i'll cover a few housekeeping items our speakers are on video today and if you would like to view them along the top of your screen look for the bar in your window to pull down so we are visible to you next please note the control panel on your screen this is where you can submit questions via the question box at any time there will be a q a portion after this presentation so please type your questions there to send them to us if at any time you experience a technical difficulty please send a message to us via the questions section and someone on our team will answer you privately also please note the orange arrow on the left side of your control panel clicking on that arrow will either expand or collapse the control panel so please be sure the panel is expanded so you can access the question box and if you are interested in continuing education credits please note that you'll receive a certificate of attendance in an email from facility executive after this webinar you can report to your association for the credit now i'll introduce your speakers john rimmer cfm is president of fm 360 llc and has over 25 years of facility management experience in a variety of capabilities and industries john and his team use their breadth of knowledge and diverse expertise to deliver comprehensive facility management consulting and related services to their clients including cmms implementation improve improvement and administration peter strasdas is the associate vice president for facilities management at western michigan university a department of nearly 400 employees that are responsible for planning engineering construction and operations for a campus of 150 buildings and 8 million gsf in his 43-year tenure at wmu he has also held positions as the construction administrator director of maintenance services and assistant professor of construction management he has served on the michigan app aboard for many years including six years as president he was actively involved with the international apa pass president served on their board for for several years and was president in 2015 to 2016. he was appointed by the governor to the michigan osha construction commission was a six-term mayor in the city of porteg and served as the president of the council of governments in kalamazoo county hello gentlemen and thank you for being with us here today john take it away great thank you very much jen i appreciate that and i appreciate everybody taking time out of their busy day to walk with us here uh as we uh look at some of the challenges that you know we as facility folks are dealing with today i know our focus is kind of around the supply chain and when you look at it we've got this the strained supply chain of the long lead times that we had of course even coming out of the great recession that during covet got worse and uh now it's almost impossible uh seemingly to to get the parts and inventory items that you need and then of course we're battling uh inflation so unfortunately these are all things that we don't have control over but we're going to try to figure out how we can work around those challenges uh in addition to the supply chain we're also wrestling with another key resource which is our people uh you're coming out of covid uh they're calling this the uh the great retirement uh basically with a number of our uh beloved baby boomers retiring and leaving the workforce uh and the sad part is is uh it's not over uh it's it's only gonna get ugly we still have about 25 of our workforce that is still uh up for retirement between now and 2030. so uh it's going to get the the pool is going to get shallower and shallower and i know with many of you having open job wrecks it's getting longer and longer to actually fill them so between not getting the the supplies that we need not having the people to turn the wrenches and take care of our facility services we are indeed having some significant challenges uh on top of that we have the uh good old uh backlog with our aiming infrastructure that we've been trying to dig out of and i think we've made some progress but still many facility organizations deal with equipment and systems that are at or beyond useful life which ultimately pushes us into reactive firefighting so with not having enough people uh not having enough material and then of course we have to do all these uh band-aid fixes if you will on our equipment that is beyond useful life uh it just it makes us you know a bit full-on corrective uh in this when we look at reactive firefighting the correct and maintenance side of it it's extremely inefficient when you have your technicians running around like chickens with their heads cut off and it also is very costly uh one of my jaundisms i like to use quite often is uh is it cheaper to change the oil in your car or to not to we all get that the executive levels understand that and yet when we look at how we operate our buildings unfortunately we run a lot more of the uh to not to we just kind of go with the around to it philosophy on our pm strategy for example we do them when we can get around to them so one of the big things that we have to do to help us overcome these challenges is uh you know again it's it paint a bleak picture of what we're wrestling with but when you start assessing and evaluating a number of the different facility organizations as i have over the years what we realize is that you know with all of that reactive maintenance it is very inefficient and while we have a strained labor pool strained resources we actually can use what we have far more efficiently and try to move the dial so that we get ahead of the curve and that really is one of the the key things that we need to do is find ways to migrate our facility management programs from being reactive firefighters to i'll say proactive but you know getting up there where we're doing at least our preventive maintenance and migrating beyond that so how do we get there first you've got to make sure you actually have your assets in a cmms like tma you've got to get your preventive maintenance scheduled and ideally you're using industry best practices and then you've got to prioritize your pms versus your corrective maintenance and that quite often is the challenge is that you usually run into the squeaky wheel gets the grease and what we need to do is make sure that we're prioritizing accurately our corrective maintenance and our service request and then juxtaposing those with the priority of our preventive maintenance which really should be driven by the criticality of the