"Sustaining” Sustainability - Enabling Operational Excellence Through Strategic Asset Management

Sustainability embodies not only sound design and engineering expertise in facility construction, but also requires a continuous improvement culture to meet or exceed the desired performance of the facility year over year. People, process, and technology must all come together to “sustain” sustainability itself.
 
This webinar discusses the appropriate data structures and key performance indicators to measure performance and the role of technology, business process definition, and culture in strategic asset management.

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Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar, sustaining sustainability, enabling operational excellence through strategic asset management presented by Britley.

Before we begin, I'd like to remind the audience that this webinar is being recorded.

Also, feel free to submit questions throughout the webinar via the question answer features that you can find on your toolbar. Our speaker will leave some time at the end of the presentation to address your questions.

Further, if you receive any technical, issues and need to have some support, you may also address this and will be able to help you as soon as possible.

Just a reminder, the information that you will receive, after the record after the webinar will be sent to you in a follow-up email where you can access the recording of today's session.

Our speaker today is Mark Mocle, who's a strategic account executive at Brightley, a Siemens company. Before joining Brightley, Mark was a co founder and senior by president at Facility League Health Inc where he was instrumental in introducing new infrastructure investment solutions and benchmarking capabilities to the health care industry.

I would now like to turn over the time today's presenter. Please go ahead, Mark.

Thank you, Regina. I appreciate it. And welcome everybody. Appreciate you joining this afternoon.

Looking forward to the discussion, and I do encourage you, please, to submit questions. We will do some polling in the middle of the presentation and, ask you to participate in that as well.

So our topic today, sustaining sustainability. We're gonna talk about operational excellence, and I'll get into that here in just, just a second. Again, my name is Mark Mocle, as Regina mentioned. My contact information is here. It will be shared in the post webinar information.

And, hope you'll, reach out if you have any questions or follow-up topics that you'd like to discuss.

Couple of reference points, back before the Ashey conference in August. We did a couple of webinars. I wanted to draw your attention to those as well.

Both of those webinars were very much focused on strategic asset management, and the why, talking about investment needs, capital investment and so on. I encourage you to visit the ASHA website. Those can be downloaded and viewed as well if you weren't able to attend.

And then as we tee up today's conversation, I really wanna hone in on the sustainability question.

You may be wondering what does this mean, sustainability?

And traditionally, in the industry, we know that sustainability is very focused on energy reduction, efficiency in the buildings, continuous commissioning, so on and so forth.

In this case, I wanna focus on when I say this, sustaining, sustainability.

We're gonna talk about the operational elements.

And my point of this is that, we can have the best building automation systems. We can have the best smart infrastructure. We can have all the technology in play but we also need to have excellence on the operational level.

It's important to be technicians that we're tracking our preventive maintenance that were changing the filters in the air handlers.

We're cleaning the coils. All of those things, the work that the technicians people are doing and touching the equipment, also supports sustainability. So that's the connection.

Again, talking about operational excellence.

I draw your attention here. This is a snapshot of an article that was published in this month's version of Ashey's HFM magazine.

Which if you subscribe, you'll either get a printed copy or an electronic copy. Again, I wanna draw your attention to that as an additional resource.

So speaking of ashy and tying this to some strategic initiatives, this is the these are the strategic initiatives as published by the American society of healthcare engineers, and all of these are important in our industry.

The optimization of healthcare facility operations, member inclusion, career advancement, succession, planning, etcetera, and then capital planning. We've actually talked a lot about Apple planting in those previous webinars that I mentioned.

So today, we're gonna drill in, on what I call a more tactical approach. Or, back to basics. And that is the optimization of healthcare facility operations.

And you see two subsets here.

With a focus on environmental sustainability decarbonization.

We know that is, coming, coming at us harder and harder. It's gonna be part of our, workload going forward.

But specifically in the second bullet point, resources and tools for technical staff and managers to run facilities efficiently and effectively.

Again, that is the connection between these two things. So with that in mind, we wanna talk a little bit about where we are in the industry.

And I think these are very common issues. We talked about them a lot. The financial hardships that we're all facing, that's very well known in the industry, aging workforce, aging population, aging population means increased demand for healthcare services.

And at the same time, aging infrastructure.

So there's a lot of different elements that were that are coming at us.

It's it in terms of macro issues in the industry.

And at the same time, we're seeing some outdated systems and processes. We're losing that, inherent knowledge as as folks like me with gray hair, eggs of the industry.

And in some cases, we're less efficient than we should be. Again, from an operational perspective.

So with all of that in mind, as we move into the discussion, I do wanna define strategic asset management. I think this is important.

Strategic asset management is about the management of the maintenance.

So, as our technicians are doing work, as our facility engineers are doing work, it's very important that we can manage that efficiently We can track those costs, and we can contribute to the business planning for the facility based on that information.

Now strategic asset management is not just a software platform.

We're gonna talk today, about software, but we're also gonna talk about business processes and the culture. So the people process and technology, that trifecta comes to the forefront when we have this discussion.

