How to Tell Your Asset Investment Story
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Good afternoon, everyone in attendance. My name is Billy Doolittle. I'm the account executive over the southeast here at Brightley Software, we're the Siemens Asset Management Company, and we're thrilled that you made it out today.
Today, if, you seen the email and you saw the agenda, we're gonna be walking through your assets, how to tell the story of what you own, the need that you have, have and how to best visualize that data. Chrome joined here with Chris. He's the solution consultant here. He's gonna be walking us through his presentation.
Chris, thankful you're here. Just a couple of housekeeping items.
There will be question to answers here at the end. Feel free to type in your question at any time. It's located right on your screen.
And then, other than that, Chris, is there anything that you'd like to say before we got got kicked off here?
I appreciate that, Billy. Let's do a sound check to make sure you can hear me okay. Yeah. I hear you great.
Alright. I appreciate it. Thank you for the introduction.
Everybody. My name is Chris De Junis. I am one of the solution consultants here with Brightley. I've been doing this with the company over nine years. Going on ten years now, actually.
And to be quite honest, a solution consultant, right, sounds fancy, but what that really means is I talk to people like yourselves.
Our prospects, our clients, and see what they're doing today and how some of the different solutions that we offer aligned with the challenges that they're having.
So a little bit about myself, I work extensively, really with our government and education clients.
Both of those markets are where, I've spent the greater part of the past ten years, learning about and with, clients like yourself.
On a more personal note, we are all real people. So I like to add a little context the discussion here.
I do live on an apple farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, so I do a whole lot of, pruning, harvesting, spraying. Also do some, amateur astronomy out here. Really nice skies and, not a lot of light. So If anybody has questions about, Apple cider or apples in general, feel free to hit me up. Love to discuss it more with you.
As far as the presentation and discussion go, today, I'll hop back for a second just to refresh you how to tell your asset investment story.
This discussion is actually something that I've been doing over the past year, actually probably eighteen months with not only our user conference, but some national conferences that we attend and do presentations at, throughout the country. So if anybody here is familiar with PWX, which is the APWA, the American Public Works Association National Conference.
This is a discussion I led there. We had a hundred plus people turn out for that.
This exact same topic.
Standing room only as far as the little amphitheatre they gave us was concerned.
Fast forward about a month. I did this same presentation at ICMA. Right? The city man city manager's National Convention down in Austin, Texas same discussion, same topic. We had over a hundred and fifty people turn out, standing room only again.
I bring this up, right, not because, like, I'm not trying to tell you I'm an awesome presenter. It's because there's a trend within the market. Your peers, the people that are in the same positions you are, you're clearly turning out to these discussions for a reason.
Now those reasons could be vast, but in my role as a solution consultant, right, again, what that really means is by listening to you, having access to different customer accounts and demo accounts on our side, I get to really hear the challenges you're having. And I've put together some trends that I see come up on a regular basis.
And I know I'm preaching to the choir here. Right? We're just trying to get this age set before we dive into some of these storytelling opportunities around asset investment planning, but within these trend of challenges that I've put together, I really wanna focus on the first one that we see there, that loss of tribal knowledge.
Right?
We've all heard the silver tsunami, all these other terms that they're not new. Right? They've been thrown around now even quite honestly since before COVID, but they really became popularized during during COVID.
But the loss of tribal knowledge is something we've been talking about here at Brightley. For literally as long as we've been in business over twenty three years now.
And I bring this up today as part of the asset investment story. Because the the tribal knowledge that we're seeing walk out right now, a lot of the times it's our most veteran staff.
It's the people who know our equipment or our scenery, our linear infrastructure and assets, they know them inside out. They're the ones that we often turn to. When we're trying to make those repair versus replacement decisions.
When we're having discussions about growth and where investments need to be, unfortunately, Those are the ones that are leaving the building, and we're seeing going into retirement.
So with that in mind, part of the discussion today, right, is gonna center around how to take some basic data points and tell a different story than what you may be used to telling. Because quite honestly, the makeup of our elected officials, our upper management, it's never been more diverse than it is now. And when I say diverse, I mean the backgrounds that they've come from.
Right. When I started doing this job, a lot of times in the leadership roles or elected officials, We're talking to people who came up through public works. People who came up through planning, parks, and rec, that sort of thing. That's no longer the case.
Right? We have more and more people coming from the private sector and coming in from worlds that, like, they don't know your world. They don't live in it day to day. They never have.
So we have our loss of tribal knowledge. We have this new makeup of our leadership roles.