assets the systems and of course the services that they support uh the other part of that equation is quite often your facility organizations do not capture their corrective maintenance and that is absolutely critical i'm actually one that uh if i can get 90 of my technicians time against work orders that's the goal uh even if i have some administrative work orders to capture time before training and meetings against it but i need to be able to show where are we spending our resources and then do that analysis after the fact coming out of the cmms to find out where are we using our resources inefficiently or ineffectively and then allow us to make those appropriate changes uh with that you're tracking one of the the main kpis it's a very simple one to do it's just your pm to cm ratio the number of work orders that are scheduled or preventive versus the number of reactive or corrective work orders sadly still even in 2022 we have more than half of our facility organizations are running more than 50 percent reactive uh the to me i'm one that uh i try to be a little bit more gracious and set the pm to cm ratio at 80 20 so you're 80 scheduled 20 percent reactive unless you're in a critical environment uh such as data centers manufacturing health care then i'm going to push it more towards 90 10 just because of the criticality of those facilities but tracking that pm to cm ratio is pretty key so that way you can slowly start moving your organization out of the the firefighting mode and into something that's more manageable and more predictable and that really is what we're trying to accomplish here so for example uh if as we move from that 50 percent you know let's say 50 preventive 50 reactive and we start moving this where we're more on the plus side of that with respect to our scheduled maintenance now we can be a forecast what parts we need so we can associate parts with the actual pms inside the cmms and then forecast and order the material when we're reactive we're now scrambling running to the supply house or ordering through grainger or whomever to get the parts that we need uh it's you know and then of course we're gonna have to overnight it or try to expedite it which is gonna cost more money and then of course all that running around trying to find those parts that we need it's just a lot of waste of time and energy where we really should be you know getting those keeping our technicians out in the field turning the wrenches so ideally getting the parts associated with your pms and then forecasting and ordering material and then the with our strained labor resources the last thing i need for them to do is getting a whole lot of wind chill time or uh running from point a to point b i need to keep my technicians in the field turning wrenches they should be able to take advantage of the mobile platforms that are available these days for cmms systems is where they can view and request parts via the mobile so if they're troubleshooting let's say a package unit up on the roof they're able to diagnose what the issue is look up the parts associated with that asset why they're still up on the roof and you know check to see do we have those items in the warehouse if so request them uh if not then let's order that part and uh and get the you know our supply chain moving uh or have our you know warehouse order that part for us uh you can also even set up the system to where depending on your relationship with your supply uh your your vendor you can actually automatically order parts from them and initiate those and then if i'm on the warehouse or the storeroom side of it as we're receiving those items on a daily basis throughout the day let's receive the parts bag and tag them and then you notify the technician that that item has shown up so they can't actually complete the repair and do the exact same thing for their pms uh and this this to me uh i've been you know working with customers and back in the day was even at microsoft so what we would do is uh have you know our pm scheduled bag tag the parts so the technician would show up look in their bin grab the parts they need throw it in the van and they're ready to roll for the day so they can stay out there in the field and then the other part of it too is i'm a big proponent for having a runner so instead of having my technicians that are the higher pay rate going back and forth uh from you know that roof to fixing that package unit to going back to the warehouse to see if we have the part or not if not they got to go to the supply house uh to the vendor to try to get the part use a runner to do that uh their lower pay rate and keep your keep your technicians out there uh turn those wrenches that really is our end goal of what we're trying to accomplish and then lastly it's uh we've got to dig out of this deferred backlog so you know we're trying to get ahead of this curve uh and i can plan parts out as much as possible on my preventive maintenance and i can try to keep my technicians in the field turning wrenches but until i can you know dig out of this deferred maintenance backlog pit that we've put ourselves in over the years we're going to continue to force us into that downward spiral of reactive fire fighting so you've got to make sure that you're doing your capital replacement forecasting where you plan for a replacement essentially you do your facility condition assessments typically those are done by a third party about once every three to five years is the recommendation and then i incorporate the that fca data into the cmms or you they actually even have capital planning modules or software that can assist with that but making sure that we're staying on top of that information and and then also do your facility condition assessments in-house on an annual basis we're basically doing a gut check and you can set that up as an inspection where if you go and you see what items are due in the next say one to three years for replacement go and evaluate that and see are they aging faster or could you you know push them out a little bit more just because we know we're wrestling over that dollar but taking advantage of your cmms to help you actually stay on top of the capital replacement forecasting the other uh part of that too and this is really where that facility condition index which is another uh kpi that's heavily utilized in the industry uh is that your fci is that sum of deferred maintenance divided by the replacement value of the facility so basically it's once you do that facility condition assessment you're identifying