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"It's all about that value to the customer in figuring out how can we solve the problem in the fastest way possible? And then how can we train our technicians to be more like energy engineers? And how can we train our energy engineers to be more like technicians?"
—Leslie Beu
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Episode 150 is a conversation with Leslie Beu and Lawrence Trifiletti from LONG Building Technologies.
Episode 150 features LONG Building Technologies and is our second episode in the Case Study series looking at real-life, large-scale deployments of smart building technologies. These are not marketing fluff stories, these are lessons from leaders that others can put into use in their smart buildings programs. Leslie Beu and Lawrence Trifiletti talk honestly about the rollout of their FDD-driven service, diving into the impacts on their technicians, operations, customers, and overall business.
You can find Leslie and Lawrence on LinkedIn.
Enjoy!
Music credits: There Is A Reality by Common Tiger—licensed under an Music Vine Limited Pro Standard License ID: S468569-15083.
Note: transcript was created using an imperfect machine learning tool and lightly edited by a human (so you can get the gist). Please forgive errors!
[00:00:00] Leslie Beu: It's all about that value to the customer in figuring out how can we solve the problem in the fastest way possible? And then how can we train our technicians to be more like energy engineers? And how can we train our energy engineers to be more like technicians?
[00:00:16] James Dice: Hey friends, if you liked the Nexus podcast, the best way to continue the learning is to join our community. There are three ways to do that. First, you can join the Nexus Pro Membership. It's our global community of smart building professionals. We have monthly events, paywall deep dive content, and a private chat room, and it's just 35 dollars a month.
[00:00:34] Second, you can upgrade from the Pro Membership to our courses offering. It's headlined by our flagship course, the Smart Building Strategist, and we're building a catalog of courses taught by world leading experts on each topic under the Smart Buildings umbrella. Third, and finally, our marketplace is how we connect leading vendors with buyers looking for their solutions.
[00:00:54] The links are below in the show notes. And now let's go on to the podcast.[00:01:00]
[00:01:01] Hello and welcome to the Nexus podcast. This is the next episode in our series diving into case studies of real life. Large scale deployments of smart building technologies. Like I said in the last, uh, one of these, these are not marketing fluff stories. We're here to share lessons from leaders that others can put into use in their smart buildings programs.
[00:01:20] So today we have a story coming out of my home state of Colorado, where long technologies is on their journey, integrating FDD or fault detection and diagnostics into their third party service operations. Um, and I have. Leslie and Lawrence here. I'm going to call on you for some self introductions.
[00:01:41] Please introduce yourself starting with Leslie.
[00:01:42] Leslie Beu: Hi, I'm Leslie Bew. I'm the analytics and energy manager at Long Building Technologies and I have been working as an energy engineer and doing a lot of troubleshooting and optimization of [00:02:00] HVAC systems throughout my entire 20 plus year career and I've really focused on building automation systems and Scaling what it is that I want to do is where my passion is and why I'm at Long Building Technologies.
[00:02:17] James Dice: Awesome. And over to you, Lawrence.
[00:02:20] Lawrence Trifiletti: I'm Lawrence Trifiletti. I'm the Senior Operations Manager for our Controls Division in Colorado. I've been with Long Building Technologies for 11 years. Background and service goes back closer to 30 with about 20 of that being in the IT world. And so I have a big passion for customer service and enhancing our customers ability to empower them to do their jobs.
[00:02:49] James Dice: Awesome. So, Lawrence, we're going to start with you. You've been doing service for how many years? Did you say 30?
[00:02:54] Lawrence Trifiletti: It's close to 30. I know it's crazy, but yeah.
[00:02:58] James Dice: So, Lawrence, [00:03:00] not many people that are doing service. Use FDD and not many of those people that have used FDD have fully integrated into their service operations.
[00:03:09] Can you talk about why Long uses FDD? What are you trying to achieve by using this technology?
[00:03:16] Lawrence Trifiletti: So I would say the simple answer, and then I could go a little more in detail, but the simple answer is value. We want to enhance the value for our customers, give them something that impacts what they're doing in their training, in their, uh, way they see their building, whether it's comfort, whether it's, uh, efficiency, uh, or whether it's maintenance and how to improve upon that.
[00:03:40] One of the things I discovered years ago when I first started at long was that service was much more reactive. So you take. Uh, a checklist and you go there and you do kind of a point check in time, and I always found that, uh, not as valuable as a proactive approach. And that's what really, [00:04:00] uh, FDD is much more of a proactive in depth utilization of your system and give you that analysis and sit down with you as a customer with a custom type of service that's directed towards you.
[00:04:11] And it's not some cookie cutter thing, which I believe our society does not like these days.
[00:04:18] James Dice: Totally. And when you think about the business of service operations, are there, are there some KPIs that you might tell the owner of the company? Like, this is why we, uh, implement FDD according to how we make more money or, you know, what, what are the metrics that we might look at this from a business standpoint that FDD helps with?
[00:04:38] Lawrence Trifiletti: So FDD will help on the health and wellness of their system, but it will give them an efficiency which can translate to a possible cost savings. In addition to that savings, maybe you save on energy, but maybe you're saving because you're prolonging the life of large, you know, like a rooftop unit. And we all know rooftop units, if you could prolong the life of something that costs six figures, uh, [00:05:00] you get a better ROI based off that type of stuff.
[00:05:03] It also gives you increased savings. Uh, for comfort for your tenants. So if your tenants are not calling you and you need less people to maintain that building, because we are working with this elaborate system and they're not going to make cold calls or hot calls, A, you've increased satisfaction of your customer, but B, you've also saved some money on, on the back end of not having people running around like chickens with their heads cut off.
[00:05:27] And they have to add additional people, uh, for that. So their savings is not necessarily, okay, it's dollar to dollar. Certainly there is on the energy savings, uh, potential, but, uh, maintenance and support of your system, uh, comes across pretty nicely that way.
[00:05:44] James Dice: Awesome. Yeah, that's, that's a great, from the owner's perspective.
[00:05:48] What about from Long's perspective? What, what does your boss think in terms of why you guys use?
[00:05:56] Lawrence Trifiletti: So it's a, it's a differentiator from our other [00:06:00] competition. So I would say that's one of the, one of the data points that my boss looks at. It gives us the ability to, uh, uh, better analyze the customer and, and get more pull through work, enhance our revenue from that perspective as well.
[00:06:15] In addition, as we're increasing value with the customer, our bosses and our company certainly supports, uh, to do that because it keeps your customers longer term. One of the things we have is we get longer term contracts with, uh, FDD versus, uh, our traditional, let's just say that's what, you know, the, the old stuff, you know, or maybe it's a two to three year contract versus a three to five year contract.
[00:06:38] So our bosses, uh, smile upon that as we increase value for our, our, our, our stockholders as well.
[00:06:47] James Dice: So before we get into the nitty gritty of this, I want to continue with a little bit more context setting, just a couple of rapid fire questions. Um, so first, who's your software vendor that you guys chose?
[00:06:58] Lawrence Trifiletti: So we chose [00:07:00] Clockworks after some extensive search.
[00:07:02] James Dice: Cool. And then how many buildings is Clockworks installed in?
[00:07:05] Lawrence Trifiletti: Currently we have 53 buildings installed with 25 in process, meaning there's 25 being on boarded. So they've been sold and they're just coming on board in the next couple months.
[00:07:16] James Dice: And roughly how much, uh, in terms of square footage is that?
[00:07:20] Lawrence Trifiletti: Uh, over 5 million, about 5. 2 million square footage right now.
[00:07:24] James Dice: So pretty large, yeah, pretty large scale deployment at this point. And when did you guys start down this journey?
[00:07:28] Lawrence Trifiletti: This journey started in the spring of 2018. Uh, we really started with, uh, different products. We used as one of those products in iteration. Uh, trying to get, you know, Our cost versus value out of it wasn't really successful as much.
[00:07:47] So spring of 2020, uh, we, uh, implemented after evaluation of ClockWorks really being the best product out there from what we've seen about a dozen products. So.
[00:07:58] James Dice: And, and what do you guys track the [00:08:00] results? And if so, how do you track the results and what would have been the total results that you've seen since, since that 2020 deployment?
[00:08:07] Lawrence Trifiletti: And so the result of the sales, um, we really had before clock works about three customers, there's different reasons for that. Meaning we didn't have someone that was dedicated such as a Leslie. And in 2021, we were up to. 10 and now we're where we are today based off the results there. So having a more elaborate, robust system at our fingertips has shown more value to our customers were in some others.
[00:08:34] It was more of a head scratcher.
[00:08:36] James Dice: Are there any sort of energy savings or task completion, any sorts of results like that?
[00:08:41] Lawrence Trifiletti: Yeah, you can, you want to throw those out there?
[00:08:43] Leslie Beu: Sure. So we track results in a couple different ways for our clients, depending on what it is they're really after. But if you look at the categories provided and really easy to digest in Clockworks, um, we have completed 586 tasks since [00:09:00] 2020.
[00:09:01] Uh, we have realized over 534, 000 of savings with those completed tasks, and we currently are tracking that there's still 60, 000 A month in avoidable costs. So potential for more savings. If we're talking just dollar savings for our clients and for us to set up more tasks and achieve more tasks. However, what we really are tracking, we have a unique dashboard that we've actually created outside of what ClockWorks provided, but within their customization and that we're tracking before and after for our service agreements.
[00:09:38] So 30 days after the service agreement starts, that those first 30 days basically getting a benchmark of where the building's performing from comfort, energy and maintenance or equipment longevity. And then the most recent 30 days. So we're constantly giving our clients a view of before and after and where [00:10:00] where all of those improvements have come.
[00:10:03] James Dice: Brilliant. And the reason I wanted to talk to you guys today is because a lot of people have implemented pilots or tried down this road, right? Try to go down this road of implementing FDD or You can really insert like any sort of smart buildings software application into the FDD slot right here.
[00:10:23] There's a lot of people have tried to integrate software into operations and have either failed or stalled out, or it sounds like maybe you guys did that as well with the previous deployments, previous selection of different products. And so I'd love to hear just can you guys talk about going back to the beginning that deployment and change management and sounds like change of directions journey that you guys, you guys went on,
[00:10:48] Lawrence Trifiletti: I would say, you know, the most important thing we did.
[00:10:51] So when we started it, it was really me. And one of my R& D technicians trying to implement and work with the service [00:11:00] techs and the salespeople on implementing this. So that's more of a half measure. And so what we did in, uh, January of 2020, we hired an energy engineer full time to focus on Developing the product, meaning developing the service, teaching the salespeople, get the technicians up to speed, and all that type of stuff.