We need a better way to tell the story. And to illustrate that, this is a thought exercise that we do that I do during the in person presentations, but I think it reflects well here as well.
So everybody take a look at our grid, basic grid five by five.
What I would like everyone to do is pick five squares.
Right? Think about the five that you're gonna choose. And we're doing this for a reason, right, this represents a group setting in which you're having to make decisions and you're having discussions about where investments are gonna go.
These are the these are the ones that I selected here. Right? These are the five that I selected. Now, by the way, I meant to mention this before. Keep the q and a going. We by no means have to wait till the very end. We're trying to keep these groups relatively small compared to our in person presentations.
So that some conversation can get going and we can continue these discussions in future webcast.
So Did anybody choose the same five I did? Feel free to let me know in the Q and A. Also, any questions you have, put them in there. I'm gonna monitor it instead of waiting till the end.
But in all of the presentations I've done and brought this graphic up, exactly zero percent of people have picked the same ones I have.
And this is a pretty simple exercise without a lot of agenda, biased, or predisposition. Behind the squares that we're going to select.
The point here is that even in a five by five grid, There's over three million different options that we could choose when asked to choose five different squares.
Group dysfunction is a real thing. Right? The point and the goal that we wanna take away from this today is that gut feeling no longer works. And you know what? The gut feeling that most of us were relying on, right, back here, they're actually walking out of the door. So sometimes we know even less about our equipment and assets than we thought we did.
Right? So keep this in mind. Keep this in the back of your head the next time you're in one of those group settings have to have these meetings. Their psychology behind this.
So when we talk about asset investment planning, right, we're talking about beyond the four year capital plan that elected officials are all gung ho about. And we get why. We know why, but There's no reason that you can't take a handful of data points and tell a more impactful story.
And a story that really makes it obvious why we need to look and plan beyond just four to five years.
So the core of our discussion here today is gonna be broken into these three pillars. And we're gonna spend some time looking at slides, but we're also gonna dive into some of my accounts that I have.
I'm gonna try to stay away from demo accounts show you actual client examples from our reporting dashboards.
But all of it's gonna come back to these three pillars that I have up on the screen. And these are the three pillars that we try to break asset investment planning into. Now you'll hear asset management, you'll hear enterprise asset management, you'll your strategic asset management, asset investment planning, come back to these three pillars.
As we're discussing these in the back of your mind, I'd also like you to start thinking about where you are in this journey. Which of these pillars have you accomplished or which one are you working on? Because quite simply, the asset register that you see in the center here, there's a reason we put it in that central column.
Right. So when I say asset what does that actually mean?
More simply put, the asset register is what do you own?
Again, it's in the center for a reason. Everything we discuss moving forward is gonna be tied back to what you own. If you don't know what you own, how could you possibly start tracking things related to it? How are you ever gonna tell elected officials or upper management, what the annual cost on a piece equipment or infrastructure is if you don't know what you own in the first place.
Right? There's no way to set up a reliable PM program preventative maintenance on something you don't know that you own.
Right? So when you hear asset register, hear all of these terms in different presentations and discussions, but it all boils down to knowing what you owe. And depending on what division we're talking about, there's gonna be different answers to this question.
And different people are gonna interact with their list of what they own in different ways. Right? This kind of screenshot you see in the background, that's what I would call traditional asset register.
It's a list of mechanical equipment in a facility.
Typically, that would live in a spreadsheet.
If we're talking roads, if we're talking sewer, we're talking stormwater, that may live in GIS. That's just as important to know what you own and are tracking in GIS as it is mechanical equipment in a building.
Now, for a lot of people, I just actually alluded to it. When I ask what you own, how many people immediately flash to something like this?
A spreadsheet. Right? Look across the top column and there are the the top column are there and then the the bottom one.
This is one of the most common approaches that I see when it comes to capital planning. People pull out the old trusty spreadsheet.
Right? It's got a list of things here on the left. We've got our years across the top, and I can see what the cost is gonna be to replace or to carry out a specific service year over year.
Right? That's a good starting point. That's not the worst place to be in. At least you're tracking what you own.
It's not a big reach. It's not a big hurdle to get from this, right, a spreadsheet.
Into something like you see here is a screenshot of an asset register.
It still looks like a spreadsheet cheap, but there's key differences here. Right now I can take action on the items that I have in my list.
If I wanna set up a PM program on that chiller, I'm one click away from doing it. I don't have to build extra sheets within the document. I don't have to start building out cells of day it.