and quantifying all of the assets and equipment that are beyond useful life and how much would it cost to actually bring them up to date and once you have that infor that that number that's what gives you the ratio of your fci and you want to basically trend and benchmark that even if it's internally so you can justify continued improvements in your facility and in your portfolio because what you want to do is try to get management to see that if they're not reinvesting if they're not providing the necessary capital to refresh the equipment and systems then they're going to see that fci degrade basically they'll see their facilities degrade and get worse what i like doing is you know we all know we've got that uh that ugly duckling of a building where we can say okay that's got a very high fci basically meaning that it's uh a ugly ratio of deferred maintenance and if we can say well if we do not get that four million dollars each year that we need to put back in our buildings uh if you only give us let's say 2.5 million to put back into our facilities what you're going to see is you know our buildings are slowly going to become just like that ugly duckling so we're going to have a whole lot of ugly ducklings and so use that comparative analysis to help management to understand the cost of saying no and of course you know with this uh to better utilize our resources is leveraging technology uh while again this seems like a a problem with our strained labor pool i actually see this as a great opportunity for us to take advantage of technology that we have had at our fingertips that we just haven't utilized uh building control systems is a great example where you know quite often we use our building control systems to help us identify you know what are the biggest fires that we need to go out and fight and really we should be using those yes to monitor you know when we exceed the operating limits but how about we start incorporating some statistical analysis uh or some trends that allow us to be flagged where we're not the ones that manually having to go do the the assessment but the system is thinking on our behalf identifying when we start straying away from optimum or if we start basically moving towards potential failure we just don't leverage our building control systems to that extent so we should take advantage of that there's other third-party entities that have their own little black boxes if you will that will extract your building control information and they run it through their own statistical analysis and failure analytics to help you predict failures and again try to get ahead of the curve so we're using the technology to work smarter not harder because there's plenty of hard work to do already maintenance is another great opportunity to incorporate technology uh i know your vibration analysis has been around you know for decades uh you know with our navy starting it's way back when but now it has advanced where you're able to have small simple devices that you can use even just to monitor a red yellow green or you can of course do your own analysis for vibration analysis we've got infrared thermography those cameras have come down where they're relatively inexpensive so we're starting to gather data that tells us what's going on with our equipment what's uh you know what is the condition of the equipment because unfortunately you prevented maintenance uh while again it's not proven maintenance is not a bad thing where in the sense that it's it's scheduled or runtime based so hey every three months or three thousand miles i've got to change oil on my car well do you have to does it need it i don't know it's been three months or it's been three thousand miles here we actually start using the data we're getting from our building control system or data that we're getting from our predictive maintenance tools to help us identify what really is going on with our equipment so we do the right maintenance at the right time because your preventive maintenance can be labor intensive often requires downtime uh and then you know sadly uh whenever i have done troubleshooting in the past first thing i always ask is who did what to it last uh because quite often preventive maintenance when we start putting our hands inside of equipment we can actually introduce failure modes as well so trying to migrate and evolve our maintenance programs will be pretty pretty critical as well to help us get the most out of the technicians and then the last is rounds and readings this is a simple one uh where we still i don't you know we've got folks that hey yeah we used our mobile technology to do work orders but they still grab that clipboard when they're doing their rounds and readings let's uh let's move away from the paper and try to get our rounds and readings put directly into the mobile device for our cmms and we can set up alarm limits we can basically create automatic follow-up work orders if we exceed alarm limits and so that way you know we're able to trend and track what is going on with our rounds and readings uh for our equipment and our new central plants etc and not uh i can't i can't trend and i can't query paper so again trying to take advantage of technology to help us be more efficient more effective with the resources that we do have with that i'm going to turn it over to pete again good afternoon everybody my name is pete strasdas associate vice president facilities at western mission university in kalamazoo michigan i want to thank everyone for attending today as well as um the opportunity to speak on something i'm very passionate about um and by the way i've been here for 43 years at western michigan university and i have one more week left so when john was talking about the great uh retirement i am one of them okay and um but with that said uh my topic today uh is kind of dovetailed as more of a a a case situation for what john talked about and while it is really focusing on preventive maintenance and our journey it's bigger and broader than that it really is that digital transformation that i'd like to share with uh the audience about what we went through over the past 30 some odd years as well as trying to future proof our campus with the facility management and also add more context um that my campus is about 8.2 million square feet we are cogen sista campus so i've got about 16 megawatts of power generation with about 400 team members all the way from architects through custodians okay so for the overview um i'll briefly talk about the history of our journey for uh