You may also think of strategic asset management. You might have also heard of enterprise asset management. In my mind, they are synonymous with each other, and again, this is a commitment to a new culture in how we wanna manage the facilities.

I'd like to use this framework to set the stage for the rest of the conversation, and there'll be a poll question coming here, in just a just a few seconds.

This hierarchy of maturity, this is actually developed. If if you've had any psycho psychology training or studies, maslow's hierarchy of needs. And what it says is that human beings, as as we progress, we can't be self fulfilled if we don't have food and shelter. So there is a hierarchy of needs that that we need as human beings. And I've adapted this to discuss strategic asset management, the hierarchy of needs.

Now at the top, we talk about a fully optimized building.

Lowest possible energy consumption, lowest possible carbon emissions, optimized and repeatable capital planning, and on down the list, What this ultimately means is we have complete situational awareness about what's happening in the building, how our technicians are performing their tasks, are we doing on preventive maintenance and so on and so forth?

A big part of the vision for facility management is, again, ESG initiatives, so decarbonization, energy reduction, reliability centered maintenance, predictive maintenance, All of those advanced facility management techniques require some basic blocking and tackling.

So if you look at the right hand side of this triangle, you're gonna see three words, reactive, preventive, and predictive.

You can't be predictive if you haven't gone through this this transition. Right? And as a quick example, I had a facility director. Some couple of years ago in a presentation asked me, do you have resources to apply vibration sensors to the equipment?

It's not a, an offering we have. But I said, I'd know people in the industry, but tell me what problem you're trying to solve. And he said, well, I'm new to this facility. We don't have a functional CMS system. I'm trying to get my hands around the building. And I thought it would make sense to do a vibration analysis on the equipment to see if we had any issues.

My answer was that's a good thing to do But let's go back to the beginning because first, we have to deal with some basic blocking and tackling.

Why don't you have an accurate inventory of the assets? Why isn't the CMS system up and running and all of those things? So that's been a foundational element of basic compliance and operations having an accurate inventory and so on, and then moving up into productivity and then benchmarking and investment and ultimately the prioritization of investment in the facility. So there are steps, and we're gonna walk through each of these in the next, the next segment.

So with this in mind and looking at this framework, I'd like to open up the first poll question.

And that question is How would you rank the asset management maturity of your organization today? And you can see the selections And please note there's multiple there are multiple poll questions in this form. Please only fill out the first question.

We will come back to this as we progress through the presentation.

So we'll take a couple of seconds here.

And folks be be honest in this assessment.

Oftentimes when I talk with facility leaders, I'll ask, how's your inventory? Do you have a good grasp on it? And the answer is, well, it's pretty good. Or, yeah, it's not too bad.

And I usually drill in, well, what does that mean? And what we often find is that there are holes in the inventory story. So maybe one facility is very strong. Another facility, perhaps not so much.

Or we're not applying data standards to those, etcetera.

But I'll be curious to see.

If you look at this framework, where would you rank yourself in terms of the maturity of your organization in your asset management journey.

We'll leave that open for a few more seconds, and then we'll take a look at the results.

And I'm not sure how we're doing on the responses, Regina. Can you see that?

I know I'm unable to see them.

Curtis or April?

We have about seven people responding. Don't know if you wanna wait a little more.

Let's go ahead and share those. Let's take a look at it. We we may have a different mix of folks on the call, but I will kinda progress through that.

Okay. So completely reactive. It's a small data set, but that's not surprising. Completely reactive.

We have five out of seven, say, moving react to preventive and preventive. Okay. So, again, a small sample size, and that's okay.

What is important to note is This is not uncommon. And I've I've had the chance over the last eight years to tour hundreds of hospitals and work with clients across the country large systems and small, community hospitals.

This is a very typical, response profile, even if it may not be statistically huge, not surprised by those results. So that's okay.

You're not alone, so to speak. So let's go ahead and start, start this journey then and talk through the the steps.

So this part of the presentation is really about back to basics.

Thinking about all the great things that we want to do I like to think of strategic asset management as think if you if you like football analogies, think of an offensive plan for the n and the NFL.

It's great, but if you don't have a good offensive line, if you don't have those fundamental techniques, If the center doesn't know how to snap the ball, then everything else falls apart. So we're gonna start at the very beginning, and we're gonna walk through this journey and hopefully share some key insights, for you as you as you move down that path.

So if you think about all of the assets in the, in the facility.

That's this big gray box in the middle of the screen.

Whether it's clinical engineering, or whether it's facility engineering, there's a whole bunch of stuff in the building. It was put there for a reason.

And it is part of making that facility perform.

And so the questions that we'd like to ask here, the high level question is Where are you today with your work order system? Do you have a functional system? Do you have an accurate inventory?

What what do you believe your work order accuracy is, are your technicians using the system? Are they logging their notes and logging their time? If not, why not? Is it a technology issue? You don't have a mobile app? Or is it a training issue, or is it a deficiency in the platform itself?

How are you doing on do you have good transparency to your preventive maintenance?

How are you performing in your compliance surveys?

Is it a paper process, or do you have digital records?