So one of the first points here really to the discussion is figure out you own. Right? And different teams, again, are gonna have different answers. So start exploring these different strategies for how to figure out what you own, and most important get it into one centralized location.
This is a brightly presentation. I would love for it to be in the brightly software. Right?
But there's other tools out there. Some of you may be using them. So think about these different strategies when it comes to taking a generic idea of what you own and getting it into a centralized system.
The most obvious is the spreadsheet approach like we just looked at. Any legitimate software is gonna be able to import your asset list into the system and create that asset register.
Whatever data points you're tracking related to the assets need to be imported in.
Now, There's some of you out there, and I work with people like this day in, day out, and they're some of the ones I see the most success out of because they're coming from the least.
Your CMS S and asset management tools should have a mobile application associated to it.
If the crew is out working in the field, you need a tool that's gonna meet them where they're at. Right? So within that tool, there should be a mobile option for building out your asset list.
So if you're in the position where you may have, let's say inherited and out of date list, that may not have a lot of details, and that's where your first step is is building out the registry and centralizing what you own.
Make sure and check if your CMS or asset management tool has that mobile piece because the teams in the field can help you build out that list right there on the spot. By creating new asset registry items as they go.
The third option there, right, I don't like to lead with this one.
Life is all about resources, right? Time versus money.
I've seen success with clients doing this themselves and building it from the ground up themselves plenty of times.
But we also have partners.
A lot of you already have engineering or infrastructure partners that you use on a regular basis.
Most of them are more than happy to come build out an asset register and actually do assessments on your infrastructure. If we're talking facilities, look at a facility condition assessment, get a list from a professional of what you own and what condition it's in. If we're talking roads, Get a PCI write a pavement condition index assessment done.
Ride comfort or ride quality assessment road degradation surveys.
If we're talking sewer, right? Nasco is there for you. They have their standardized rating system.
The point being, if you can't capture it yourself, there are people that can do this for you because it all goes back to what we were saying. Whether you're capturing it or you're having boots on the ground, come, Patrick for you.
If you wanna tell an effective story, you have to know what you own.
So next up, we're gonna move over to the left, the operations management and CMS side of things. I know a lot of you are probably using a day to day CMS tool already, but what we're gonna do is change things up a bit, and we're gonna focus on the story that you should be able to tell with a you effective data points.
Now as we're about to move on to that day to day side of things, again, I'll remind feel free to put questions in the Q and A. I'll keep monitoring that if any come in.
Whether it's related to the asset register and on the ground services or whether related to the upcoming CMS discussion.
But before we get into some examples, I'm gonna share something that I have learned over the years of doing this and working with with, clients that are in the same roles that you are And it relates to PMs. I can't tell you. Actually, it may be the most common thing that I hear when it comes to clients. Right? Before you dig in and actually understand where somebody's at, I would say, like, seven times out of ten when I ask somebody what they're trying to improve. You know what they say?
I wanna be more proactive. We're too reactive here.
Hopefully, some of you chuckled because every literally, it it's uncanny how frequently that gets brought up.
And really as you start digging in, what that means is they're either doing no PMs at all, Or they have a preventative maintenance program built out, but they don't actually do it.
And this may sound familiar to you. Unfortunately, I can't you, but do PMs get put on the back burner for your organization like they do most of the ones I talk to? Just a legitimate question. If you wanna put it in the q and a grade, but they seem and again, this is off of, you know, almost ten years of doing this. PM seemed to be the first thing that gets cut.
They're the first things that get pushed off when an emergency pops up. And, you know, we push them off a time or two.
We do something else. Nothing bad happened. Right? So they're the first things to get cut. And, unfortunately, it's the worst thing in the long run that we could be doing. It's the worst approach to take. There's actually a term for this, guys.
If anybody's familiar with normalization of deviance, Again, I'd love to hear from you in the Q and A, because this is exactly what's occurring when we push off PMs.
Alright. I'll give you a second to read that. But essentially, distill down what this is saying is.
Well, We skipped it once and nothing really bad happened. So what are the odds that something bad that's gonna happen next time?
There are some very extreme examples of normalization of deviance. In in fact, the first popularized use case of normalization of deviance, came from something called the Rogers Commission.
If I say nineteen eighty six or Rogers Commission, there's probably a few of you who already know where we're going with this.
The challenger.
Normalization of deviation, they knew About the o rings and the temperature related issues long before the problem with the challenger actually occurred.
They have documentation of it.