preventative maintenance and our journey of dealing with capital improvements and um the likes of trying to manage our campus portfolio better a little philosophy of our preventive maintenance programs how we initiated it and even some best practices in that space a little on the history first that since i go way back when i started here in the 80s that we did create a decentralized shop because we wanted that advantage of frequent touch points with customers so instead of having central craft shops of 100 skill trades we had electrical shop we've had a plumbing shop control shop and the like that and it was really good because they were familiarized themselves with that small cluster of buildings and then 10 years into that we knew that we needed to start a dedicated pm shop and so that was a central shop with a mix of zone shops that had multiple crafts and with the recession that hit us and with our downsizing of facilities that perhaps a lot of people have been experiencing and labor force challenges we are back to single craft shops and uh great that they get to share the knowledge all the plumbers the same shop all electricians in the same shop and uh but we have maintained a dedicated shop for preventer maintenance and that's been some of our uh critical things on how we move forward some philosophical things about uh whether it's service calls or do it now versus preventative maintenance i put these in three buckets and so when we started that preventive maintenance shop and that transition of moving to do the right thing a best practice that we had to think differently with our management staff we had to think differently with our trades so we tried to sensitize the group about the philosophical differences and why we're moving towards a focused preventive maintenance program and i would certainly coverage everyone that if you're moving in that direction you have to stage it for both management and the trades as far as tools equipment and processes we were heading in the 90s to transitioning from a dos based if you're old enough from a dos-based cmms system to a windows-based system and of course remember y2k that put us on steroids to move quickly in that direction in the late 90s and so with that we had electronic tools we gave the technicians the right tools and the processes we built processes for preventer maintenance and perhaps the last circle is the most important and that is we tried to maintain that stewardship role which were responsible to maintain the facilities the best we can and we talked a lot about that stewardship role and how we needed to change the attitude of from going from do it now type work orders to more advanced scheduled maintenance preventative maintenance and that cultural piece was terribly important and we did a lot of work on the front end we did a lot of work obviously in the transition period and it's still our focus of focusing on these three things about our stewardship role so back in the day when we initialized that centralized pm program these are some of the key steps we went through i suspect these are consistent for others on this call that have been on that journey and uh maybe you're in the middle of the journey or maybe gonna be starting that journey but certainly uh these seven steps in my mind were critical to us and how we transition i'll talk about these steps in more detail but we did do the inventory we did do tagging we created those procedures or frequency of frequencies um we the fifth one fourth one here on maintenance shops and staffing it is a really challenge and i'll share with you more detail when i get to that one using our tablets were terribly important even today saving a lot of time i'll talk about that and of course if you don't measure things and check things the checks and balances are big with our management team with our trades things to go astray we'll talk about that and then constant review it's a little more context about our buildings we have over 150 buildings but really 120 major buildings with over 8 million square feet and more context of what is in our cmms system over 16 000 pieces of maintainable equipment and most all of them obviously have some sort of scheduled maintenance attached to them and you can certainly see the number of pm work orders issued last year and i'll show you a slide later on that we're up to roughly uh 13 000 scheduled pm work orders and it's pretty robust and growing more sophisticated every year a little more context we have 23 chillers across campus over 200 air handlers and we are a campus with a central steam district so lots of steam traps that we use a lot of our tagging for our steam traps and all of our equipment is tagged with qr codes and i'll talk a little bit more about our steam traps whether involved in the ground or high up in a ceiling somewhere perhaps in one of our plants that we use rfdi tags in that particular instance so in that tagging as you can see we are using tma as our cms system but we did start back in the day with using barcodes because i don't think qr codes we've been around in the late 1990s but we did do barcodes we have since transitioning transition everything from barcodes to qr codes um and so all those pieces of equipment have a qr code on on the piece of equipment uh as i mentioned earlier are steam traps uh that are very remote difficult to get to rfdi is not terribly expensive but very powerful when you don't have direct access to see the tag and something i'd like to talk about through maybe the q a period is using building information modeling with our new buildings because we do download all of the data and the assets from our bim models for our new capital projects direct into our cmms and that has saved us a tremendous amount of time in populating our pm uh asset system creating our task frequencies and procedures um there is a balance and we uh aired early on of looking at manufacturers manuals i think on the front end and uh when we first launched this we thought we knew better as management and uh we got smarter where we got the trades engaged to find that balance between what the manufacturers owen and manuel said we supposed to be doing and using the knowledge of of course our management engineering staff but the critical element is getting that input and buy-in from the skilled trades and trying to determine the frequency as well as trying to determine what all specific tasks that they need to do and by and large they were following o manuals but yet there are certain applications and certain pieces of equipment as you