And ultimately, is it the right time to optimize or re optimize the existing work order system or is it time to replace?

Again, this is kind of a self assessment of where are we today and and how is our current, baseline platform performing?

And this is the foundation. For everything else that we're gonna talk about. And it's that foundation that we talked about in the first slide.

The second question then to ask is How do you want to manage your facility? So question one, where are we today?

Question two, where do we wanna be? Where would we like to be? Do we want to be, to move from reactive to preventive and ultimately predictive? I hope the answer she asked.

So again, inventory accuracy, do we want to have an accurate inventory? Yes, we do.

Do we want to be reactive Hopefully, no, we don't. We'd like to be more preventive and predictive.

Are we using an OEM, original equipment manufacturer or an AEM maintenance strategy. AEM is alternative equipment maintenance and management.

This is a big decision for the organization to make.

Teaser, I'm gonna show you why I believe that AEM is the best path forward in the in the next couple of slides. But again, that's a business decision. Do we wanna be OEM or AEM? And there are ramifications to both.

Do we wanna be centralized or decentralized?

This is a very, very common sticking point for a lot of organizations.

If you're in a multi hospital system, is each hospital running independently with its own work order system, with its own data standards? Or do we wanna have a centralized more corporate, structure so that we're managing each of the facilities in the same way as best we can. Again, the trend is towards centralization, and and I'm gonna recommend that is the path to go so that we get efficiencies in our facility management data.

Naming, tagging And then this is the great question. What is an asset?

At what level do we wanna measure our inventory?

Is every, variable frequency drive that's attached to the air handler, is that its own asset? Yes or no? There's no right or wrong answer there, but it depends on again how do you want to manage the facility?

Do you maintain every VFT separately, or do you do a preventive maintenance on the whole asset? So again, these are business discussions.

Answering these questions and creating the data and the process standards behind it empowers you again to move further in the journey.

So the next question, do this is it? Right? Do we know what assets we have and how they're performing?

So this is when we talk about inventory validation.

Have you performed a facility condition assessment in recent times? Have you performed and inventory validation exercise.

Those two are very similar.

But again, it all speaks to What are the next steps in in validating this inventory?

Do we know the make model with serial number of our equipment? Do we know the engineering capacity? Meaning, is it a ten thousand CFM air handler or is it a twenty thousand CFM air handler? That can also have an impact to how we maintain the equipment.

A rooftop unit is different than an indoor air handler. If you have a desiccant wheel, again, that changes, the way we look at those assets. But do we know that? Do we know when it was installed?

Do we have expected useful life information?

And again, I'm speaking to the situational awareness. So this is really our operational performance baseline, which is gonna lead us again to pull question two.

Hopefully, we'll get more responses. But for the seven folks that did respond, please continue to share your, information Do you know what assets you have and how they are performing?

Worst case, don't know, don't have any idea. All the way up to a fully accurate inventory and business processes to maintain that inventory.

And while you're answering that question, what do I mean by maintaining the inventory?

Specifically, if we take out a pump and we put a new pump in, is there a defined process that the technician will notify somebody so that we can decommission the old asset in the work order system and reestablish the new asset in the work order system so that we can begin performing preventative maintenance from the first day the asset is installed.

Simple in concept. This is typically a big issue in the industry, a lot of times, we bring on who are new buildings or new assets, and we fail to get that information into the CMS right from day one. So, Curtis, maybe you can show us the results. Let's see how this came in.

Okay. Pretty much a mid level district. Oh, we got more. We got thirteen this time. So thank you all for jumping in.

I've got two folks, less than fifty percent, barely using CMS.

Most people are in the mid range, the fifty to eighty percent. I'm not prized by that. Again, that's, that is a typical, place to be.

And we've got some folks that are eighty percent or better, so that's that's good news.

To me, this highlights the topic of this process and reinforcing I don't typically quote the joint commission in this regard, but if you see it cite it, I'm gonna use that same analogy with your technicians and training your staff If you change something, if you see something, please tell somebody, right, so that we can make sure that once we've established an inventory baseline, that we're maintaining that, but we don't create more work where we don't lose the efficacy of that inventory data. So, again, I'm not surprised by the answers. I'm encouraged that we've got some folks that are moving further down that value chain. So, why is this so important?

We're gonna talk in the next session about risk ranking and criticality.

So this is a fundamental requirement of accreditation, to maintain a written inventory I'd like to say, digital inventory is better, but maintain an accurate inventory of the assets, and then also do a assessment of those assets. And we're gonna spend a little bit of time here because to me, this is the next highest level, critical step in this journey is to have this risk ranking in place.

So CMS inventory risk assessment, have you applied standardized risk rankings for your assets?

And in this case, we're gonna talk about criticality to the business and some of the elements that we typically look at or utility, which is, okay, this asset was installed for a reason. What does it do?

What if it fails?

How much does it cost or how much does it costing to maintain?

How much does it cost to replace? Do we have redundancy?

So, for example, Med Gas, there are requirements to have redundancy in place there's n plus one requirements in in certain asset types. In other asset types, it's not a requirement.