But nothing bad had ever happened in testing under those circumstances, so they didn't think there was a way that exhaust would burn through the o ring and essentially destroy the ship.
Right? So we had the Rogers Commission. This popularized not only the concept of normalization of deviance, but human factors investigations as a whole.
We learned a lot. NASA promised they would do better. We fast forward seventeen years.
Another accident occurs.
We lose another shuttle. This time, it's related to phone breaking off of the shuttle and hitting the wing, putting a hole in the wing, something no one ever thought could happen. You know why they thought it could never happen? Because from the very first shuttle launch, documented, and on camera, foam was breaking off of the fuel tank of the shuttle.
Phone would break off on every lunch, and it never did anything catastrophic. So why would it?
Normalization of deviance.
Nothing was wrong until it was.
Run the failure. Right?
These are two very extreme examples of normalization of deviance on purpose. But remember, the core concept here is you're putting something off because there's no immediate failure that's going occur. There's no immediate pain to be recognized, so surely it can't be that bad.
You know what this leads to in your operation?
Run to fail approaches over and over and over again. This very linear type of approach.
Right? When you think back to that spreadsheet we talked about, when you look across those columns in the bottom, the numbers Well, when you don't fund the projects one year, they don't disappear. They go into the backlog and they stack up, and you're not taking the correct preventative action in the first place. Your running units past their useful life. Right?
Soon, we're inundated with this feeling right there too much. The backlog's growing. We're going into the emergency fund more frequently than we should be.
Right. So think about it again. All of this is tied back to the day to day CMS side and the concept of why we need to avoid falling into the trap normalization of deviance and ignoring our PM programs.
So we're about to look at a few examples of trends and reports that can help tell the story of why you need an effective PM program. Because remember, you're not presenting to the audience. You typically would be in the past. It's people from the private sector. It's people from other career paths. So you need to start finding a way to talk about a different style of report.
ROI is a trend that we've been seeing pick up a lot of steam over the past few years.
In leadership positions elected officials, they love the return on investment discussion.
What am I getting from my money? What's the impact of what we're spending?
And on the screen, I'm pulling up the age old example. Right? Everyone here is familiar with this of example, heck most adults are familiar with this type of example.
By a car, do oil changes versus not doing oil changes. Now the difference that I'm offering you here is the annual cost perspective.
And instead of just showing the savings, because typically this discussion would be presented as fifteen thousand dollars of savings over ten years.
What I'm showing you is a different way, but you need an extra data point. In order to show ROI, like I am here, a hundred and ninety seven percent, I need the annual cost.
In this case, the annual cost is fifty dollars over ten years. Right? That's our PM operating expense. Now annual cost could be PM specific. It could include reactive maintenance, but the idea is you need to start somehow tracking annual cost on your assets.
Again, a a reliable CMS is gonna take something like labor hours and convert it to labor cost for you.
That's your annual cost when you look at it from a reporting standpoint.
When you start looking at data points like labor hours converted to labor cost, category of work, bring materials into the equation if your tool allows you to do so?
I'm not asking you to track this data, on every light bulb that's changed or every inlet that we evaluate or every storm sewer we clear, I'm asking you to do this level of analysis on the primary and critical assets.
Because if you start doing so and looking at this from a annual cost perspective, it unlocks numerous reports that you can start running or what I would consider pages of the story that you're trying to tell leadership.
The caveat here, and I'll throw this out there for full transparency, you need to be looking at no less than twelve months of data. To really take any stock or put any stock into these trends.
But if you're doing so, being able to look at things like your PM trends. Right?
Let's go back to the to the comment I made earlier about one of the most or if not the most commented thing that I hear in webcast. We want to be more proactive.
We're too reactive.
Alright. Step one, we know what we own.
Now we need to figure out, do we have PMs set on our critical pieces of equipment?
If we have PM set, are we completing them?
Right? How many people at throw it in throw it in the chat or the q and a if you if you know, but how many people here can actually look and see what the percentage of completed PMs they do annually on infrastructure or equipment on.
Or take it a step further, can you put a value on the ratio of reactive work you do to PM work.
Those are the types of stories we wanna start capturing and being able to tell.
Right? Change the conversation, start speaking leadership's language, because all of this is leading to making better asset investment dis decisions. How are we gonna get the most bang for our buck over time? Well, we can't even have that discussion unless we're starting to look at these metrics from an annual cost standpoint.
So next up, I'm actually I'm gonna get out of this presentation for a second, and we're gonna look at some dashboards I'm gonna grab a simple water while we do so. Again, if anybody has any questions or thoughts, small group here with us today. So feel free to throw those in the q and a and expand the discussion. I'm happy to, to touch on any questions or items anyone has.