all know that there's some give and take between what a manufacturer says and what a seasoned technician really knows what to do and that was critical of how we created those staffing the pm program sounds wonderful you just simply pull a trigger and you transition 20 people from do it now to pm no it's not that easy so we transition over a number of years and we got some champions on the front end and there's always champions of whatever you start we start our cmms system we have a handful of people that were champions with those those tablets we had people who love computers and people hated them and so we had people who believed in pm and some people didn't believe in pm and so we got some champions in the front end and we got a handful of them year one ramped it up year two and by year three we had a great transition uh and of course you have to have that transition because you can't simply stop doing those do or not work orders so it has to happen over a period of time and a our secret sauce was transitioning over time as well as finding champions staff buy-in we started early on that and talk about the value and we even had some technicians talk to other technicians about the value of a pm system and uh and has proven itself was i'll show you some slides of how we transition from do it now work order quantities transition lovely into doing more pm and there was less emergencies unless issues we had to chase our tails on one last secret sauce was that we did have to make a shift as we shifted some of our supervisors around and we found one supervisor who want to be the champion who was going to be the pm scheduler and uh so that was a significant shift also now if you have a luxury with a limited people and unlimited resources you just hire more people and hire a pm scheduler i don't know who can do that so it is that transition of losing one traditional supervisor to be a pm person and shifting the focus from do it now work orders to pm work orders and that is a really difficult challenge in how you do that but buy-in and over time is what i recommend technology uh certainly has been part of our success story at my institution we have many work orders both pms and do it now work orders and these tablets are godson i mean we have all of our drawings at our server so a technician can not only look at the work order but they can bring up drawings they can order supplies through our warehouse but uh for the pm piece certainly technicians do receive the pm work orders and by the way those are batch loaded through our cms to the supervisor and the supervisor dishes those out daily weekly to each technician so the technician doesn't get a whole month's worth of pm work orders and they're lost and too many of them and yes the technicians enter time and comments on the pms and that's important and that's even terribly more important i should say for those technicians for do it now we need to know what they did and what they found and that was an issue early on of getting tech comments but we built that culture where the tech comments are terribly important for us and also a different technician might be going to that particular piece of equipment they'd like to know what the last technician did and certainly the lookup of the equipment history of the qr code that is so cool because the database the cms has that history the technician can look at what they did in the past when they did it what parts they were in the past what a cool feature that has been for our technicians and our uh pm scheduler is not sitting in a room they were sitting around quite a bit creating this thing in the first several years but now they're of course creating new pms on newer buildings and some of the tasks but they do have time to get out and about and so they are reviewing completed work orders and they're looking at the comments in particular one of the coolest things that we found with our cms system we have is searching keywords so a technician writes follow-up the technician says warranty the supervisor then does some redirecting of going to a different trade a different shop a different person who has to do the follow-up if it's a warranty item so using the power of that cms is is a cool feature that we like and again i mentioned the pm schedule does get out of the office behind the desk get out in the field talk to the technicians see what they're doing and double checking a few things every now and then so i'm going to pause here for a second and everyone take a look at this uh graph and these are not made up numbers these are real numbers i'm pretty big on metrics i'm very big on accuracy and so you can see when we started our pm program in 1998 we had uh do it now work orders that are about 42 000 of them on our campus and you can see the slow build up over at least the first three years that we were transitioning people from do it now to pms and this is a classic curve and i i assume this is the way the curve was going to show when we started 98 but i'm still pinching myself this did turn out just like the curves in the textbook said it would and so you can see of course the pm uh quantities of work orders the pm work orders rising the do it now customer service was much much better the trades felt better that they were not being treated like firemen they were being treated as professionals doing a uh a job where they're actually going out in a head of things being ahead of the curve trying to manage things in a better way so they saw the value we saw the value to play it out so then you fast forward um into uh 2010 so we kind of hit the bottom of that curve and i'll share with you what happened at the bottom of that curve is that uh you can see a liberal is red those red curves going up from red bars going up in 2010 all the way through 2019 that we we're transforming a lot of older buildings to new buildings because part of this success story is not just pm it's about capital renewal we argue and we're successful with a reasonably good capital renewal program as well as trying to raise older buildings and eliminate our our uh deferred maintenance challenges so why did our red bars go up because we had newer equipment newer buildings that had a lot more equipment and yet we had some older buildings we were challenged with and some of the do it now did pick up a bit so i don't know if anyone is long of the tooth that has done something over some 20 years and i'll just be interested to see what your charts and graphs look like but this is the my story our story here our institution great on the