Now redundancy is not a mandatory thing for every asset. We can't afford to do that, but knowing whether we have redundancy or not can be a critical factor.

Another factor that most people overlook, end of life. So if you're looking at your fire alarm, your security systems, any you're building automation, any of those digital platforms that run software and use software are potentially vulnerable to cyber attack. They may no longer be supported by the manufacturer. I have seen multiple hospitals where I go in and the fire alarm is technologically obsolete, and folks are buying parts on eBay to keep this fire alarm going. That is a critical critical input.

So again, what I wanna focus on here is not just probability of failure, but what happens if something fails.

And the key piece here is that the that equipment was installed for a reason. And we need to make sure we understand what's the impact if it fails.

Final note, it risks, Ricky. I encourage you to include your control team in this risk ranking. So if we're talking about HDAC, if we're talking about different things, invite other people outside the facility world to be a part of this risk ranking. And you might find that you get a lot of support. Especially from the clinical side of the house. The nurses, the the staff, and the clinical engineering even, in this case, infection control.

So, again, this is a compliance issue, risk ranking, identification of life safety assets, and so on. I've listed the appropriate, references to, you know, ultimately leading back to CMS, but if your joint commission, DMV, the appropriate articles are listed here. The HVAP, HVAP, and HCHC, and I'm dropping the acronym now for CHC, but they went through, some type of a merger. I'm not sure if that's the the the correct note, but, we can take a look at that if you need additional assistance. I'm assuming most people on the call are probably joint commission or DMV.

So let's talk about risk ranking. This is the framework that we have vetted with the joint commission, as a reference point. And as with the joint commission, they didn't tell us it was approved because they endorse it, but they didn't tell us it was wrong. So we took that as a good sign.

And again, When you speak in engineering language, if we talk about risk, most people are thinking probability of failure. What's the probability? Was the risk that it will fail?

To me, that is the age of the equipment. That's the condition of the equipment. That's the PM history, all of those factors combined to create a probability of failure.

This risk ranking is what happens if an asset fails. So it's a very different perspective, and I found that to be very helpful in communicating investment needs with non facility leadership.

So as an example, if we look at a facility at million square foot, you know, acute, non acute campus, we might see anywhere from fifty to a hundred or a hundred plus air handlers, serving all different capacities and all different occupancy types.

All of those would start out in this race risk ranking as a number six on the utility side. It's an environmental support asset.

The risk application tying this to NFPA would be disruption of comfort, average maintenance, and average redundancy.

And as we go through and do a condition assessment, or the client does their own assessment, what we wanna do is isolate those air handlers that serve critical spaces.

So if I have an air handler that serves or, ICU, an isolation space, or sterile processing, or pharmacy, any of those things, I would actually re identify that air handler as an infection control asset where the risk application now becomes injury or even death. And that's not to be overly dramatic. It's not to say that the sky is falling, but I want to make sure that I can see the air handlers that serve those most critical spaces as compared to an air handler that serves a professional office building. If that air handler fails, it's okay. We can send everybody home. If the air handler and ORs one through eight fails, we have a massive loss of revenue, and we have a very serious induction control issue.

So think about this risk ranking as a as a way to prioritize, those assets based on the functions that they provide.

Again, the average maintenance, the redundancy.

This is where redundancy comes in. And ultimately, what we're saying is If this asset were to fail, how long would it take us to restore service? Again, professional office building, No big deal. But a no hard, an or, air handler, we can't wait seven weeks to get that up and running. We either need to get temporary service, or whatever we have to do, but how quickly can we restore service to that area?

Final emphasis here Consistency and risk ranking across facilities is very, very important.

So, again, if you're in a multi system, I'm sorry, a multi hospital system.

We don't wanna have air handlers serving professional office buildings at one hospital with a higher risk ranking than an air handler that serves in isolation space at another. So again, this speaks to centralization and standardization.

Of that data.

There are additional references here to NFPA. I'm not gonna go into great detail here. But just as a side note, remember that CMS has, the most recent adaptation of NFPA is of NFP ninety nine.

Is the two thousand twelve edition, and that defines a very basic risk ranking profile, not only for assets, for the spaces.

So if you haven't done that already, having a risk assessment of your spaces, is also a key function of this, and these definitions are here.

We have embedded the NFPA standards into our risk ranking. Our risk ranking is a little bit more complex, but there's a direct connection here again from a compliance perspective to tie those assets to the spaces.

And speaking of that, that is the real secret here. Air handler twenty one, nobody cares about air handler twenty one being connected to a highly critical space, like an OR.

I can now use that NFPA space reference to also prioritize maintenance and even capital investment on the air handler. So any opportunity that you have to tie an infrastructure asset to the spaces and the services that it provides that creates a much better understanding of why it's important and hopefully help to justify the inevitable return on investment Why should we replace air handler twenty one? Air handler twenty one is tied to a massive amount of revenue for the hospital. And it's clinically important to the services that are being provided.

So this is all available in the information. I hope this is a helpful context.

Because to me, this is one of the one of the biggest areas, for improvement in our industry.