Alright. So I'm gonna share out our screen with this, Billy. I'm gonna you back in here, and are you able to confirm with me that you see my dashboard?
So I can see analytic dashboard demo.
Yep. You can so you can see my website with the dashboards on it? No. I see the slide that says, analytic dashboard demo.
One second here. Let's and this is, hey, this is why I brought you back. Make sure we're on the same page.
Alright. Tracy, are you able to see Billy Tracy, are you able to see the website I'm sharing? It's showing that I'm sharing it. So Yep. I see it in the media player, for the audience. If it's too small up in the top corner, you can switch that for the main slide area just by clicking on.
Perfect.
Did it get bigger?
Yeah. They they just need to click on it and select it as their main viewer. Yeah. You're you're off the races, buddy.
Alrighty. Great.
So everybody, we're we are like I mentioned before, with this view here, this is one of the analytic dashboards that comes with our day to day CMS and asset management tool. This is not a demo account. This is what I was referring to earlier. This is a real client dashboard.
Remember, this is all tied back to our day to day. What is our return on investment for completing PM programs and what is our annual cost on assets.
So this client has been using the tool you could see here in the middle for numerous years.
They're using this one tool for facilities, parks, roads, as well as utilities all within the one account.
So if we take the top one here facilities, if I wanna report out my annual cost on different equipment at my locations, I'm simply select facilities.
I'm gonna hit the twenty twenty two annual report so we have a full year of data.
And now this drop down allows me to decide, hey, what visuals do I want so I can tell this story effectively.
So we're gonna go into our asset list.
What this community is doing is very straightforward. They have their critical equipment built into the tool.
And they tie their PMs back to the pieces of equipment.
As the PM work orders are generated, an signed out to the crew, the crew will track simply the labor that goes into each task.
They're not getting fancy here again, tracking labor.
This tool will convert labor hours to labor cost based off of the wage for the staff member that you have in the system.
Very straightforward.
So what they can do is look across their list of equipment that they own. And in twenty twenty two, this is the annual cost for these different pieces of equipment on the team.
So if we were to select one, something like this generator at the sheriff's office.
The view to the right shows us the work orders that were performed into twenty two.
So they did twelve PMs on this one generator last year.
And in labor cost, it was just south of ten thousand dollars.
Let's stop before we even dive in any further. Right? Think about that. That is great information when we bring it back to the trends we just discussed.
So our annual cost is about ten thousand dollars for this one piece of equipment in consist of twelve PMs.
Let's look at a different piece here. Right?
A chiller is very different than a generator.
Now I'm not gonna tell you who this client is, but I can tell you that they're in a region of the country that went through some of those extreme heat waves this spring and summer.
As a result, look at this.
They did a hundred and eight PMs on this chiller twenty twenty two. And over those summer months, it actually shows that they're doing about two PMs per day.
Which that's perfectly fine if you have the staffing to do that.
It may just be a quick check to make sure it's operational. It's not gonna take any more than twenty minutes. Maybe even less.
But there's labor that goes into that. So if you're tracking it and you wanna roll out a twice a day check, You need to be able to show leadership that it's gonna cost you about five thousand dollars a chiller in labor alone to do that annually. How many chiller do you have across communities.
Right? So scale that out to all of the chillers that you're working on.
Right again, it's getting back to our annual cost. And here we go. We're gonna now we're gonna get a little more in-depth since we're tracking look, guys, this is only a handful of data points. We're tracking the status of the work order open to closed.
We're tying it back to the chiller, and the staff is telling us how long it took. Three data points.
And instead of telling somebody, we did a hundred and eight work orders on a chiller, which I hate to tell you this, but I think a lot of you know Nobody in leadership cares that you did a hundred and eight work orders on the chiller. They don't know what that means. They don't live in that world. What they do care about Is it a cost five thousand dollars to chiller annually just to keep the darn thing running?
Change the discussion.
Now, when I scroll down, we'll actually see the records tied to the individual assets to this one chiller that we're looking at.
You can actually see here we created a hundred and eight work orders.
We only completed a hundred and four of them.
The average days to complete those work orders, thirty nine days. So we're not exactly on top of things, by if we're being honest with ourselves. It's taken us thirty nine days to do it. Five thousand dollars the total cost roughly.
Remember what I mentioned was the most commented thing I hear on a regular basis?