[00:11:23] Uh, really looking at that, you know, that's all they do, okay, because obviously I have a day job, my R& D person, she had a day job, and so it was, you know, what I would tell people, you know, is you can't half measure it, you really have to put some investment time and money, meaning put a person in there. To develop the, the product, the content, find the right, right information, you know, that's how we arrived at Clockworks because he saw the inadequacies with it that we couldn't really figure out how to get anything deeper.
[00:11:55] And he's the one that did the deep dive with us on getting where we [00:12:00] were. So that's how I would say some of that starts.
[00:12:03] James Dice: And what were the symptoms of, of not having a full time person? Like what, what was, how, how did that show up on a day to day basis?
[00:12:09] Lawrence Trifiletti: You know, it starts really with the salespeople, right?
[00:12:11] You have to train the salespeople to understand it, and that was a heavier lift, uh, than we originally anticipated, uh, so lots of questions were asked or were missed, or, you know, there was a lot of dependence, and if they don't feel like they can make money off it or understand it, they're not going to sell it.
[00:12:32] So there's no champion that's full time on it that they can tap and take to it. Take two demos. Sure, they took my technician or had us to me discuss it or, or whatever from that perspective. But that's not the full measure of someone that's 100% supporting, uh, the cause, if you will. And I think that's the biggest difference on that.
[00:12:55] James Dice: And it sounds like when you brought the full time person and they're really, you said, [00:13:00] develop a product and you didn't mean develop a software product. You've meant develop an offering.
[00:13:04] Lawrence Trifiletti: Yeah, offering. Yes. Yes.
[00:13:06] James Dice: that you could then say, Hey, here's this product or widget salesperson that you're selling. And then you could go to the service people and say, here's exactly what we're doing to implement this product after it gets sold.
[00:13:21] Is that kind of what you mean?
[00:13:21] Lawrence Trifiletti: Yeah, I misspoke a little bit there. It's not so much a product. It's not even so much a widget. To us, it's a service. So we're selling something called impact driven service. Oh, and by the way, we're using it powered by Clockworks. So we don't go into a sale saying, Hey, you want to buy Clockworks?
[00:13:40] We're going in and say, Hey, we would like to do provide you a service that will do better on efficiency, maintenance, and comfort. You know, we are using this tool to do it. And here's some of the charts and graphs and results oriented we get from it. But that was the biggest lift because salespeople are used to [00:14:00] selling widgets.
[00:14:00] You know, it's easier for them to sell a widget. We're telling them to sell a concept. On, uh, on a value added service and in the IT world that seemed to be a little, you know, that's more normal in the HVAC world that that is a much different optic than they're used to. So I think that was a big lift. For it and having someone dedicated on those types of things, helping the sales content, adding to the statement of work and all that in the pricing tools and all that type of stuff was very important and critical where I couldn't completely do it or my engineer or my technician couldn't completely do it.
[00:14:39] You know, we can only do half of it, you know, because we're our mind sharing that type of stuff. So,
[00:14:44] James Dice: so Leslie, then you came on board, take us through. The time when you came on board into today, like what does the program look like today?
[00:14:52] Leslie Beu: Sure. Yeah. As Lawrence mentioned, um, after them having somebody dedicated and [00:15:00] recognizing that it wasn't as easy as just saying, sell it.
[00:15:03] And here's the service it is. We're selling. Um, what happened was we, we did start selling it. Our salespeople started selling it. And then there were more questions. To be answered. And there was more training to refine what it was we were doing. And then we got to the operational side. And after even just the, the I'll say minor lift of the onboarding support and getting everything up and running.
[00:15:29] Then comes the service, right? The service that it is we're selling and having our salespeople learn how to sell and helping our technicians understand what that service looks like now and how is it different. That was a big lift. And so I came on board. We had about 10 clients, um, on boarded, but we were still in the infancy of the service.
[00:15:50] Uh, life cycle for them. You know, they were three year agreements, we were maybe six months into some of these agreements, had just got them up and running, and [00:16:00] we recognized that the, the technicians also needed a lot of support in the training of using the system, of course. But it wasn't even really looking at and understanding the diagnostics that they needed training on.
[00:16:13] That's, that's part of why we love Clockworks is because it's very readily accessible to, um, most people in the industry. And And so some technicians need a little bit more in depth training and learning how to read the diagnostics, but a lot of them took to it pretty quickly. Um, with that though, we had to make sure that we understood how do we actually resolve these issues?
[00:16:36] How do we track this? And how do we stop thinking of a site visit or logging into a system remotely as some time based plan and And deliver exactly whatever was sold, because now we're looking at fault detection and these faults are telling us what's impactful to the client. What's hurting their comfort.
[00:16:59] What's [00:17:00] hurting, you know, what's their energy waste. And so we had to kind of transition from this mindset of, I need to show up on site. This is the day I'm showing up, but I'm just going to do whatever the client said they needed me to do and go through my checklist. And instead we had to spend a lot more time.
[00:17:17] Prepping and discussing the issue and then talking about how we were going to consult the client about what we were recommending they should do based on what the fault detection and diagnostic system informed us of. So once I was on board and started noticing some of the operational challenges. And then went back to redo some pricing models based on feedback, right?
[00:17:42] Based on the data, based on seeing what was working for clients, what was working for our technicians, what were our sales people selling versus what we thought that they were selling. And we had to take that feedback and revamp a little bit. A couple of times now, it's, it's a continuous [00:18:00] iteration, really.
[00:18:01] Our technicians. We're used to doing things a certain way. They're used to consulting with the client in a little different way, and we're a little bit hesitant to, to step up and say, I know this building, I know what's going on, I can see the fault detection and diagnostics, and it helps me to understand it.
[00:18:17] And here, let me explain what I think would be really helpful for us to cover for you. Um, Balancing the time that they have on site and the way that they used to do things with this new concept was really challenging. And so instead of having technicians say, yes, I'm really excited for this new challenge and I can grow in my career, we had some that were really frustrated with the large change.
[00:18:42] They felt like a lot of it was kind of put onto their, their back and they were having to manage all of these new processes and new communication. And some didn't feel comfortable with it. And others, um, feel like, you know, they're already doing a really good job and they are, but [00:19:00] they're used to having to do it all mentally and troubleshoot everything from what they're seeing instead of actually using this tool.
[00:19:07] And while There is a learning curve, slight learning curve, to learning how to understand the tool to get you there faster and to make you more efficient. They saw it as kind of a hindrance or just another tool instead of the tool that should be leading our discussions.
[00:19:23] Lawrence Trifiletti: That was the thing. It's like, you know, they saw it as a tool versus it being the center of the universe to get the information and to do it.
[00:19:31] The paradigm shift and the change It's, it's hard for people, and I think technicians who are a little more conservative in what they do and used to the way things are done, as Leslie stated, uh, they got, they knew, they know the customer's back of their hand and they love this or that, or the other thing is it's hard, you know, we have to sell that to the technician to understand of the value we're bringing to the customer doing this versus the current state of what you're doing.
[00:19:59] That [00:20:00] was, I think, a little bit of a surprise on. That being the lift, I always felt with the salespeople, there'd always be a lift, but I didn't realize, uh, the technicians were going to be having a harder time with it as well, so.
[00:20:12] James Dice: And when you say center of the universe, Lawrence, you're saying you want this tool.
[00:20:17] It's not a tool, it's the center of the universe. You're saying you want it to be the place where they go to decide.
[00:20:21] Lawrence Trifiletti: Yeah, it's not a screwdriver, which is kind of the way they looked at it a little bit. It's just something in my tool bag. No. This is, this is planet Earth. Work off planet Earth, and then you can use your tools around planet Earth to get the information.
[00:20:34] If I'm going from a sci fi standpoint here, that's where every, all the information, in depth information comes from, and the analysis, and the cost savings and stuff. It's, it's not something like, oh, I feel like there's a problem, let me go look at the... At Clockworks in order to figure out what that problem is.
[00:20:50] No, you start there. Okay. Here's what the trends are showing me Here's what things are doing Now I take my tools out to deal with it and add the value to the service [00:21:00] That's a backwards thought process to some of them some embraced it quicker than others But you know, they're so used to having lists and checklists to go check A, B, and C, where, you know, they get used to that.
[00:21:13] It's just like anybody else. It's a human nature to be, you get a habit, you like it, and you're comfortable with it. We're just comfort, we're putting them in an uncomfortable position.
[00:21:23] Leslie Beu: So much so that we have completely revamped what we originally thought was to train them, make them comfortable, and they're going to be this For the customer, and they're going to know how to utilize this and fix it.
[00:21:37] And they came back and said, we really need support. We need more of the analytics team. We need a little bit more handholding or a little bit more like. Just a list of what to go do and when to go do it. Um, so we've staffed up a little bit differently than we expected so that we could support our technicians better [00:22:00] as they become more and more accustomed to this over a little bit longer period of time.
[00:22:05] So now we have three energy engineers working, uh, working for my team. And then we're also adding a new role, which is a data specialist. That's a, like a statistician data analyst role, uh, to really help pull all the information from, from ClockWorks. That is great about the systems in the building automation system and all the HVAC.
[00:22:28] And to pair that with our business systems and understanding our margins and understanding, uh, how our plans and how our sales process are all fitting in so that we can track this better and ensure. We are being more effective and we are being more efficient and then to determine where we need to provide additional training and support and some validation.
[00:22:49] So we're, we've staffed up to accommodate the fact that the technicians weren't really ready for this major shift in, in this traditional to impact driven service.
[00:22:59] James Dice: [00:23:00] Cool. And if I can just kind of repeat what you guys are saying back to you and maybe put it in a different, you know, use of words for the audience here.
[00:23:08] The old world As a technician has a checklist and a schedule at which they need to go do that checklist, right? And the new world is, I have a piece of software and it's going to tell me what the biggest problems are. And so the old world might be, hey, go stroke this valve on a quarterly basis. And the new world is like, the valve's leaking.
[00:23:29] Lawrence Trifiletti: Or you don't need to stroke the valve because it's
[00:23:32] James Dice: working just fine, right? Yeah. And so what you guys are saying is you were hoping that you have this fleet of technicians out there that were used to go in on these site visits all the time. You were hoping that they would be the primary end users of the software, right?
[00:23:47] Then they could prioritize their day. They could decide, do I need to go on this site visit or not? But what you're saying is now. Instead, maybe as a stopgap, an interim measure, you want to get there eventually, but [00:24:00] interim measure is to staff up centrally so that you can then help them decide. Um, Hey, instead of going on that site visit that you're planning on going on on Monday, why don't you go to this other place because they have this leaking valve or that place you were planning on going, they don't have anything wrong.