This is an example of a space map where, again, in this, this is just a snapshot taken from a client's, drawing set. But I would encourage you to approach the zone mapping and the criticality of your spaces the same manner that you would manage your life safety drawings. So if you think about a site plan, and then you have life safety drawings which designate all your smoke and fire barriers and all the life safety equipment, why not use that same approach and create zone maps so that you know exactly which air handlers are serving which spaces And oh, by the way, which exhaust fans are in those spaces, which VAVs and fan coil units, anything you can do to isolate and understand, that, you know, that lowly exhaust fan that sits on on top of the roof.

If it's venting or if it's exhausting a critical space and it fails, and then you lose control of your test and balance in that space, That exhaust fan, it might be a five thousand dollar fan, but that fan has a very significant impact on the overall pressure relationship in the building. And so we need to know that and use that to prioritize our maintenance and our eventual replacement, capital planning.

So I'm beating this topic up pretty good, or pretty well, but I hope that you understand the significance of it and why we're we're approaching it this way.

So that's gonna bring us to poll question. Number three, do you have risk ranking standards in place and have you deployed that risk ranking to your asset inventory.

Question number or answer number one, no. It's too much work. I don't know where to start up to and including a fully defined risk ranking for your assets and spaces.

In accordance with NFE ninety nine, version two thousand twelve.

Questions one or answers one and two might not seem appropriate, but I bring those to the table because I just recently had a conversation with a respected client and was asking them about AEM risk ranking. And the answer was, we're not gonna do that. It's too much work.

I was a little surprised to hear that, but it's not the first time I've heard it. And I guess my point here is It's really not optional to do risk ranking, but I would not sit here and say do it just because you have to. I really truly believe that getting to this point in the journey and applying that risk ranking, there are so many other benefits from this.

It helps you to prioritize really all of the work that you do, all of the work that the maintenance teams do again, based on that criticality.

So at this point, How are we doing Curtis on responses? What do you think?

Let's see what we got here.

I will be very curious to see risk ranking. And if, I'm hoping maybe some questions come in on that as well.

Because I'm happy to talk through them. Okay.

I'm glad nobody said yes to number one. Thank you for that. Not sure where to start. Okay. So for a couple of those folks, hopefully, at least the discussion and the framework that we just showed, gives you an idea on where to start.

In that regard, I would be happy to answer any questions you have or set up some time to talk you through that process.

Number three, working on the deployment and basic risk ranking, and we've got one person that all the way up to number five. So this is a pretty good distribution.

So great, great responses there.

In conclusion of this piece, and thank you all for responding to that, I would suggest this from a risk ranking perspective.

As they say in the military, we're here to defend democracy not to practice it.

And I use that often when I advise clients on establishing a risk ranking framework.

You have to do some of the work by committee. It's important to get buy in from infection control from your staff. If, you know, if you could use the framework, did we just present it? Great?

If you wanna do something different, that's also okay.

The best risk ranking standard you can use or that you can deploy is the one that you will actually use. And people will, understand what it means.

Oftentimes, I see organizations get so wrapped around the axle of finding what criteria they're going to use, that it never actually gets deployed.

And my point in that is Get the input, lay down the framework, but drive that forward as leaders in your facilities that it's more important to get a risk ranking in place, even if it needs to be modified as data comes in, I have seen some organizations spend years debating the framework, but never actually getting it deployed. So again, this is really a key point to drive that forward.

Now why is this so important? Let's move into the next section.

And again, sorry, compliance note, risk ranking is a requirement for CMS accreditation.

Doesn't matter if you're an OEM or AEM maintenance strategy.

Risk ranking is just part of, part of the game. But hopefully, I'm giving you some tools that show we can go much further than that.

So when I take that same inventory assessment slide, and we use the framework that we just talked about, this is what we create for ourselves.

So we're not just doing risk rankings so we can check the box with the joint commission or DMV and say that we're using risk ranking.

This is what it allows us to do. So when we apply this risk ranking and we create our rules of what risk do we wanna track, it allows us to isolate our life safety. If you're on the clinical side, it's radiology, lasers, and and so on.

And then we create this pareto chart, if you will, or this, I guess the parietal charts the right one, but it's a hierarchy of where we wanna focus.

Now, where I like to focus on this, this is a fundamental part of an AEM strategy.

Now why do I advocate for AEM?

In the first case, again, I've had multiple clients prospective clients, tell me, we don't we're not messing with AEMs, too much work. We're gonna do OEM maintenance.

The danger is I have not seen anybody yet that truly has a complete catalog of all the OEM the original equipment maintenance, requirements for NASA. And if I walk into an aging facility, and I've got air handlers and boilers and chillers are thirty years old.

The chances that the maintenance requirements for those, based on the original manufacturer are in the CMS and are being followed are very low. So the reality is without being too harsh, Whether you say your AEM or OEM, practically speaking, you're in an AEM program, unless you can truly prove that you're performing OEM recommended maintenance on all of your assets.