We want to be more proactive. Well, if you wanna be more proactive, then you should probably do more than seventy percent of your PMs on a piece of equipment. In fact, the goal next quarter or next year should be to bump this to seventy five percent or eighty percent. Incremental gains don't overwhelm yourself. But what I'm showing you here is a way to not only define what you own, But now I can easily see if we have a PM program. And more importantly, are we actually accomplishing the PM program at an acceptable rate?
And I know we have a wide audience. I went right into facilities.
I could show you the exact same example for roads.
Right? They're doing the same thing. Here's their roadways.
Could see exactly how much they spent on this roadway last year and what that consisted of, seventeen PMs in this case.
They're doing the same thing here, guys. They're tying the work back to the road segment.
Right? And they're tying the labor back to it.
So here we have the same results. How many work orders did we do? I mean, look at that.
Your cost difference. Right?
So these are just different ideas and and how you can use this data.
Instead of just reporting out a simple number account is what we call it. Right? How many times did we do something? It's great. You track it, but one more data point puts dollar signs on it. Changes the conversation.
If we went back to our mechanical equipment discussion here, We can go back to our chiller that we're picking on. And I mentioned, and I showed you a screenshot earlier of some dashboards related to trend analysis. We just looked at annual cost.
We just looked at being more preventative and reactive by trying to track and increase the PM ratio.
But if we want a holistic view on the trend or the health of an asset, you need an easy way to analyze and look at it.
Alright. So remember, we're looking at our chiller.
This is classified within our system based off of all of the factors that we've just been looking at. It's classified as a low risk asset because we're actually doing a good job managing this.
We could see the number of work orders that we've performed.
And then we scroll down, we'll actually give you a definite non PM trend, PM, critical, recent work order cost.
In this case, we're scaling favorably.
Here's our work order trends over the past twelve months.
So these are all different dashboard approaches you can take. And I again, I'm not telling you that you need to start tracking everything in order to get this level of metric, have the discussion figure out what is our most critical equipment, what is our most what what infrastructure has the highest consequence of failure, and that's what I encourage you to focus on first in building out these PM programs.
When I clear this out, instead of looking at this from a strictly facility standpoint, We're now looking across the board, so we're looking at roads, parks, utilities, and facilities.
Easy for me to figure out which assets it consider to be the riskiest. Right? So if we were to hit on these two medium risk assets, we can start breaking it down and figuring out why these assets are considered medium risk.
So in this case, you could see this is a filter. This is an air filter con or a air compressor tied to a filter for our stormwater operation.
Medium risk asset.
When we scroll down, here's why it's considered medium medium risk. Our PM trend, it's trending up.
Right? Non PM work orders.
We're seeing more emergency repairs than we have in the past. And look here. PM trend, unfavorable.
It's taking longer if all to complete our recent PMs. These two are tied directly together.
This is where we need to focus now.
Right? So this is the difference between having data and being able to analyze data to learn something from it and start incorporating it into your day to day plans.
Alright. So I'll pause for a second again. See if we have any new questions come in while I hop back into our presentation.
Hey, Billy. Are you back with me on the three pillar slide? Make sure everyone's good.
I sure am. Yeah. I see it.
Great.
So we've discussed the asset register, right, how important it is to know what you own to make your decisions.
We've discussed the left pillar, right, the day to day CMS, PM program and inspection side of the equation.
When we go over to the right side, the life cycle modeling, side of the equation?
We're really focused on the same central pillar. What do we own? If we know what we own. If we know the PM trends, we know our annual cost, then life cycle model allows us to take a snapshot of where our assets are today.
Put them on the appropriate degradation profile.
And then see how we can get the most bang for our buck based off of the dollars that we're gonna spend. Or another way to put it is what is the impact of the dollars I'm about to spend today?
And to do this, when it comes back to that life cycle modeling side, it's really all about what we call that degradation profile.
It it doesn't matter if we're talking about a car that you drive in every day. It doesn't matter if we're talking about a pump.
Compressor, tractor, everything ages. Right? And that is the degradation at what rate and pace does it grade and what useful life remaining useful life does it have.
So when it comes to Most, what I would call traditional capital plans, they really focus on this last point, the expenditure of the replacement cost.
Or what we pointed out earlier is what we call that run to fail approach. Letting an asset degrade, pushing it it's useful life, hoping we can get away with it until it fails and we have to go into the emergency room.
Very common approach we see with our clients. And quite honestly, it's the most expensive approach that you can take, which is an interesting choice for a lot of people who have issues funding and budgeting.