[00:24:15] Everything's fine. Is that kind of what the approach is?
[00:24:18] Leslie Beu: I think we're somewhere in between that in that we still have some frequency based So we still may be planning to go to that site that day, but what it is they're going to do when they show up is dependent on the fault detection and diagnostics.
[00:24:36] And so what you said about our hopes for them to take, take that information and determine where they should be spending their time while they're on that site and what they're doing, um, is, is the hope, was the hope. We're now in the interim supporting them even more, but I still hope and see the scalability of this is that more [00:25:00] technicians are eager to learn and to step up and to become that expert on these systems rather than just being reactive to being scheduled.
[00:25:10] And there will probably be a place for a blend. And right now we actually have taken, we have, um, a few technicians that are more dedicated to these services that are, they are actually scheduling themselves and working through some of these lists and some of these commitments. It's based on these scheduled frequency, whereas some of our other technicians then are being scheduled to do certain tasks that either our analytics team is determining or that some of our lead analytics techs then reassign to technicians that need a little bit more concrete task based schedule.
[00:25:47] Lawrence Trifiletti: Yeah. So we're empowering them. And I think part of that was scary, but some are embracing it. So it's kind of a hybrid, if you will, kind of, we call them gray techs.
[00:25:56] James Dice: Okay. And so it sounds like they're really, I was about to [00:26:00] ask you, what is today's process, but it sounds like they're depending on the tech and depending on the customer, there might be various shades of gray in the process.
[00:26:09] Can you give us an idea of like the average customer? Maybe walk through Leslie walk through here. Step one is we have an insight. And then how do you get to the action? How does that process work?
[00:26:22] Leslie Beu: Yeah. So the today kind of average process that we have is more contractually based and more results driven solution driven.
[00:26:31] And so what we're doing is we have determined the processing time, uh. In scope items, if you will, are those low cost and no cost troubleshooting or optimization, you know, set points and dead bands and tooting loops and setting schedules and some of those things that we know we can accomplish quickly and effectively.
[00:26:51] And then we have the bigger troubleshooting concepts that maybe are things that are kind of outside of our agreement and we'll sit down with that [00:27:00] in mind with the client, um, and we'll pull up the The fault detection and diagnostics platform with them. We'll look through the dashboards, um, and we'll point out the things that we have been noticing, the big things that we think this client specifically, because we know them, they're going to be most impacted by, or the things they're most concerned with, and we'll bring up maybe a handful of, uh, faults that are happening or opportunities that there might be, and then we'll ask for their feedback about what's.
[00:27:34] Other things they may have noticed that we should look up and see, you know, may not be something that we thought was important to them, but it's really important from a comfort perspective in a certain, uh, room or something for them. And so from that discussion, then we basically agree to, let's say, two or three items for them to have us proceed on for our next scheduled visit, which it might be that we're having this, [00:28:00] Discussion the same day, or it might be that in a few days, our technician is going to be dispatched and we want to have an idea of what it is they're going to be working on and what the client really wants.
[00:28:11] And so from that, we maintain some level of agreement with the customer about which are the tasks that are most important to them. Some clients. Don't care to partake in that conversation. They say, Nope, you're our experts. We trust you. Let us know, you know what you do. And then others that are very involved in that process.
[00:28:29] And then from there we determine, well, how much time is really needed? You know, how much time can we estimate that this is going to take for our technician? While they're on site or some of our site visits are actually, uh, not on site. They are remote visits because we can do so much more now remotely with the information we have.
[00:28:48] We don't have to always dispatch a technician depending on our agreement. And then from there, the technician handles the visit. They have, let's say, three tasks assigned to them, uh, [00:29:00] through the Clockworks platform. And that may also include some traditional device support tasks from a controls perspective, things that need to be done anyway, like upgrading software, uh, to the latest license and some of those we're tracking along with it.
[00:29:17] And then after their visit, then there's... Uh, follow up from the analytics team as well, uh, depending on the technicians, some, some technicians are able to follow up and determine that their solutions, uh, really fix the problem. And then sometimes it will be turned back over to our analytics team to verify that what we said we do, we actually got done, or do we need to redispatch?
[00:29:41] You know, was there something that we need to go back out for or hop on remotely for to, Finish that and then close the loop with the customer in time for whatever the next scheduled visit would be.
[00:29:53] Lawrence Trifiletti: Follow up on, on what issues we addressed, I think is critical and I think it should be emphasized [00:30:00] because that's a big difference.
[00:30:01] You know, when you're doing the traditional checklist, you do it and you move on for the most part. This is all right. Did we do what they did work? Make it better, worse, or the same. Uh, so we have that follow up and we have tools that can help us, uh, check on that follow up as well.
[00:30:18] James Dice: Can you talk a little bit more about how you're tracking those metrics?
[00:30:21] Leslie Beu: Yeah, absolutely. Uh, just as Lawrence was saying, we're looking at the scores that are directly coming out of ClockWorks and we're looking at, over time, how those scores change. And so, we can track that, you know, we knew about a fault And we initiated a task on a certain day and then we can track when that task was intended to be completed or, or essentially when the technician has said, I've done what I needed to, to fix this problem.
[00:30:51] And so at that completion date, we're looking at these scores and we're saying, did we actually see the scores, uh, improve at that time? Did they [00:31:00] improve all the way? Did the faults go completely away or did the faults get better, but maybe not completely be resolved? Or, did we fix a, let's say a comfort issue, but cause an energy spike because we've gone too far, it's the other way.
[00:31:15] And we want to be very diligent and provide that enhanced value for our clients. And so that's really important to us. So through that journey of tracking those things, um, using that data and understanding that data has really helped with our business in that we can see, um, we have some clients that have very robust facilities teams and they call on us for some spot maintenance or projects and they didn't really necessarily want service.
[00:31:45] And so We, in certain cases, sold this as more of a product with very limited support, and one key takeaway that we found was actually that the clients that were [00:32:00] servicing, we were able to track that we had results of 76% of the clients. task resolution that we tracked had improvements, uh, meaning it was either all the way fixed or the task was partially fixed.
[00:32:16] And only 24% of those items had either no change or got slightly worse, or like I said, a trade off between, let's say, comfort and energy. Whereas some of our clients that were utilizing this tool without us, We actually saw a pretty dramatic difference in results where we saw with one particular client, 27% improvement in the tasks they had completed and 73% of the items that they were completing, um, and they had lots of tasks being completed.
[00:32:49] Either had no change, so no improvement, or they got worse, because that was very eye opening for us internally, but also enabled us to have a really [00:33:00] good conversation with the client, and we determined together that it probably makes sense to have us provide additional service support.
[00:33:10] Lawrence Trifiletti: And some of those clients that started out thinking that we can do it ourselves really found out quickly.
[00:33:17] They could not.
[00:33:18] James Dice: Okay.
[00:33:19] Lawrence Trifiletti: So having that giving that value and we can provide that value based off that. I think I think that's that's kind of a long way for some of our bigger clients because they have like Leslie mentioned. Uh, bigger staff, so they figure they can handle those types of things and those incidents and they, what they quickly find out is, well, they need, they don't necessarily have the expertise or the, or the ability to garner what's good and what's bad type thing.
[00:33:46] James Dice: Yeah. And, and what you guys have done is built up two separate, I see them as two kinds of separate processes. One is the analytics team, like you said, Leslie, and the other one is getting the insights from the analytics team into someone's hands that can go actually [00:34:00] fix it. And the first one that I just described, I consider that like the super user playbook.
[00:34:04] Like if there were a playbook, there's a super user playbook. No, one's written it yet. Someone should write it, but it's, it's basically like. This person, all their, like their only job is to log into the software. And, and I think about it, like, I think I once described it on the podcast as like taking a work order and stuffing it into maintenance people's pockets as they're going out to the building.
[00:34:25] Like your, your job is to integrate into the maintenance folks as jobs so that, and in their day to day lives, so that they don't have to think about how to use the technology or when to use it, or really worry about the technology at all. It's basically like, you keep doing what you're doing before and we're just going to feed you insights.
[00:34:44] Leslie Beu: An interesting thing about that though, is that we have some, uh, some clients who have really robust facilities, teams, and they're able to take a lot of the insights and immediately, you know, resolve problems when there's broken pieces of equipment [00:35:00] or faulty sensors, they know how to get to that and fix that pretty quickly.
[00:35:04] And they don't need a whole lot of interpretation from, from what clockworks. Tells them, and that's why we love ClockWorks. And so it really is just certain opportunities. And, and it's not so much understanding what's wrong, but understanding how do I fix it? How do I write programming or change the way the whole program works to alleviate these issues or understand that three different things like a boiler short cycling with a low Delta T and then an issue where it's not following the reset.
[00:35:36] That was expected in the sequence of operations tells me, Oh, we need to change the way we're doing our hot water reset. But some of those insights from people who haven't spent their career understanding how the system hierarchy works together. That's a little bit of a tougher lift to actually get the impact of that, and that's where we're training our technicians and a [00:36:00] lot of our clients don't have maybe that full capability, even though they can use all those quick hitting, uh, faults that are obvious, and they can turn that around right away without that, I guess, centralized system as well.
[00:36:13] James Dice: Yeah, but it's your analytics team that's taking that insight and Turning it into action in a way, even though, like you said, the software, if it's a good FTD product, it can give you an action. But you're saying there's maybe even an extra layer here that your team does that. It seems like it's really important.
[00:36:32] Even if a customer can go change out of valve or whatever, it's still a little bit of diagnosis that needs to be done sometimes.
[00:36:41] Lawrence Trifiletti: Yeah, one of the added benefits, I guess, is, you know, based off the data and the results we get on this, we can actually see for our, uh, our employees, our technicians, where their weaknesses are and how to shore that up.
[00:36:53] Something that you get, you know, quantifiable with the, you know, all technicians, not all, but a lot of them, they [00:37:00] think they know everything and they're going to be the expert of all. But I think metrically we can see where, okay, you need some, a little more training here, a little more help here, because again, it's not off a checklist.
[00:37:10] You gotta be a lot more savvy, uh, of understanding a little more of the big picture. And I think in the long run, we see ourselves having technicians that are much more broad based, uh, because of this. And so that's, we see some of the evolution of some of them, uh, that are already proceeding, you know, uh.
[00:37:29] Growing into that,
[00:37:30] James Dice: what do you mean by broad based? And let me add to that. What do you also mean by the ability to sort of track a technician's effectiveness? How do you do that?
[00:37:40] Lawrence Trifiletti: So let's talk about the tool that it's it's again, if they're making a change and it's X, Y and Z, or they work with the analytics team and.