So I was just at a conference a few weeks ago. If you're familiar with the name George Mills, from his time at the joint commission. He gave a presentation, even though he's with JLL now, he was updating on some joint commission activity.

And he actually talked about a EEM, and he showed a picture of a hand crank water pump. Right? And he said, If that is at your facility and you are using it to draw water to service the facility, you have to show that you're doing preventive maintenance on that.

And again, it it it was a joke, adjuster, if you will, but to draw attention, and he asked the audience, What percentage of preventive maintenance are you required to perform for accreditation?

And the answer is a hundred percent.

So if you say you're doing OEM theoretically, not even theoretically, practically, you have to be able to show that you're doing it for all of the assets.

So I'm beating this up again, but this is an important point. The operational benefits of AEM come forward when you apply the risk ranking to the inventory.

And and just as a quick note in case somebody's gonna zing me on this one, life safety assets, as deemed by accreditation are not eligible for AEM. So for your generators, your automatic transfer switches, fire alarm, fire suppression, so on and so forth. You have to maintain those by OEM standards.

Everything else, you have the ability to choose. Do I wanna do AEM? I'm sorry. Do I wanna do OEM or do I wanna do something different?

So final note on this slide, if you look at that yellow box, the high risk assets, this is where I really like to focus with clients both operationally and for capital investment, an air handler that serves the OR.

The roof that is on top of, an acute space.

Those are assets that I actually would elevate to this high risk area.

We may not want we're not they're not life safety assets, but we may want to manage those with that level of scrutiny.

Why a roof? Well, nobody cares about a roof until it starts leaking. But if I get water in an acute space, We have some real serious issues, not just cost issues, but we have infection control issues.

So again, I hope you see the benefit of this risk ranking It actually allows us to to prioritize this, investment on the on the operational side.

Quick note.

I love this this note. Again, I'm drawing attention to compliance.

Do what you say and say what you do.

The point of George Mills common about a hundred percent. If you say you're doing something, you have to be able to document and show that you're doing it. This risk ranking when applied and documented in a policy, this is the risk ranking that we're using, and this is why we're doing it and so on and so forth. That provides that necessary documentation.

When we take the same risk ranking framework, Now, and we attach one more layer of information, which is predicted useful life, that one additional data point Now we actually can use the same risk ranking criteria, the same framework to inform our strategic capital planning.

So this is a fundamental element or solution where, again, I wanna focus on those assets that are most critical to operations.

And now I've got operational and capital alignment all built on the same, the same data flow. This is where we start to transform facility management.

So side note on the capital side, don't forget about technological obsolescence.

So if you have a fire alarm, it's working fine, but but it's no longer supported by the manufacturer, I would flag that as a critical event, and I would use that to prioritize investment, investment over just about anything else. What do I mean by technological obsolescence?

It's like a phone. Right? The phone may be fine for a long time, but eventually the new iOS that comes from Apple, if you're an Apple person, won't run on the old phone anymore, even though it's a perfectly good piece of equipment.

So any of your equipment that has software that requires updates, cyber security, technological, techno, technological obsolescence is another critical factor to consider.

So when we take this all together, Strategic asset management optimized with this information prioritized capital and optimized operational I can now participate fully in a discussion about sustainability, about deep organization, If I know my chillers are due for replacement in four years, I have that information. I can start to engineer a better solution. So that when it comes time to replace those, we can we can actually recognize the benefits.

If I'm in a reactive mode and I don't have visibility, and I run to fail, and the children fails in August, I'm not gonna have time to engineer a better solution. I'm gonna do whatever I can to simply restore operations. So again, that's the strategic benefit.

Now at Brytely, you may have seen that on the, the, the framework slide. We have two solutions that we bring into this space.

On the CMS side, it's called the Works Hub. That is a platform dedicated to health care. And it's wholly encompasses the specific compliance requirements for healthcare.

Origin is our strategic asset management. It's the capital planning tool. In both of these cases, that risk based inventory, that the accurate inventory with the risk ranking, is what allows us to inform all of these decisions.

So in this case, we're leveraging operational data to inform infrastructure investment and to inform all of the other strategic initiatives that we have in front of us. Which begs the question. Are you managing your facility or is your facility managing you? Right? That's kind of a tongue in cheek way to say it.

Very, very quickly on the work sub, again, dashboards. We wanna have visibility to this in terms of compliance, work order performance.

Capital investment needs and so on. When we look at origin, we're looking at deferred maintenance.

What percentage of our assets are in deferred status?

What's the risk profile?

So deferred maintenance, assets that have exceeded industry expected useful life, every facility has them. And that's okay, but I would always like to know what assets are in that. If it's a fire alarm, fire suppression, generator, ATS.

I don't wanna see that go significantly beyond expected useful life. So having this data deferred maintenance, risk ranking in place, what's in this deferred bucket? What critical pieces of equipment should we be looking at for either enhanced preventive maintenance, re rebuild, renovate, or even replace those assets? So that we can mitigate that risk.