front end but it does i suspect plateau and maybe we can let john or others weigh in on their thoughts about those that might have a pm program for a couple of decades and does it truly plateau or does it go down to zero and let's get closer to my time talking with this group on the best practices we tried to layer in a few other things so we have a made investment in eddy current testing for our chillers invested a lot in our steam trap program and if you have a steam traps in a central steam trap district a steam track program pays for itself over and over again and i can share with you some data another day relative to how much money we've saved our institution because of the few bucks we spent and saved the bundle on our wasted steam through blow throughs laser alignment we have some of that on campus and trying to get more people gauged than that thermal inspection of our switch gear uh we're not doing everything on campus we're putting our toe in the water where we think it's right making small investments but one we spend a lot of our investment in as our ba assistant well over 150 000 points across campus and our bas is one of the coolest things that really have exercised a lot of trying to maintain our assets of beacon stewards and so time reminders on our bas and actually as i get down to the bottom of the commission you see monitor-based commissioning that is fully integrated with our bis but part of our success story on the front end of new buildings is new building commissioning and we that started about oh gosh about 15 years ago and about 12 years ago we said that was pretty cool we went into retro commissioning we picked several of our buildings to retro commission them and get them back in alignment and it was about six or seven years ago we exercised our bas with monitoring based commissioning and that has been one of our biggest success stories to be good stewards using the software that we have and having the software make sure that the other software that's supposed to be turning things on and off and adjusting things is actually working appropriately so with that i'm gonna end on that note and i guess i'll turn it back to uh the person running this wonderful thing to open up our questions awesome thank you so much peter thank you um everyone for the discussion today and thank you to our attendees for sending in some questions we'll now move into the q a portion to address some of the questions that you have sent in and please we encourage you to continue sending questions in so the first question i would like to somebody asked is how do you recommend migrating teams from reactive to proactive maintenance given limited staffing you want to jump on that job yeah well that's a good question because i've got some things that i've seen but you you did that transition pete i'd love to hear what you have to say how you guys did it and then uh and then i'll throw in some two cents afterwards sure and i i think i've answered that a certain degree i'm gonna make it expand a bit on that um obviously it's a mindset if you don't have a culture any of people wanting to go in that direction i don't care who the boss is you're not going to be successful and so we spent some time on the front end talking about it the rationale behind moving in that direction why we need to move in that direction and quite frankly the trade said well how many more people are going to hire we said none um that this is going to be beneficial to all of us and we're going to do it over time and so the theory behind us building that culture on the front end and conversation and getting champions that first year to see it work show the data it's working and then having those champions those technicians tell other technicians you know what you need to get on the pm team and i think you'll be good of doing certain things in that that group and so we use that basic psychology of of having the champions bring others along with them now granted we didn't transition everybody to a pm specialist and but you saw that graph with our success story so culture building the excitement on the front end picking the right people doing it over time that's how we did it i don't know if it was right or wrong but it worked for us well you actually you said one key thing in there that is one of the two ways that i have seen work and you said a pm team and and that uh that i have seen that be successful just as you guys experienced where you you know if you've got your you know field of technicians you start setting aside some of them to do pms and then as you make that transition like you did over those three years you probably increased the size of your pm team where you're able to you know take less you'll take some of your firefighters and move them over to that pm team and keep growing it so that you start getting a little bit healthier balance of where you're spreading your man hours the other way i've seen it do your work as well is you know you've got a different setup where you've maybe got a technician that's responsible for a few buildings start setting aside certain times so you know tuesdays and thursday mornings are pms and then they slowly start adding more hours to their work week of you know setting aside times to do pms again it does just come down to prioritizing and making it a priority to get those pms done and setting aside the resources to do it and john i've got to have one more item that i was thinking year three or four whatever reason we got slammed with a lot of uh service calls and i got convinced by the supervisors we needed to situationally remove people from the pm team and and that was probably the worst thing we did for one year because once you start down the slippery slope was difficult to get back up and so after a month or so i saw the data and i said uh you know what we're do it now and service calls we will going to delay them a little bit and we're going to stick with this pm theory and obviously we did stick with it and look at the look at the graph on the chart and so i counseled people to not drift granted if you've got a building on fire you gotta get everyone there i get it but at the end of the day once you start drifting backwards it's difficult to get back on that horse again yeah and i'll just tell you one more thing is the other other thing that i've done as well is work with clients to help them manage the expectations of the customers they serve uh and i've had those those hard conversations that go surprisingly well with uh you know basically you know university faculty