[00:37:50] The analytics team may see X, Y, and Z for something. They may not see that. And we say, okay, well, it's really this, and they can give you a blank stare or something to [00:38:00] that effect. Um, but even if they're working on it and they're struggling with it, we can understand that because we're telling them to go deeper and further than they, than they are used to going.
[00:38:10] And, and when I mean broad basis, like big picture, they have to have a more of a comprehensive understanding of the system, the processes and the, in the controls world, it's gotten much more elaborate over the years. You know, you got it. You know, ip, the world of IP is in is involved now so that, and security and controls and everything, uh, broad based in there, that can have an effect, uh, on what you're doing.
[00:38:35] Not everybody is, was built that way. And so I think we're building a, a. A more well rounded technician for the customer as well as ourselves so they can do more with less and all that type of stuff as well.
[00:38:50] James Dice: Brilliant.
[00:38:51] Leslie Beu: I was going to jump in and tag off of that in this past year where we've really started looking at operationally how we're succeeding and [00:39:00] recognizing that sometimes when we implement.
[00:39:02] A solution, it doesn't actually solve the problem they thought they were trying to solve. And it shows that they don't either understand the root system and how the system hierarchy works together and how, you know, running something more helps run something less, which one's more efficient. But really, it's going back to the.
[00:39:23] The data that I was talking about and seeing those score changes after they've implemented it. And so now instead of, you know, as a service manager or me as the analytics manager or the person approving their time sheets saying, Hey, did you, did you. Get these tasks done and they say, yep, we got the task done.
[00:39:42] And then we move on to the next thing. Now we're actually looking at it. And instead of, let's say me being the bad guy and saying, you didn't really fix it the way that you probably should have fixed it. Now I can point to the data and say, data shows that you didn't actually fix it. All the same faults are [00:40:00] happening into this magnitude.
[00:40:01] It's not just that it's on or off. It's actually really helpful that this Uh, platform shows us the magnitude, like it's just as bad or you did improve it, but we need to go back and tune that a little bit better because we didn't quite get there. So that's the data that we're using to then inform technicians that.
[00:40:20] That maybe they need some assistance and maybe we can jump in and help them with the solution, uh, or we have that foundation to talk about because they can see the scores plain as day in front of them to now say, oh, yeah, I thought that I was fixing that, but I didn't quite understand the ramifications of what I was doing.
[00:40:38] James Dice: Yeah, and this is where it kind of aligns everyone's the sentence because if I'm a building owner, I didn't really want, I wasn't intending to pay people to go check stuff and check stuff off a checklist. You're intending for stuff to get fixed and stuff to get resolved and performance to improve. And so in a way, that seems like the software is kind of aligning your incentives.
[00:40:57] It's not that they weren't You know, obviously you wanted [00:41:00] to do what was best for the client from the begin with, but it aligns sort of everyone's incentives to then allow you to say, as your manager, you're, you're not improving and the data shows you're not improving, which is the same thing for the building owner is the performance of the system improving or not, which is awesome.
[00:41:16] So as we kind of close things out here, uh, this has been super insightful. I think we've told a really comprehensive story the way that you guys are interjecting, which is awesome. Let's pretend, just to close things out, if, if I'm an organization like yours that is following behind you on your footsteps on this journey, what are a couple of things you would tell them in terms of lessons learned, things you would do differently next time, that kind of thing?
[00:41:42] Lawrence Trifiletti: We'll have patience, you know, so I would say persistence through the ups and downs. You're going to take two steps forward, one step back, and all that. If you believe in what you're trying to do, you have to stick with it, and to have a dedicated team to really work with it. You know, it's not a half measure.
[00:41:59] [00:42:00] What you're doing is you're changing the paradigm, uh, in what HVAC, uh, does, and that does not take, uh, half measures, so. Um, that would be my advice is persistence and, and a dedicated team.
[00:42:14] James Dice: How about you, Leslie?
[00:42:17] Leslie Beu: I think he said it all. Honestly, I think I can't imagine people trying to do this without having this full time position.
[00:42:25] And, and now this full team that I have, and it's been successful in that we're selling it and successful in that we have clients that are extremely pleased with it. Um, we certainly have the step back every once in a while. A client says, this is what I thought you were selling me. Here's what I'm getting.
[00:42:44] And we have to rectify it. And we need to make sure that we're in line with what it is we're really after. But that persistence is extremely important. And I'm just glad that we have a team and that Long had the insight. [00:43:00] Lawrence had the insight to, um, advocate for that and recognize that the only way to Move forward and be successful is to dedicate the resources to doing that.
[00:43:10] Lawrence Trifiletti: Yeah. So one last thing. It's an evolutionary process, meaning always be flexible in to change like we did with the technicians and the conditions on the ground of what you're running into. You have to be flexible when it comes to that or you're going to bang your head on the wall a lot.
[00:43:28] James Dice: Yeah. So if we're thinking about the technician piece.
[00:43:31] How, how do you guys plan to solve that in the future? You said that's where you want to get, you wanna get to where they're the primary uses of the software. What's the sort of plan, I guess?
[00:43:43] Lawrence Trifiletti: Well, part of it's natural. I think part of it is as we phase out our traditional, which is something we're doing, this is the norm of what we're doing.
[00:43:51] And I would say, I, I, I call it like kind of a seeding process. We have a few technicians that have embraced it, that [00:44:00] we're using as the seeds to germinate. Uh, the rest of the technicians to understand it and have them mentor those technicians and lead by example on that. So it's an evolutionary process, uh, when it comes to that.
[00:44:13] And then continuously, the last thing would be continuing to support them and train them and tell them it's okay. You know, you're not doomed.
[00:44:22] Leslie Beu: I would add to that, that we're also looking for non traditional technicians to add into the mix, right? We're really approaching it from both sides. We want to train up the technicians that we have.
[00:44:34] We want to hire new technicians that are interested in, maybe they aren't looking for a management role, but they don't necessarily want to do what they've always been doing. And then on the flip side, I told you that I hired three energy engineers. They're not functioning as energy engineers. They're functioning as some sort of blend between a technician and an engineer and as a salesperson, because we're talking to the clients, [00:45:00] we're analyzing the data, and we need that technical background.
[00:45:03] But ultimately, sometimes we may be able to implement some of these changes before we even have to dispatch to a technician. So it's all about that value to the customer and figuring out how can we solve the problem the fastest Way possible. And then how can we train our technicians to be more like energy engineers?
[00:45:21] And how can we train our energy engineers to be more like technicians?
[00:45:25] James Dice: Awesome. Okay. One last question I have for you guys is around trust. So it seems like you guys, for the most part, have your, a lot of your customers trust in terms of you're providing this tool. This tool says what you need to be doing.
[00:45:38] And you said at the beginning, this is driving more pull through work and the ability, it has the ability to get and grow your guys's business, which is great. I think a lot of people look at that like, Oh, this person's got this analytics tool and it's going to help. that they need to do more work for us.
[00:45:55] I've heard that pushback at least a little bit. So how, how would you recommend people sort of [00:46:00] message that with their customer? It probably starts with having their trust to begin with, but can you kind of talk a little bit about how, I think a lot of customers aren't necessarily ready for their service providers to be.
[00:46:12] Totally proactive with some of this stuff.
[00:46:16] Lawrence Trifiletti: Well, I, I guess, and maybe Leslie can elaborate. I feel like if you show value to what you're doing within, without the pull through work, like, you know, on a normal day to day basis, and you're showing You know, from clockwork, from the dashboard of like, okay, here's your potential savings based off X, Y, and Z.
[00:46:35] Um, here's, here's, you know, all that type of metric, you gain their trust. And then when you come to something that's possibly out of scope and they're used to some stuff out of scope anyways, they're more readily, uh, have the ability to accept that in its trust in our technicians and our team is a big part.
[00:46:53] Leslie Beu: Yeah, I'd elaborate. Lawrence mentioned what's included and what's excluded, and I mentioned that [00:47:00] earlier, too. We really did have to define and make sure that our technicians and our clients understand what are we including in our service, and then what's That's kind of outside of that. So we are not intending to grow this by just bringing in more, more pull through work.
[00:47:17] In fact, in a lot of cases, we're selling this to say, you shouldn't have to call us for all of these service calls. We want to proactively find them and resolve them so that you're not constantly having the hot calls and cold calls. So we're including a certain scope and if we're taking care of those items and then we can prove, right, we can show the results with these, you know, these metrics and say we have improved, uh, these different tasks and here's how you can see that the scores have gone down and there's this third party software that's able to actually show that we're doing what we said we were going to do.
[00:47:51] That's a huge part of gaining their trust and showing that while we're on site or looking at it remotely. And implementing these solutions. We're really [00:48:00] solving the problem. And so if the if a certain customer has so many more problems that are outside of our ability to handle that during our regularly scheduled visits, then they have the opportunity to say.
[00:48:13] Well, I can see how important this is according to the fault detection and diagnostics, so I do want to pay you to come do this. And other times they can say, yeah, I see it's something we can work on, but it's not that big of a deal to me. Let's do it at your next scheduled visit. So like Lawrence said, if we're doing what we said we'd do during our service agreement, then they, we earn their trust to do more outside of the agreement when and if they are ready to do that.
[00:48:40] And the third party platform then. Proves to them that we're doing what we said we do, or shows us when we're not so that we can rectify the situation. And my one other comment on what you said, what you asked about, um, why we're doing this and what this value is, it really is all about [00:49:00] scalability more than just more pull through work.
[00:49:03] It's about us doing more for the client. In the same amount of time or doing the same amount for the client in less amount of time so that we can handle more clients and grow our business and grow our base without just adding more and more people to it and just selling, selling hours of time.
[00:49:23] James Dice: Right, because technicians and energy engineers aren't exactly growing on trees these days.
[00:49:28] Lawrence Trifiletti: Yeah, that's exactly what I was about to say, you know. It takes, it takes a very long time to get technicians, you know, they're like an oak tree. It takes a while for them to become, you know, a full tree. So, it takes a while. All right.
[00:49:43] James Dice: Well, that's a good place to end up. I want to thank you both for sort of pulling back the curtain, uh, to show us how you're using analytics software and your service operations.
[00:49:53] So thank you so much.
[00:49:57] Rosy Kahlife: Okay friends, thank you for listening to this episode. [00:50:00] As we continue to grow our global community of change makers, we need your help. For the next couple of months, we're challenging our listeners to share a link to their favorite Nexus episode on LinkedIn with a short post about why you listen. It would really, really help us out.
[00:50:14] Make sure to tag us in the post so we can see it. Have a good one.