When we look at the national level data, again, we can now look at this across the country and say, what percentage of assets are in this status? In our database, with over a hundred million square close to a hundred million square feet, Fifty percent of the major mechanical electrical plumbing assets in our portfolio have exceeded expected useful life. That is a big, big accumulation of risk. And again, we wanna be able to go back and dissect what are those assets and why, and how can we, build a better business plan for the facility.

So that leads us to the poll question four, and then we'll do a short wrap up. So at the Ashey, twenty one national conference, so two years ago, forty three percent of respondents reported that the pandemic had definitely impacted facility budgets in a negative way.

Now in twenty twenty three, for the folks on the call. Has the situation gotten better or worse?

And what this really speaks to is aging infrastructure And it also speaks to the fact that as we froze capital during the pandemic, we also saw increased pressure to reduce staff. Right? What happens when you reduce staff?

You reduce your ability to perform preventive maintenance or predictive maintenance.

A lot of folks came to us in the pandemic. Do you have FTE data? Do you have information that can help us validate our staffing needs?

And the real answer folks is that it's the assets in the building that drive the workload. It's the assets in the building that drive the compliance needs. So again, understanding what's in the building, how it's performing, and building this risk based framework allows you to better justify the needs. Simply put, if you have two thousand exit signs in your facility, You have to look at those exit signs every month, and that's a certain number of hours. So let the assets help you build your business case.

Based on risk and based on data.

So let's see what hap is happening from a budget perspective. Again, both capital and operation.

Not surprising.

So one person is better. Since then, I wanna know what the secret sauce is. So maybe you can reach out afterwards. That's great news. I'm glad to hear that. Neutral.

And then the majority of the respondents worse since twenty twenty one pressure to further reduce debt.

And at number one, or, I'm sorry, number four.

The two folks had answered yes on number one and number four, I need to know how you're doing it.

Not surprising. This is what I'm seeing in the industry. Number three, most people are under further pressure to reduce spend. And if you go back to this risk based framework and having inventory in your system and knowing the work that needs to be done, we need to do a better job in the industry of defending our position, but also we need to do a better job of educating the non facility leadership Why is it, or what, why is there an expectation to continuously reduce cost? It's not compressible.

Because most of the work, if not all, we do, mandatory. And the only way I know to defend against that again is to have the data fully aligned and prepared so that when you sit at the big table where the budget decisions are made, you've got that situational awareness that you can share with the non facility leadership.

So, couple of key things to wrap up the session.

Selecting a provider, a strategic asset management provider.

These are best practices. Obviously, I'm with Britney.

And I have, my bias is in that regard. But before becoming to coming to brightly, I was also part of working with a lot of different clients and a lot of different systems.

So what I look for in a strategic asset management provider subject matter expertise.

There are a lot of solution providers that work in multiple industries. Healthcare is different. So understanding compliance, having ties directly to the joint commission DMV accreditation requirements.

That is fundamentally, important in healthcare.

Reporting and dashboard constructed in a way that will be meaningful to, your surveyors. Right? Risk ranking. We just beat that up. Having that risk ranking predefined in the system so that when you put an asset in your work order system on our from our standpoint, that risk ranking is already applied so that, again, we wanna facilitate a a quicker configuration and a more efficient deployment.

AEM PM, do you have the ability in the system to document those assets that are in an AM policy and plan and can you report on those?

ILSM, icra, Pickra, tying work orders to those factors So if you have a deficiency from a compliance perspective, we should know that that deficiency could potentially trigger an interim life safety event etcetera, etcetera. So I'm speaking again to subject matter expertise, and then sustainability and decarbonization.

What we're really talking about here is Do we have visibility to the assets? Do we know, what energy consumption is? Do we know what the energy savings opportunities are? Again, all of this data comes together in that situational awareness. So if you're interviewing potential solution providers, focus on subject matter expertise, Do they understand health care and does the system support the things that you need to do?

Has practices part two, deployment standardized and optimized workflows.

See the previous, thirty slides or so. The methodology that I outlined here as process for optimizing your assets, that should be inherently built into your CMMS platform.

So ease of configuration.

If I'm sitting down with the client, I don't wanna say just to the client, we'll teach you how to build your own PMs.

What I'd rather say to the client is, when do you wanna start the appropriate PM for this type of an asset? So in the works of in our offering, we have a predefined library of AEM tasks and schedules. For all of the asset types that are eligible for that. So our goal here, is to have that available so that you can turn it on when you're ready. And then very specifically, if you think about rounding, or or inspection testing and maintenance, your CMS provider should not be asking you how do you wanna maintain your generators?

We know that. The joint commission, CMS tells us exactly how we have to maintain, inspect, test, our generators.

So again, that should not be an exercise that you as the owner have to build a hundred percent your CMS provider should know enough and how to pre configure so that you can spend your time, on, you know, when do you wanna turn it on? Versus trying to build it out.

Ease of configuration, we talked about that in sourced configuration.

There are some platforms in the industry. They provide the software and then they hire a third party to come in and do the configuration.

I believe the best practice if we're gonna tie this to subject matter expertise is that we can, the people that know the software, know the customer are also doing the configuration.

Part three, kinda walking through. We're getting more into the features and functions.