But here we are. Right?
What capital predictor, the life cycle modeling tool that we offer allows you to do, is move beyond that simple run to fail type of approach.
How can we look at our degradation profile and instead of just focusing on the capital expense of replacement, What other treatment options do we have available? As this thing ages, are there different interventions that we can take?
Interventions that will cost less than an outright replacement. And if I were to perform an intervention when an asset is in state d, Will it bump it back up to b? Will it only back bump it back up to c? How do I get the most bang for the buck when I'm gonna be spending tax spare money. So I need to be able to show not only what we're doing, but how does it impact the ultimate service level that we're bringing the community? Right? That's another big discussion and common topic in the market right now is service level.
Right? Service level does not have to be a complicated complex discussion.
Right? I intentionally left this slide blank for a reason because this discussion can go a lot of ways, and a lot of people over complicate it when it comes to that actual service level.
Pavement is a good example.
There's a you name an acronym, and there's a pavement assessment to go along with it, quite frankly.
The problem is people in leadership has the ones we mentioned earlier that do not live in your world every day.
They don't know the difference between a PCI of seventy five and a PCI of eighty five.
I need a different way. I need a better way to explain to them why we want to spend the money on the projects that we're gonna do and what they're getting. What is the community getting in return for it?
So those degradation profiles are gonna be key to any sort of long term planning and discussions that you wanna have. But before we can get into the profiles, I do wanna point out things like condition and criticality.
This is a great way to evolve your asset register. If you think the register is in good shape right now, like you know what you own, You have a good spreadsheet or you have good GIS layers, the next step is making sure you have condition and criticality tied to them.
Condition is just another way of saying where on this degradation profile is the asset today.
Right? So if its condition score is halfway through its useful life, then when the modeling tool comes into play, it's gonna put it at the appropriate place.
Right. So the context here, we need to know the condition. We need to know how old it is. If we're talking structure. We need to know what materials it were made it's made of. Right? So these are all things that can be taken into account with the correct tool at your disposal.
So I'm gonna go ahead and share out my screen again here with you. Let me get a sip of water.
There's multiple examples we can look at guys, by the way. If you're listening and you wanna pull up the q and a or the chat, Throw out an asset class you would like to see an example of when it comes to the predictor tool. I'm gonna load up a roads example if anybody doesn't object, but really, We could take this a lot of ways if anybody has a strong preference here.
Alright. So it looks like roads is good. So with our roads example here, the first thing that I wanna point out is that these numbers that you see are custom This community that we're about to look at the pavement model for, they're looking at how they would spend three million dollars a year and what impact it would have on the service level. They're gonna look at five million, ten million, etcetera.
So when we select our first model for three million dollars a year, let's add some context.
This first dot you see is the current state of their roads network. Here's the condition of their pavement across this county.
If you see the bubble above the dot, it says state one point one nine.
Look over to the far right with me now.
This is your service level. Don't over complicate it. Zero is brand new.
Six is end of life.
For most use cases, you can throw those out.
Look at one through five as an a through f grading scale.
Right? Very straightforward. Even elected officials can understand this.
Hey, Chris. So you're yes.
You're actually not during the, the live demo this time. It fell back off. Try again. Oh, yeah.
One second. This would happen here. I saw it when you first went in, and then it fell off this thing. Yeah.
What's your name? Trying to share it with me?
Yep. That looks great. Yep. Alright. Perfect. So everyone, thank you for pointing that out, Tracy. So what I was pointing out within this chart for three million dollars a year, that's the blue bars We see annual cost.
This is a thirty year model. You can see it across the bottom axis.
Here's the current condition of the roadways of that state one point one nine, meaning their roads are in good shape.
Over here to the far right is that service level I was referring to. Zero being brand new, six end of life, one through five is our eight through F scale.
So when we return to the first point, with context, That state one point one nine is really good. So one of the first things this chart allows them to do with their decision makers is say, Hey, if the roads are in good shape today, shouldn't the goal be to keep the service level as close to this as possible?
It's a pretty realistic goal. If it's good and we're getting minimal complaints, let's keep it as close to this score as possible.
The trend line you see represents the service level of the roads over the next thirty years.
So if we're trying to keep this in good shape based off of the initial score, I would say this strategy significantly fails the community.
And you can see why when we look back to the blue bars, they're actually planning to have a funding gap here. This three to five year period.
And the reason could be widely varying depending on the community, but in this case, they're looking at different grants.