"It's all about that value to the customer in figuring out how can we solve the problem in the fastest way possible? And then how can we train our technicians to be more like energy engineers? And how can we train our energy engineers to be more like technicians?"
—Leslie Beu
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Episode 150 is a conversation with Leslie Beu and Lawrence Trifiletti from LONG Building Technologies.
Episode 150 features LONG Building Technologies and is our second episode in the Case Study series looking at real-life, large-scale deployments of smart building technologies. These are not marketing fluff stories, these are lessons from leaders that others can put into use in their smart buildings programs. Leslie Beu and Lawrence Trifiletti talk honestly about the rollout of their FDD-driven service, diving into the impacts on their technicians, operations, customers, and overall business.
You can find Leslie and Lawrence on LinkedIn.
Enjoy!
Music credits: There Is A Reality by Common Tiger—licensed under an Music Vine Limited Pro Standard License ID: S468569-15083.
Note: transcript was created using an imperfect machine learning tool and lightly edited by a human (so you can get the gist). Please forgive errors!
[00:00:00] Leslie Beu: It's all about that value to the customer in figuring out how can we solve the problem in the fastest way possible? And then how can we train our technicians to be more like energy engineers? And how can we train our energy engineers to be more like technicians?
[00:00:16] James Dice: Hey friends, if you liked the Nexus podcast, the best way to continue the learning is to join our community. There are three ways to do that. First, you can join the Nexus Pro Membership. It's our global community of smart building professionals. We have monthly events, paywall deep dive content, and a private chat room, and it's just 35 dollars a month.
[00:00:34] Second, you can upgrade from the Pro Membership to our courses offering. It's headlined by our flagship course, the Smart Building Strategist, and we're building a catalog of courses taught by world leading experts on each topic under the Smart Buildings umbrella. Third, and finally, our marketplace is how we connect leading vendors with buyers looking for their solutions.
[00:00:54] The links are below in the show notes. And now let's go on to the podcast.[00:01:00]
[00:01:01] Hello and welcome to the Nexus podcast. This is the next episode in our series diving into case studies of real life. Large scale deployments of smart building technologies. Like I said in the last, uh, one of these, these are not marketing fluff stories. We're here to share lessons from leaders that others can put into use in their smart buildings programs.
[00:01:20] So today we have a story coming out of my home state of Colorado, where long technologies is on their journey, integrating FDD or fault detection and diagnostics into their third party service operations. Um, and I have. Leslie and Lawrence here. I'm going to call on you for some self introductions.
[00:01:41] Please introduce yourself starting with Leslie.
[00:01:42] Leslie Beu: Hi, I'm Leslie Bew. I'm the analytics and energy manager at Long Building Technologies and I have been working as an energy engineer and doing a lot of troubleshooting and optimization of [00:02:00] HVAC systems throughout my entire 20 plus year career and I've really focused on building automation systems and Scaling what it is that I want to do is where my passion is and why I'm at Long Building Technologies.
[00:02:17] James Dice: Awesome. And over to you, Lawrence.
[00:02:20] Lawrence Trifiletti: I'm Lawrence Trifiletti. I'm the Senior Operations Manager for our Controls Division in Colorado. I've been with Long Building Technologies for 11 years. Background and service goes back closer to 30 with about 20 of that being in the IT world. And so I have a big passion for customer service and enhancing our customers ability to empower them to do their jobs.
[00:02:49] James Dice: Awesome. So, Lawrence, we're going to start with you. You've been doing service for how many years? Did you say 30?
[00:02:54] Lawrence Trifiletti: It's close to 30. I know it's crazy, but yeah.
[00:02:58] James Dice: So, Lawrence, [00:03:00] not many people that are doing service. Use FDD and not many of those people that have used FDD have fully integrated into their service operations.
[00:03:09] Can you talk about why Long uses FDD? What are you trying to achieve by using this technology?
[00:03:16] Lawrence Trifiletti: So I would say the simple answer, and then I could go a little more in detail, but the simple answer is value. We want to enhance the value for our customers, give them something that impacts what they're doing in their training, in their, uh, way they see their building, whether it's comfort, whether it's, uh, efficiency, uh, or whether it's maintenance and how to improve upon that.
[00:03:40] One of the things I discovered years ago when I first started at long was that service was much more reactive. So you take. Uh, a checklist and you go there and you do kind of a point check in time, and I always found that, uh, not as valuable as a proactive approach. And that's what really, [00:04:00] uh, FDD is much more of a proactive in depth utilization of your system and give you that analysis and sit down with you as a customer with a custom type of service that's directed towards you.
[00:04:11] And it's not some cookie cutter thing, which I believe our society does not like these days.
[00:04:18] James Dice: Totally. And when you think about the business of service operations, are there, are there some KPIs that you might tell the owner of the company? Like, this is why we, uh, implement FDD according to how we make more money or, you know, what, what are the metrics that we might look at this from a business standpoint that FDD helps with?
[00:04:38] Lawrence Trifiletti: So FDD will help on the health and wellness of their system, but it will give them an efficiency which can translate to a possible cost savings. In addition to that savings, maybe you save on energy, but maybe you're saving because you're prolonging the life of large, you know, like a rooftop unit. And we all know rooftop units, if you could prolong the life of something that costs six figures, uh, [00:05:00] you get a better ROI based off that type of stuff.
[00:05:03] It also gives you increased savings. Uh, for comfort for your tenants. So if your tenants are not calling you and you need less people to maintain that building, because we are working with this elaborate system and they're not going to make cold calls or hot calls, A, you've increased satisfaction of your customer, but B, you've also saved some money on, on the back end of not having people running around like chickens with their heads cut off.
[00:05:27] And they have to add additional people, uh, for that. So their savings is not necessarily, okay, it's dollar to dollar. Certainly there is on the energy savings, uh, potential, but, uh, maintenance and support of your system, uh, comes across pretty nicely that way.
[00:05:44] James Dice: Awesome. Yeah, that's, that's a great, from the owner's perspective.
[00:05:48] What about from Long's perspective? What, what does your boss think in terms of why you guys use?
[00:05:56] Lawrence Trifiletti: So it's a, it's a differentiator from our other [00:06:00] competition. So I would say that's one of the, one of the data points that my boss looks at. It gives us the ability to, uh, uh, better analyze the customer and, and get more pull through work, enhance our revenue from that perspective as well.
[00:06:15] In addition, as we're increasing value with the customer, our bosses and our company certainly supports, uh, to do that because it keeps your customers longer term. One of the things we have is we get longer term contracts with, uh, FDD versus, uh, our traditional, let's just say that's what, you know, the, the old stuff, you know, or maybe it's a two to three year contract versus a three to five year contract.
[00:06:38] So our bosses, uh, smile upon that as we increase value for our, our, our, our stockholders as well.
[00:06:47] James Dice: So before we get into the nitty gritty of this, I want to continue with a little bit more context setting, just a couple of rapid fire questions. Um, so first, who's your software vendor that you guys chose?
[00:06:58] Lawrence Trifiletti: So we chose [00:07:00] Clockworks after some extensive search.
[00:07:02] James Dice: Cool. And then how many buildings is Clockworks installed in?
[00:07:05] Lawrence Trifiletti: Currently we have 53 buildings installed with 25 in process, meaning there's 25 being on boarded. So they've been sold and they're just coming on board in the next couple months.
[00:07:16] James Dice: And roughly how much, uh, in terms of square footage is that?
[00:07:20] Lawrence Trifiletti: Uh, over 5 million, about 5. 2 million square footage right now.
[00:07:24] James Dice: So pretty large, yeah, pretty large scale deployment at this point. And when did you guys start down this journey?
[00:07:28] Lawrence Trifiletti: This journey started in the spring of 2018. Uh, we really started with, uh, different products. We used as one of those products in iteration. Uh, trying to get, you know, Our cost versus value out of it wasn't really successful as much.
[00:07:47] So spring of 2020, uh, we, uh, implemented after evaluation of ClockWorks really being the best product out there from what we've seen about a dozen products. So.
[00:07:58] James Dice: And, and what do you guys track the [00:08:00] results? And if so, how do you track the results and what would have been the total results that you've seen since, since that 2020 deployment?
[00:08:07] Lawrence Trifiletti: And so the result of the sales, um, we really had before clock works about three customers, there's different reasons for that. Meaning we didn't have someone that was dedicated such as a Leslie. And in 2021, we were up to. 10 and now we're where we are today based off the results there. So having a more elaborate, robust system at our fingertips has shown more value to our customers were in some others.
[00:08:34] It was more of a head scratcher.
[00:08:36] James Dice: Are there any sort of energy savings or task completion, any sorts of results like that?
[00:08:41] Lawrence Trifiletti: Yeah, you can, you want to throw those out there?
[00:08:43] Leslie Beu: Sure. So we track results in a couple different ways for our clients, depending on what it is they're really after. But if you look at the categories provided and really easy to digest in Clockworks, um, we have completed 586 tasks since [00:09:00] 2020.
[00:09:01] Uh, we have realized over 534, 000 of savings with those completed tasks, and we currently are tracking that there's still 60, 000 A month in avoidable costs. So potential for more savings. If we're talking just dollar savings for our clients and for us to set up more tasks and achieve more tasks. However, what we really are tracking, we have a unique dashboard that we've actually created outside of what ClockWorks provided, but within their customization and that we're tracking before and after for our service agreements.
[00:09:38] So 30 days after the service agreement starts, that those first 30 days basically getting a benchmark of where the building's performing from comfort, energy and maintenance or equipment longevity. And then the most recent 30 days. So we're constantly giving our clients a view of before and after and where [00:10:00] where all of those improvements have come.
[00:10:03] James Dice: Brilliant. And the reason I wanted to talk to you guys today is because a lot of people have implemented pilots or tried down this road, right? Try to go down this road of implementing FDD or You can really insert like any sort of smart buildings software application into the FDD slot right here.
[00:10:23] There's a lot of people have tried to integrate software into operations and have either failed or stalled out, or it sounds like maybe you guys did that as well with the previous deployments, previous selection of different products. And so I'd love to hear just can you guys talk about going back to the beginning that deployment and change management and sounds like change of directions journey that you guys, you guys went on,
[00:10:48] Lawrence Trifiletti: I would say, you know, the most important thing we did.
[00:10:51] So when we started it, it was really me. And one of my R& D technicians trying to implement and work with the service [00:11:00] techs and the salespeople on implementing this. So that's more of a half measure. And so what we did in, uh, January of 2020, we hired an energy engineer full time to focus on Developing the product, meaning developing the service, teaching the salespeople, get the technicians up to speed, and all that type of stuff.