But ease of use, right, efficiency, predefined, the fewer clicks the better to open and close a work order.

Mobile application, including data redundancy so that as technicians move in and out of Wi Fi, there's not a loss of data.

That is very, very critical as a lot of our spaces don't have good wifi coverage.

Operation benchmarking, The standardization of data and the standardization of workflows allows us to take data from multiple sites and create those analytical fuse so we can compare from site to site. And then, lastly, stay away from over customization.

So minimized customization.

I've seen some solutions in the industry that are selling customization as a feature, I tend to advise clients, don't customize unless you absolutely have to. If you've got a good provider with subject matter expertise, and with an efficient configuration of the system, you shouldn't have to do a lot of customization to suit your needs. Again, generators or generators Why would you have to have a customized workflow just for generators?

Customization makes long term maintenance much more difficult.

And then finally, the capital planning, budgeting, and forecasting, I call this dynamic asset condition. It's the ability, in this case, it's our origin platform to actually use the data from the work order system as modifiers to expected useful life. Work order history, PM history, automatic calculation of predicted useful life. That's that seamless flow.

And in this case, It's it doesn't require third party input to tell the system when you wanna replace it. The system actually makes recommendations on when assets should be considered for replacement.

It allows us to track deferred maintenance. It allows us to model investment spend, and it allows us to create a very strategic view of both operational and capital investment.

And it's all prioritized based on that risk ranking scenario that we spent some time talking about.

So, again, the workshop a little advertisement for Brightley. The Worksub is our health care CMS solution.

Origin is our strategic asset management, capital planning, solution. Think of it as a fitbit. It sits on top of the workshop, and really gives us that strategic intelligence.

And and all of the subject matter expertise that we've talked about here is actually embedded in these solutions, and, that's why I think it's a very, very powerful tool for the industry.

So here's some connections to brightly. If you wanna learn more about those platforms, that information is here. I encourage you to go look at that. And then we're gonna leave with a poll question.

Based on this short conversation, what brightly strategic asset management solutions would you be most interested in learning about? We talked about the Workshub, CMS, capital planning would be origin, We do offer, another solution called Stream, which is really focusing in on energy management, measuring your utility bills and so on. Not time to cover that today, but that is also an offering that we bring to the market that just further consolidates this concept strategic asset management. And if you're not sure, that's okay, please reach out to us, reach out to me, and we can discuss that as well.

So Curtis, go ahead and show that up. Or let's keep that information. Let's see what you got here.

Okay. So we got some interest across the board.

Thank you for filling that out. We'll take that information.

And in terms of contact information, please don't hesitate to reach out to me you will receive a survey after this webinar. The same questions will be included.

And I'm happy to offer my time. No charge.

A thirty minute conversation. Would you like to set up a consult a consulting session with me? I would be more than happy to walk through this with you. And I'll give you my unbiased and, professional opinion on any of the questions that you might have. So any of the folks that were unsure Please don't hesitate to reach out. I'm happy to be a resource for you in that regard.

So I'll leave it that. I left only a couple of minutes, Regina. I'm sorry. But do we have any questions or comments from the group for holding wrap up?

We do have a few, but just before jumping, for those that are on the call, if we unable to get to your question. If you do put it in the chat, we'll be able to get those questions, and then we'll be able to get back to you. So if you have opportunity, feel free to put it into the Q and A box and we'll get back to you. Okay, Mark.

I'm gonna go quickly here. We're performing OEM maintenance on our equipment. Can you more about the risks and benefits of an AEM program.

So in that sense, the risk, there's two risks. The risk of an OEM program is that you actually probably don't have sufficient documentation to cover all of the OEM requirements.

So that is a risk from an accreditation standpoint.

Most people are afraid of AEM because they think it's risky. It's actually inherently lower risk because what you're basically telling the joint commission or DMV, we're not doing OEM. We understand that. We know what's in the building, and we're using this as an alternative, based on that performance. And then we're tracking it. We can see that by altering our PM strategies, we are or are not increasing risk through break fix and so on. So the risk of not going AEM to me is higher than the risk of actually getting into an AEM program and and and being I guess clear about what is and isn't happening in the building.

Great question.

Alright. I'll do one more here before we time out, our capital budgets have been somewhat frozen. What data can we use to document our operational budgets?

Again, I would tie very, very great question. I think the we tie it right back to the assets themselves. If you know what's in the building and you know the compliance requirements that are there, the best way to defend those budgets is to actually spilled that business plan. You know, we're spending x amount of FTEs on rounding every month.

It costs us this much money to do our generator test. The reality is all of that workload is not discretionary, so the budgets cannot be discretionary either So we have to look at the building. The building will tell us how much work needs to be done to properly maintain that facility. So I go back to the assets, not just the square footage, but I wanna know what's in the building, and I can take it from there.

Great question. Thank you so much. I just wanna conclude by thanking you, Mark. And letting everybody on the call know that the webinar will be available soon. Look out for an email with the follow-up information on how to view that recording. Thank you again for attending today's webinar. Everyone, and have a great day.