They're gonna have a gap between grant funding and they have to figure out if they wanna invest their own money in the gap that they're gonna have. Now this chart shows them in no undiscerning terms. If you allow this funding gap occur and don't invest in the pavement, the three million that you were spending initially per year will no longer be sufficient to cover a backlog that you're gonna create for yourself during this funding gap.
Hence why you see a drop off, and it never recovers.
So this backlog is an issue. And to fast forward, because I know we're getting towards the top of the hour here, if this is the strategy that they're gonna do, allow this funding gap without investing themselves in it, they're actually gonna need something closer to ten million dollars a year annually after the funding gap in order to get the roads back up into the service level that the community is used too.
Right? Quite a jump in spending that they would have to do.
And to be quite honest, it's kind of self inflicted because of the lack of investment that they're putting forth.
Now, each of these different scenarios has a wealth of reports. There's dozens of ways you tell this story depending on who the audience is.
One of the most impactful ways to show this is to focus on the backlog with elected officials.
You really wanna tell that story about how poor of a job they're doing investing in infrastructure?
Show them the backlog. So remember, this is the underfunded model, three million a year over thirty years.
They started off in good shape.
In thirty years, instead of having almost no backlog, this is what the chart for backlog growth will look like year over year for this county.
Starting point today, pretty much no backlog over here on the far left.
Now look what happens. Here's the gap in funding that's going to be created and look at the backlog that results from it.
We can actually go out to year thirty of this model and show leadership that they're gonna create a hundred and forty six million dollars of backlog for themselves.
And these are the different pro types of projects that they're not funding.
So this can be a real eye opener when it comes to telling the story a different way. And if if we have some folks here who are interested in really diving to the life cycle modeling and long term planning discussion side of this. There are numerous reports we can dive into. There's GIS story maps that we can create from this data. So I would love the opportunity to spend some more time in a in a webcast setting. Discussing some, individual use cases.
We can really dive into figuring out what story needs to be told to upper management and electives and really figure out how we can customize this for you. But hopefully, this has been some good insight into different ways that you can tell this asset story. Without focusing on the traditional spreadsheet and just counting the number of work orders that are going into things.
So I'll stop my share and bring us back in here.
Again, I encourage you to reach out you have any questions about what we discussed today or if you'd like to set up a follow-up, Billy would be a great point of contact for you to reach out to, and I'll turn it back over to him to wrap us up here over the last few minutes.
Yeah, Chris. Thank you so much. I thought that was very insightful, especially around the strategic asset management.
I've been keeping an eye on the chat. I didn't see thing really, come forward. That's fine. I I did have a question for you as we wrap here, Chris.
When when it comes to strategic asset management, when when folks initially get started, how much data is required for getting more strategic with predictive modeling.
When it comes to the life cycle modeling side of things, I would say the key data points are gonna be one knowing what you own. Right? Back to that slide that I kept harping on, the all probably tired of seeing. That's the point.
Step one is knowing what you own, obviously.
Step two is knowing the condition that it's in.
Right? Now within that, that concept of knowing what you own, to do accurate life cycle modeling, there are a few additional data points How old is it? Right? Age of infrastructure is huge. Same for equipment.
What materials is made of. And when I say materials, right, there there's some guesswork. There's some educated guesswork that can be done. By some of your engineering partners that I have seen done with GIS and knowing what is similar around it. So materials can be really big. And then also replacement cost.
Right? Because from replacement cost, what we're gonna do is take a network measure. So if I'm looking at roads, I'm not looking at square footage of a road, right? I'm looking at lane mile cost.
If I'm looking at sewer or collections, right? I'm looking at linear feet line. I'm not I'm not looking at lane miles. Right? If I'm looking at roofing, I am looking at square footage. So by knowing the replacement cost will generate a network tied to it. But long story short, know what you own, know the condition it's in, how old is it, materials, and if possible, placement cost so we can generate a reliable network measure.
Does that help, Billy?
It's very helpful, Chris. Yeah. I really appreciate that.
For those, on the call, just wanted to thank you for coming out today. Any follow-up questions, feel free to contact either me or Chris. You have my email.
Or Chris and I should say. If there's anything that we can do to assist you, the cities and the counties present, I I had a couple of, Metropolitan planning organizations, love to contact you, and, discuss potential opportunities, ways that we can help. But, Chris. Thank you again.
And I'll give, four minutes back to everybody's day and hope, everyone has a good day. And and for those in Kentucky, Happy, election day. It is election day in Kentucky. I saw a couple of Kentucky folks in here. So best of luck to you and let us know how we can help.