[00:11:23] Uh, really looking at that, you know, that's all they do, okay, because obviously I have a day job, my R& D person, she had a day job, and so it was, you know, what I would tell people, you know, is you can't half measure it, you really have to put some investment time and money, meaning put a person in there. To develop the, the product, the content, find the right, right information, you know, that's how we arrived at Clockworks because he saw the inadequacies with it that we couldn't really figure out how to get anything deeper.
[00:11:55] And he's the one that did the deep dive with us on getting where we [00:12:00] were. So that's how I would say some of that starts.
[00:12:03] James Dice: And what were the symptoms of, of not having a full time person? Like what, what was, how, how did that show up on a day to day basis?
[00:12:09] Lawrence Trifiletti: You know, it starts really with the salespeople, right?
[00:12:11] You have to train the salespeople to understand it, and that was a heavier lift, uh, than we originally anticipated, uh, so lots of questions were asked or were missed, or, you know, there was a lot of dependence, and if they don't feel like they can make money off it or understand it, they're not going to sell it.
[00:12:32] So there's no champion that's full time on it that they can tap and take to it. Take two demos. Sure, they took my technician or had us to me discuss it or, or whatever from that perspective. But that's not the full measure of someone that's 100% supporting, uh, the cause, if you will. And I think that's the biggest difference on that.
[00:12:55] James Dice: And it sounds like when you brought the full time person and they're really, you said, [00:13:00] develop a product and you didn't mean develop a software product. You've meant develop an offering.
[00:13:04] Lawrence Trifiletti: Yeah, offering. Yes. Yes.
[00:13:06] James Dice: that you could then say, Hey, here's this product or widget salesperson that you're selling. And then you could go to the service people and say, here's exactly what we're doing to implement this product after it gets sold.
[00:13:21] Is that kind of what you mean?
[00:13:21] Lawrence Trifiletti: Yeah, I misspoke a little bit there. It's not so much a product. It's not even so much a widget. To us, it's a service. So we're selling something called impact driven service. Oh, and by the way, we're using it powered by Clockworks. So we don't go into a sale saying, Hey, you want to buy Clockworks?
[00:13:40] We're going in and say, Hey, we would like to do provide you a service that will do better on efficiency, maintenance, and comfort. You know, we are using this tool to do it. And here's some of the charts and graphs and results oriented we get from it. But that was the biggest lift because salespeople are used to [00:14:00] selling widgets.
[00:14:00] You know, it's easier for them to sell a widget. We're telling them to sell a concept. On, uh, on a value added service and in the IT world that seemed to be a little, you know, that's more normal in the HVAC world that that is a much different optic than they're used to. So I think that was a big lift. For it and having someone dedicated on those types of things, helping the sales content, adding to the statement of work and all that in the pricing tools and all that type of stuff was very important and critical where I couldn't completely do it or my engineer or my technician couldn't completely do it.
[00:14:39] You know, we can only do half of it, you know, because we're our mind sharing that type of stuff. So,
[00:14:44] James Dice: so Leslie, then you came on board, take us through. The time when you came on board into today, like what does the program look like today?
[00:14:52] Leslie Beu: Sure. Yeah. As Lawrence mentioned, um, after them having somebody dedicated and [00:15:00] recognizing that it wasn't as easy as just saying, sell it.
[00:15:03] And here's the service it is. We're selling. Um, what happened was we, we did start selling it. Our salespeople started selling it. And then there were more questions. To be answered. And there was more training to refine what it was we were doing. And then we got to the operational side. And after even just the, the I'll say minor lift of the onboarding support and getting everything up and running.
[00:15:29] Then comes the service, right? The service that it is we're selling and having our salespeople learn how to sell and helping our technicians understand what that service looks like now and how is it different. That was a big lift. And so I came on board. We had about 10 clients, um, on boarded, but we were still in the infancy of the service.
[00:15:50] Uh, life cycle for them. You know, they were three year agreements, we were maybe six months into some of these agreements, had just got them up and running, and [00:16:00] we recognized that the, the technicians also needed a lot of support in the training of using the system, of course. But it wasn't even really looking at and understanding the diagnostics that they needed training on.
[00:16:13] That's, that's part of why we love Clockworks is because it's very readily accessible to, um, most people in the industry. And And so some technicians need a little bit more in depth training and learning how to read the diagnostics, but a lot of them took to it pretty quickly. Um, with that though, we had to make sure that we understood how do we actually resolve these issues?
[00:16:36] How do we track this? And how do we stop thinking of a site visit or logging into a system remotely as some time based plan and And deliver exactly whatever was sold, because now we're looking at fault detection and these faults are telling us what's impactful to the client. What's hurting their comfort.
[00:16:59] What's [00:17:00] hurting, you know, what's their energy waste. And so we had to kind of transition from this mindset of, I need to show up on site. This is the day I'm showing up, but I'm just going to do whatever the client said they needed me to do and go through my checklist. And instead we had to spend a lot more time.
[00:17:17] Prepping and discussing the issue and then talking about how we were going to consult the client about what we were recommending they should do based on what the fault detection and diagnostic system informed us of. So once I was on board and started noticing some of the operational challenges. And then went back to redo some pricing models based on feedback, right?
[00:17:42] Based on the data, based on seeing what was working for clients, what was working for our technicians, what were our sales people selling versus what we thought that they were selling. And we had to take that feedback and revamp a little bit. A couple of times now, it's, it's a continuous [00:18:00] iteration, really.
[00:18:01] Our technicians. We're used to doing things a certain way. They're used to consulting with the client in a little different way, and we're a little bit hesitant to, to step up and say, I know this building, I know what's going on, I can see the fault detection and diagnostics, and it helps me to understand it.
[00:18:17] And here, let me explain what I think would be really helpful for us to cover for you. Um, Balancing the time that they have on site and the way that they used to do things with this new concept was really challenging. And so instead of having technicians say, yes, I'm really excited for this new challenge and I can grow in my career, we had some that were really frustrated with the large change.
[00:18:42] They felt like a lot of it was kind of put onto their, their back and they were having to manage all of these new processes and new communication. And some didn't feel comfortable with it. And others, um, feel like, you know, they're already doing a really good job and they are, but [00:19:00] they're used to having to do it all mentally and troubleshoot everything from what they're seeing instead of actually using this tool.
[00:19:07] And while There is a learning curve, slight learning curve, to learning how to understand the tool to get you there faster and to make you more efficient. They saw it as kind of a hindrance or just another tool instead of the tool that should be leading our discussions.
[00:19:23] Lawrence Trifiletti: That was the thing. It's like, you know, they saw it as a tool versus it being the center of the universe to get the information and to do it.
[00:19:31] The paradigm shift and the change It's, it's hard for people, and I think technicians who are a little more conservative in what they do and used to the way things are done, as Leslie stated, uh, they got, they knew, they know the customer's back of their hand and they love this or that, or the other thing is it's hard, you know, we have to sell that to the technician to understand of the value we're bringing to the customer doing this versus the current state of what you're doing.
[00:19:59] That [00:20:00] was, I think, a little bit of a surprise on. That being the lift, I always felt with the salespeople, there'd always be a lift, but I didn't realize, uh, the technicians were going to be having a harder time with it as well, so.
[00:20:12] James Dice: And when you say center of the universe, Lawrence, you're saying you want this tool.
[00:20:17] It's not a tool, it's the center of the universe. You're saying you want it to be the place where they go to decide.
[00:20:21] Lawrence Trifiletti: Yeah, it's not a screwdriver, which is kind of the way they looked at it a little bit. It's just something in my tool bag. No. This is, this is planet Earth. Work off planet Earth, and then you can use your tools around planet Earth to get the information.
[00:20:34] If I'm going from a sci fi standpoint here, that's where every, all the information, in depth information comes from, and the analysis, and the cost savings and stuff. It's, it's not something like, oh, I feel like there's a problem, let me go look at the... At Clockworks in order to figure out what that problem is.
[00:20:50] No, you start there. Okay. Here's what the trends are showing me Here's what things are doing Now I take my tools out to deal with it and add the value to the service [00:21:00] That's a backwards thought process to some of them some embraced it quicker than others But you know, they're so used to having lists and checklists to go check A, B, and C, where, you know, they get used to that.
[00:21:13] It's just like anybody else. It's a human nature to be, you get a habit, you like it, and you're comfortable with it. We're just comfort, we're putting them in an uncomfortable position.
[00:21:23] Leslie Beu: So much so that we have completely revamped what we originally thought was to train them, make them comfortable, and they're going to be this For the customer, and they're going to know how to utilize this and fix it.
[00:21:37] And they came back and said, we really need support. We need more of the analytics team. We need a little bit more handholding or a little bit more like. Just a list of what to go do and when to go do it. Um, so we've staffed up a little bit differently than we expected so that we could support our technicians better [00:22:00] as they become more and more accustomed to this over a little bit longer period of time.
[00:22:05] So now we have three energy engineers working, uh, working for my team. And then we're also adding a new role, which is a data specialist. That's a, like a statistician data analyst role, uh, to really help pull all the information from, from ClockWorks. That is great about the systems in the building automation system and all the HVAC.
[00:22:28] And to pair that with our business systems and understanding our margins and understanding, uh, how our plans and how our sales process are all fitting in so that we can track this better and ensure. We are being more effective and we are being more efficient and then to determine where we need to provide additional training and support and some validation.
[00:22:49] So we're, we've staffed up to accommodate the fact that the technicians weren't really ready for this major shift in, in this traditional to impact driven service.
[00:22:59] James Dice: [00:23:00] Cool. And if I can just kind of repeat what you guys are saying back to you and maybe put it in a different, you know, use of words for the audience here.
[00:23:08] The old world As a technician has a checklist and a schedule at which they need to go do that checklist, right? And the new world is, I have a piece of software and it's going to tell me what the biggest problems are. And so the old world might be, hey, go stroke this valve on a quarterly basis. And the new world is like, the valve's leaking.
[00:23:29] Lawrence Trifiletti: Or you don't need to stroke the valve because it's
[00:23:32] James Dice: working just fine, right? Yeah. And so what you guys are saying is you were hoping that you have this fleet of technicians out there that were used to go in on these site visits all the time. You were hoping that they would be the primary end users of the software, right?
[00:23:47] Then they could prioritize their day. They could decide, do I need to go on this site visit or not? But what you're saying is now. Instead, maybe as a stopgap, an interim measure, you want to get there eventually, but [00:24:00] interim measure is to staff up centrally so that you can then help them decide. Um, Hey, instead of going on that site visit that you're planning on going on on Monday, why don't you go to this other place because they have this leaking valve or that place you were planning on going, they don't have anything wrong.