it was at a at a college where i had one of these conversations where i let them know hey this literacy may not respond as quickly as you were used to in the past but here's why and they got it they understood and they were they were good with making that transition because they started to see that yeah we started doing the pms there hopefully be less times they have to call us because less things will break great thank you guys um okay we have one other question that just come in came in what are some tips to get techs um to use mobile platforms i think pete hit that early on is is the the changing the culture so i'll let pete throw in some there and i've got some tips i'll throw one on top of that so i'm dating myself with palm pilots so i'm with you and so palm pilot technology was pretty clunky versus these cool tablets today and we wanted to start doing that we only had a handful of champions back then but when the windows palm pilots the tablets came out it was a lot easier to get those to move forward but again i started this a long time ago and many technicians did not have computers back in the late 90s okay and so it was a struggle and but yet it's the younger technicians it's the ones that want to be more advanced and use that basic psychology gang you got to get champions you get someone who wants to eat that stuff up and and so there might have been certain people in the shop that love that and everyone else around the lunch table in the shop looking at this person like what are you doing and and they show them what they're doing and so it's kind of leading a horse to water and so having the champions or a few of those younger ones that might be more more computer savvy and of course today everyone's computer savvy but i think the net net of the answer that question in our space was to get those that want to do the technology let the let them show their peer technicians that this is good this is not bad this will save you time and actually once we put all of our data on all our drawings on those uh those tablets holy smokes everyone wanted one because they wanted to look at the drawings and i tell you what you talked about that cycle time from going from building back to our records room you talk about wasted time window time you talk about going to get supplies so not only getting supplies john i'd say looking for the damn drawings yeah yeah absolutely and trying to find the o m manuals and just yeah all that information it's uh i i i would say 10 years ago it was a different conversation uh meeting with the technicians i know whenever we assist clients with selecting or implementing uh their cmms i want to meet with the upper management but i want to meet with the boots in the field and get their input find out what their challenges are and start selling them i i call it you know we're basically kind of planting some seeds of change early and get them to see the value that these mobile devices can provide of course you uh you know and it you know there's gonna have some where you have to kind of answer that question of well this is you know like big brother 1984 they just want to find some way to track us but it's like you know once you walk them through how it can help them do their job give them the data they need at their fingertips in the field they really are a lot more open to wanting to use the tool and uh and again like 10 years ago it was a harder sell today i don't care how old they are um you know how old or how young they are they're open to using the mobile devices and with the implementations we're doing they're excited to get their hands on them so i agree with you pete it's just a matter of getting those early adopters getting that kind of excitement going and uh you know and those early adopters are good too because they usually will have more grace with you as you work through some of the wrinkles uh in the initial you know roll out but uh yeah showing the value that it can provide to the technicians and the others will start hopping on board whether it's you're getting a new cms or you're just getting some technology like these tablets workflow is terribly important we found that having the technicians share what they think is the best workflow process not what me and now what their boss thinks and together we come together so what is that workflow and also um so how they do things on a daily basis how they used to do things a daily basis is somewhat consistent with the technology just speeds it up and the other item of course you just don't throw software at somebody and saying figure it out you don't throw a tablet at a technician saying this is good figure it out so quite frankly we made significant investments financial investments time investments of training and so um if you're thinking that you're going to buy some tablets and everything's going to be hunky during tomorrow you're wrong that you do have to have the right kind of people both management our i.t person i grew from one it person to three um yeah i think all of you really thinking about moving in this direction you don't need more technicians you might need a less one fewer technicians but you will be needing an i.t type person on your team and they are critical to our success and those it people are working daily and trust me one of our technicians has a problem with their uh tablet the worst thing to do is get in line see me next week i'll fix it that is going to turn that program upside down so when the technician comes up to rit person it's drop everything fix it get that tool working because i've got an expensive technician that's waiting for their tool to be fixed so they can fix the equipment so there's an investment there gang and you have to think smart about how you're going to shift to some more i.t support and more training on the front end once you get some people trained and trained the trainer and so get those champions we've got a couple of technicians that are pretty cool and they can teach a technician better than i can so but that training is is something that is so darn critical if you missed that you missed the boat yeah well and keeping the platform keep keeping the process is simple like you said the uh a a good system does not fix bad processes so you need to take that opportunity to optimize processes like you said meeting with the technicians soliciting their feedback and then on those mobile devices whatever you can do to keep it quick and easy and simple uh you know you've already done the qr codes which to me is invaluable uh take advantage of the