[00:24:15] Everything's fine. Is that kind of what the approach is?
[00:24:18] Leslie Beu: I think we're somewhere in between that in that we still have some frequency based So we still may be planning to go to that site that day, but what it is they're going to do when they show up is dependent on the fault detection and diagnostics.
[00:24:36] And so what you said about our hopes for them to take, take that information and determine where they should be spending their time while they're on that site and what they're doing, um, is, is the hope, was the hope. We're now in the interim supporting them even more, but I still hope and see the scalability of this is that more [00:25:00] technicians are eager to learn and to step up and to become that expert on these systems rather than just being reactive to being scheduled.
[00:25:10] And there will probably be a place for a blend. And right now we actually have taken, we have, um, a few technicians that are more dedicated to these services that are, they are actually scheduling themselves and working through some of these lists and some of these commitments. It's based on these scheduled frequency, whereas some of our other technicians then are being scheduled to do certain tasks that either our analytics team is determining or that some of our lead analytics techs then reassign to technicians that need a little bit more concrete task based schedule.
[00:25:47] Lawrence Trifiletti: Yeah. So we're empowering them. And I think part of that was scary, but some are embracing it. So it's kind of a hybrid, if you will, kind of, we call them gray techs.
[00:25:56] James Dice: Okay. And so it sounds like they're really, I was about to [00:26:00] ask you, what is today's process, but it sounds like they're depending on the tech and depending on the customer, there might be various shades of gray in the process.
[00:26:09] Can you give us an idea of like the average customer? Maybe walk through Leslie walk through here. Step one is we have an insight. And then how do you get to the action? How does that process work?
[00:26:22] Leslie Beu: Yeah. So the today kind of average process that we have is more contractually based and more results driven solution driven.
[00:26:31] And so what we're doing is we have determined the processing time, uh. In scope items, if you will, are those low cost and no cost troubleshooting or optimization, you know, set points and dead bands and tooting loops and setting schedules and some of those things that we know we can accomplish quickly and effectively.
[00:26:51] And then we have the bigger troubleshooting concepts that maybe are things that are kind of outside of our agreement and we'll sit down with that [00:27:00] in mind with the client, um, and we'll pull up the The fault detection and diagnostics platform with them. We'll look through the dashboards, um, and we'll point out the things that we have been noticing, the big things that we think this client specifically, because we know them, they're going to be most impacted by, or the things they're most concerned with, and we'll bring up maybe a handful of, uh, faults that are happening or opportunities that there might be, and then we'll ask for their feedback about what's.
[00:27:34] Other things they may have noticed that we should look up and see, you know, may not be something that we thought was important to them, but it's really important from a comfort perspective in a certain, uh, room or something for them. And so from that discussion, then we basically agree to, let's say, two or three items for them to have us proceed on for our next scheduled visit, which it might be that we're having this, [00:28:00] Discussion the same day, or it might be that in a few days, our technician is going to be dispatched and we want to have an idea of what it is they're going to be working on and what the client really wants.
[00:28:11] And so from that, we maintain some level of agreement with the customer about which are the tasks that are most important to them. Some clients. Don't care to partake in that conversation. They say, Nope, you're our experts. We trust you. Let us know, you know what you do. And then others that are very involved in that process.
[00:28:29] And then from there we determine, well, how much time is really needed? You know, how much time can we estimate that this is going to take for our technician? While they're on site or some of our site visits are actually, uh, not on site. They are remote visits because we can do so much more now remotely with the information we have.
[00:28:48] We don't have to always dispatch a technician depending on our agreement. And then from there, the technician handles the visit. They have, let's say, three tasks assigned to them, uh, [00:29:00] through the Clockworks platform. And that may also include some traditional device support tasks from a controls perspective, things that need to be done anyway, like upgrading software, uh, to the latest license and some of those we're tracking along with it.
[00:29:17] And then after their visit, then there's... Uh, follow up from the analytics team as well, uh, depending on the technicians, some, some technicians are able to follow up and determine that their solutions, uh, really fix the problem. And then sometimes it will be turned back over to our analytics team to verify that what we said we do, we actually got done, or do we need to redispatch?
[00:29:41] You know, was there something that we need to go back out for or hop on remotely for to, Finish that and then close the loop with the customer in time for whatever the next scheduled visit would be.
[00:29:53] Lawrence Trifiletti: Follow up on, on what issues we addressed, I think is critical and I think it should be emphasized [00:30:00] because that's a big difference.
[00:30:01] You know, when you're doing the traditional checklist, you do it and you move on for the most part. This is all right. Did we do what they did work? Make it better, worse, or the same. Uh, so we have that follow up and we have tools that can help us, uh, check on that follow up as well.
[00:30:18] James Dice: Can you talk a little bit more about how you're tracking those metrics?
[00:30:21] Leslie Beu: Yeah, absolutely. Uh, just as Lawrence was saying, we're looking at the scores that are directly coming out of ClockWorks and we're looking at, over time, how those scores change. And so, we can track that, you know, we knew about a fault And we initiated a task on a certain day and then we can track when that task was intended to be completed or, or essentially when the technician has said, I've done what I needed to, to fix this problem.
[00:30:51] And so at that completion date, we're looking at these scores and we're saying, did we actually see the scores, uh, improve at that time? Did they [00:31:00] improve all the way? Did the faults go completely away or did the faults get better, but maybe not completely be resolved? Or, did we fix a, let's say a comfort issue, but cause an energy spike because we've gone too far, it's the other way.
[00:31:15] And we want to be very diligent and provide that enhanced value for our clients. And so that's really important to us. So through that journey of tracking those things, um, using that data and understanding that data has really helped with our business in that we can see, um, we have some clients that have very robust facilities teams and they call on us for some spot maintenance or projects and they didn't really necessarily want service.
[00:31:45] And so We, in certain cases, sold this as more of a product with very limited support, and one key takeaway that we found was actually that the clients that were [00:32:00] servicing, we were able to track that we had results of 76% of the clients. task resolution that we tracked had improvements, uh, meaning it was either all the way fixed or the task was partially fixed.
[00:32:16] And only 24% of those items had either no change or got slightly worse, or like I said, a trade off between, let's say, comfort and energy. Whereas some of our clients that were utilizing this tool without us, We actually saw a pretty dramatic difference in results where we saw with one particular client, 27% improvement in the tasks they had completed and 73% of the items that they were completing, um, and they had lots of tasks being completed.
[00:32:49] Either had no change, so no improvement, or they got worse, because that was very eye opening for us internally, but also enabled us to have a really [00:33:00] good conversation with the client, and we determined together that it probably makes sense to have us provide additional service support.
[00:33:10] Lawrence Trifiletti: And some of those clients that started out thinking that we can do it ourselves really found out quickly.
[00:33:17] They could not.
[00:33:18] James Dice: Okay.
[00:33:19] Lawrence Trifiletti: So having that giving that value and we can provide that value based off that. I think I think that's that's kind of a long way for some of our bigger clients because they have like Leslie mentioned. Uh, bigger staff, so they figure they can handle those types of things and those incidents and they, what they quickly find out is, well, they need, they don't necessarily have the expertise or the, or the ability to garner what's good and what's bad type thing.
[00:33:46] James Dice: Yeah. And, and what you guys have done is built up two separate, I see them as two kinds of separate processes. One is the analytics team, like you said, Leslie, and the other one is getting the insights from the analytics team into someone's hands that can go actually [00:34:00] fix it. And the first one that I just described, I consider that like the super user playbook.
[00:34:04] Like if there were a playbook, there's a super user playbook. No, one's written it yet. Someone should write it, but it's, it's basically like. This person, all their, like their only job is to log into the software. And, and I think about it, like, I think I once described it on the podcast as like taking a work order and stuffing it into maintenance people's pockets as they're going out to the building.
[00:34:25] Like your, your job is to integrate into the maintenance folks as jobs so that, and in their day to day lives, so that they don't have to think about how to use the technology or when to use it, or really worry about the technology at all. It's basically like, you keep doing what you're doing before and we're just going to feed you insights.
[00:34:44] Leslie Beu: An interesting thing about that though, is that we have some, uh, some clients who have really robust facilities, teams, and they're able to take a lot of the insights and immediately, you know, resolve problems when there's broken pieces of equipment [00:35:00] or faulty sensors, they know how to get to that and fix that pretty quickly.
[00:35:04] And they don't need a whole lot of interpretation from, from what clockworks. Tells them, and that's why we love ClockWorks. And so it really is just certain opportunities. And, and it's not so much understanding what's wrong, but understanding how do I fix it? How do I write programming or change the way the whole program works to alleviate these issues or understand that three different things like a boiler short cycling with a low Delta T and then an issue where it's not following the reset.
[00:35:36] That was expected in the sequence of operations tells me, Oh, we need to change the way we're doing our hot water reset. But some of those insights from people who haven't spent their career understanding how the system hierarchy works together. That's a little bit of a tougher lift to actually get the impact of that, and that's where we're training our technicians and a [00:36:00] lot of our clients don't have maybe that full capability, even though they can use all those quick hitting, uh, faults that are obvious, and they can turn that around right away without that, I guess, centralized system as well.
[00:36:13] James Dice: Yeah, but it's your analytics team that's taking that insight and Turning it into action in a way, even though, like you said, the software, if it's a good FTD product, it can give you an action. But you're saying there's maybe even an extra layer here that your team does that. It seems like it's really important.
[00:36:32] Even if a customer can go change out of valve or whatever, it's still a little bit of diagnosis that needs to be done sometimes.
[00:36:41] Lawrence Trifiletti: Yeah, one of the added benefits, I guess, is, you know, based off the data and the results we get on this, we can actually see for our, uh, our employees, our technicians, where their weaknesses are and how to shore that up.
[00:36:53] Something that you get, you know, quantifiable with the, you know, all technicians, not all, but a lot of them, they [00:37:00] think they know everything and they're going to be the expert of all. But I think metrically we can see where, okay, you need some, a little more training here, a little more help here, because again, it's not off a checklist.
[00:37:10] You gotta be a lot more savvy, uh, of understanding a little more of the big picture. And I think in the long run, we see ourselves having technicians that are much more broad based, uh, because of this. And so that's, we see some of the evolution of some of them, uh, that are already proceeding, you know, uh.
[00:37:29] Growing into that,
[00:37:30] James Dice: what do you mean by broad based? And let me add to that. What do you also mean by the ability to sort of track a technician's effectiveness? How do you do that?