talk to text incorporate drop downs because you just don't want you don't want them chicken pecking i want them to be able to get through closing a work order you know as quickly as possible and not sit there and grumble as that takes them minutes to do it wonderful thank you guys um we have a couple more questions uh maybe we have time for one or two more um how do you get contractors to use in-house systems for reporting uh have you have you guys done that across that bridge there pete we well we outsource elevators and fire alarms okay and so we do not crosswalk and force our elevator company nor our fire alarm company you will use our cms or else um and so we want them to use their database however however if we get service calls um our service call system is pushed into their cmms system okay and when they close it out we close it on our end but we do not force pms on elevators for another company for example okay so service calls goes from our system to theirs pms stay in theirs but yet they have a lot of similar data graphs charts data we want on our elevators that comes out of their cmms so there's some obviously comes in crosswalk that works well between the data and the reporting that comes out of ours or theirs yeah for those that want to get the contractors involved you've got to be selective as to which contractor that you engage i mean a lot of times when i've seen this happen it usually is more like with your hvac contractor because because hvc has a higher frequency of maintenance and so they're going to be out on your site more frequently getting it baked into the contract the service contract when it comes up for renewal that's saying hey you will complete work orders and attach invoices things like that into the mobile platform but the other thing you need to take into consideration when you say okay let's pick on your hvc contractor is do they tend to send the same technicians or do they have a higher turnover because if it's the same technicians it's a pretty easy thing to do but if it's uh if they have a higher turnover and you just don't know which person's showing up that week uh that becomes a problem so you'd have to have those discussions with your contractor to try to get some sort of consistency in who's coming to site and uh and getting that work executed that is a good question for those who do more outsourcing we're insourcing most as i mentioned but i'll give you one other cool thing and that's warranty work orders we've got two or three capital projects going on all the time on our campus and so we use our cms system to track warranty issues and we do a daily push out to our construction manager and they push it out of course each of the subs to follow up with warranty stuff so they are doing their our work orders warranty workloads in our system yeah that's a great idea and then you should get that basically prompt if something's under warranty uh if you go to put a work order against that asset awesome thank you guys um i believe we have time for one last question um you know are there a few fms applications that would be suggested for a national presence of single facilities with a skeleton facility group of three it's right in your wheelhouse john so you're they're asking i'm just trying to get clarification on the question they're looking for a system that would be useful to do something like that i believe so yes okay um a lot of it's going to come down to when i work with my clients there there's a lot of good products out there there's some products out there that frankly you probably just need to stay away from but it really comes down to what do you need the tool to do because these these cmms systems they are business tools and you as a facility manager director you're a business manager managing the second you know largest asset and expense for your organization more than likely so uh what i encourage my clients to do is don't go shopping first because it's easy to get sucked into a good sales presentation and it may be a great product but it's not the right product for you so i think that's always important is to have that conversation to figure out what do you need the system to do and then uh once you define what those requirements are then you go shopping and you've picked the right tool that's going to work for you now and also it's going to grow and evolve with you as you continue to grow and evolve your program i would agree john that no any one of these cms systems doesn't fit every one of your needs so as john mentioned get your shopping list of what you really need and then prioritize that list and you'll find out this system is is not hitting my number one and number two need and early on i was looking for something that i wanted to make sure we were tracking cost because i want to make sure our cms goes into our university-wide billing system and uh alden could do that and so that was a high need might not be hiding for someone else so john's uh counsel to everyone listening is is terribly important get your list together and then uh work the list to see who can meet your high priorities yeah and and i and i don't want to burst any bubbles but um there is no one system that does everything well it doesn't exist i don't care what the sales people tell you it doesn't exist yet we keep hoping for it and waiting for it uh and so it may come down to like space management so you know something like an iwms integrated work management system versus a cmms where it's you know a little bit more hardy on the asset and maintenance management side uh you've got some of the software products that say oh well yeah we do space management and we do maintenance management um they're gonna be thin on one of one of the two of those they just don't do both well so um i think that's again like pete said prioritizing what your needs are and if it comes down to it i've got many clients that they've got a space management software and they have a cms uh so you know they're using the best and best of breed for both of those products awesome thank you both thank you again gentlemen um for your talk today um it looks like we are just about nearing the end of time um if your question was not answered we'll forward it to our speakers to address offline you know thank you again to gentlemen for speaking today and to tma systems for sponsoring this webinar and thank you to our audience for attending today a recording from today's session will be made available on our magazines website facilityexecutive.com thank you and have a great afternoon everyone you