[00:37:40] Lawrence Trifiletti: So let's talk about the tool that it's it's again, if they're making a change and it's X, Y and Z, or they work with the analytics team and.
[00:37:50] The analytics team may see X, Y, and Z for something. They may not see that. And we say, okay, well, it's really this, and they can give you a blank stare or something to [00:38:00] that effect. Um, but even if they're working on it and they're struggling with it, we can understand that because we're telling them to go deeper and further than they, than they are used to going.
[00:38:10] And, and when I mean broad basis, like big picture, they have to have a more of a comprehensive understanding of the system, the processes and the, in the controls world, it's gotten much more elaborate over the years. You know, you got it. You know, ip, the world of IP is in is involved now so that, and security and controls and everything, uh, broad based in there, that can have an effect, uh, on what you're doing.
[00:38:35] Not everybody is, was built that way. And so I think we're building a, a. A more well rounded technician for the customer as well as ourselves so they can do more with less and all that type of stuff as well.
[00:38:50] James Dice: Brilliant.
[00:38:51] Leslie Beu: I was going to jump in and tag off of that in this past year where we've really started looking at operationally how we're succeeding and [00:39:00] recognizing that sometimes when we implement.
[00:39:02] A solution, it doesn't actually solve the problem they thought they were trying to solve. And it shows that they don't either understand the root system and how the system hierarchy works together and how, you know, running something more helps run something less, which one's more efficient. But really, it's going back to the.
[00:39:23] The data that I was talking about and seeing those score changes after they've implemented it. And so now instead of, you know, as a service manager or me as the analytics manager or the person approving their time sheets saying, Hey, did you, did you. Get these tasks done and they say, yep, we got the task done.
[00:39:42] And then we move on to the next thing. Now we're actually looking at it. And instead of, let's say me being the bad guy and saying, you didn't really fix it the way that you probably should have fixed it. Now I can point to the data and say, data shows that you didn't actually fix it. All the same faults are [00:40:00] happening into this magnitude.
[00:40:01] It's not just that it's on or off. It's actually really helpful that this Uh, platform shows us the magnitude, like it's just as bad or you did improve it, but we need to go back and tune that a little bit better because we didn't quite get there. So that's the data that we're using to then inform technicians that.
[00:40:20] That maybe they need some assistance and maybe we can jump in and help them with the solution, uh, or we have that foundation to talk about because they can see the scores plain as day in front of them to now say, oh, yeah, I thought that I was fixing that, but I didn't quite understand the ramifications of what I was doing.
[00:40:38] James Dice: Yeah, and this is where it kind of aligns everyone's the sentence because if I'm a building owner, I didn't really want, I wasn't intending to pay people to go check stuff and check stuff off a checklist. You're intending for stuff to get fixed and stuff to get resolved and performance to improve. And so in a way, that seems like the software is kind of aligning your incentives.
[00:40:57] It's not that they weren't You know, obviously you wanted [00:41:00] to do what was best for the client from the begin with, but it aligns sort of everyone's incentives to then allow you to say, as your manager, you're, you're not improving and the data shows you're not improving, which is the same thing for the building owner is the performance of the system improving or not, which is awesome.
[00:41:16] So as we kind of close things out here, uh, this has been super insightful. I think we've told a really comprehensive story the way that you guys are interjecting, which is awesome. Let's pretend, just to close things out, if, if I'm an organization like yours that is following behind you on your footsteps on this journey, what are a couple of things you would tell them in terms of lessons learned, things you would do differently next time, that kind of thing?
[00:41:42] Lawrence Trifiletti: We'll have patience, you know, so I would say persistence through the ups and downs. You're going to take two steps forward, one step back, and all that. If you believe in what you're trying to do, you have to stick with it, and to have a dedicated team to really work with it. You know, it's not a half measure.
[00:41:59] [00:42:00] What you're doing is you're changing the paradigm, uh, in what HVAC, uh, does, and that does not take, uh, half measures, so. Um, that would be my advice is persistence and, and a dedicated team.
[00:42:14] James Dice: How about you, Leslie?
[00:42:17] Leslie Beu: I think he said it all. Honestly, I think I can't imagine people trying to do this without having this full time position.
[00:42:25] And, and now this full team that I have, and it's been successful in that we're selling it and successful in that we have clients that are extremely pleased with it. Um, we certainly have the step back every once in a while. A client says, this is what I thought you were selling me. Here's what I'm getting.
[00:42:44] And we have to rectify it. And we need to make sure that we're in line with what it is we're really after. But that persistence is extremely important. And I'm just glad that we have a team and that Long had the insight. [00:43:00] Lawrence had the insight to, um, advocate for that and recognize that the only way to Move forward and be successful is to dedicate the resources to doing that.
[00:43:10] Lawrence Trifiletti: Yeah. So one last thing. It's an evolutionary process, meaning always be flexible in to change like we did with the technicians and the conditions on the ground of what you're running into. You have to be flexible when it comes to that or you're going to bang your head on the wall a lot.
[00:43:28] James Dice: Yeah. So if we're thinking about the technician piece.
[00:43:31] How, how do you guys plan to solve that in the future? You said that's where you want to get, you wanna get to where they're the primary uses of the software. What's the sort of plan, I guess?
[00:43:43] Lawrence Trifiletti: Well, part of it's natural. I think part of it is as we phase out our traditional, which is something we're doing, this is the norm of what we're doing.
[00:43:51] And I would say, I, I, I call it like kind of a seeding process. We have a few technicians that have embraced it, that [00:44:00] we're using as the seeds to germinate. Uh, the rest of the technicians to understand it and have them mentor those technicians and lead by example on that. So it's an evolutionary process, uh, when it comes to that.
[00:44:13] And then continuously, the last thing would be continuing to support them and train them and tell them it's okay. You know, you're not doomed.
[00:44:22] Leslie Beu: I would add to that, that we're also looking for non traditional technicians to add into the mix, right? We're really approaching it from both sides. We want to train up the technicians that we have.
[00:44:34] We want to hire new technicians that are interested in, maybe they aren't looking for a management role, but they don't necessarily want to do what they've always been doing. And then on the flip side, I told you that I hired three energy engineers. They're not functioning as energy engineers. They're functioning as some sort of blend between a technician and an engineer and as a salesperson, because we're talking to the clients, [00:45:00] we're analyzing the data, and we need that technical background.
[00:45:03] But ultimately, sometimes we may be able to implement some of these changes before we even have to dispatch to a technician. So it's all about that value to the customer and figuring out how can we solve the problem the fastest Way possible. And then how can we train our technicians to be more like energy engineers?
[00:45:21] And how can we train our energy engineers to be more like technicians?
[00:45:25] James Dice: Awesome. Okay. One last question I have for you guys is around trust. So it seems like you guys, for the most part, have your, a lot of your customers trust in terms of you're providing this tool. This tool says what you need to be doing.
[00:45:38] And you said at the beginning, this is driving more pull through work and the ability, it has the ability to get and grow your guys's business, which is great. I think a lot of people look at that like, Oh, this person's got this analytics tool and it's going to help. that they need to do more work for us.
[00:45:55] I've heard that pushback at least a little bit. So how, how would you recommend people sort of [00:46:00] message that with their customer? It probably starts with having their trust to begin with, but can you kind of talk a little bit about how, I think a lot of customers aren't necessarily ready for their service providers to be.
[00:46:12] Totally proactive with some of this stuff.
[00:46:16] Lawrence Trifiletti: Well, I, I guess, and maybe Leslie can elaborate. I feel like if you show value to what you're doing within, without the pull through work, like, you know, on a normal day to day basis, and you're showing You know, from clockwork, from the dashboard of like, okay, here's your potential savings based off X, Y, and Z.
[00:46:35] Um, here's, here's, you know, all that type of metric, you gain their trust. And then when you come to something that's possibly out of scope and they're used to some stuff out of scope anyways, they're more readily, uh, have the ability to accept that in its trust in our technicians and our team is a big part.
[00:46:53] Leslie Beu: Yeah, I'd elaborate. Lawrence mentioned what's included and what's excluded, and I mentioned that [00:47:00] earlier, too. We really did have to define and make sure that our technicians and our clients understand what are we including in our service, and then what's That's kind of outside of that. So we are not intending to grow this by just bringing in more, more pull through work.
[00:47:17] In fact, in a lot of cases, we're selling this to say, you shouldn't have to call us for all of these service calls. We want to proactively find them and resolve them so that you're not constantly having the hot calls and cold calls. So we're including a certain scope and if we're taking care of those items and then we can prove, right, we can show the results with these, you know, these metrics and say we have improved, uh, these different tasks and here's how you can see that the scores have gone down and there's this third party software that's able to actually show that we're doing what we said we were going to do.
[00:47:51] That's a huge part of gaining their trust and showing that while we're on site or looking at it remotely. And implementing these solutions. We're really [00:48:00] solving the problem. And so if the if a certain customer has so many more problems that are outside of our ability to handle that during our regularly scheduled visits, then they have the opportunity to say.
[00:48:13] Well, I can see how important this is according to the fault detection and diagnostics, so I do want to pay you to come do this. And other times they can say, yeah, I see it's something we can work on, but it's not that big of a deal to me. Let's do it at your next scheduled visit. So like Lawrence said, if we're doing what we said we'd do during our service agreement, then they, we earn their trust to do more outside of the agreement when and if they are ready to do that.
[00:48:40] And the third party platform then. Proves to them that we're doing what we said we do, or shows us when we're not so that we can rectify the situation. And my one other comment on what you said, what you asked about, um, why we're doing this and what this value is, it really is all about [00:49:00] scalability more than just more pull through work.
[00:49:03] It's about us doing more for the client. In the same amount of time or doing the same amount for the client in less amount of time so that we can handle more clients and grow our business and grow our base without just adding more and more people to it and just selling, selling hours of time.
[00:49:23] James Dice: Right, because technicians and energy engineers aren't exactly growing on trees these days.
[00:49:28] Lawrence Trifiletti: Yeah, that's exactly what I was about to say, you know. It takes, it takes a very long time to get technicians, you know, they're like an oak tree. It takes a while for them to become, you know, a full tree. So, it takes a while. All right.
[00:49:43] James Dice: Well, that's a good place to end up. I want to thank you both for sort of pulling back the curtain, uh, to show us how you're using analytics software and your service operations.
[00:49:53] So thank you so much.
[00:49:57] Rosy Kahlife: Okay friends, thank you for listening to this episode. [00:50:00] As we continue to grow our global community of change makers, we need your help. For the next couple of months, we're challenging our listeners to share a link to their favorite Nexus episode on LinkedIn with a short post about why you listen. It would really, really help us out.
[00:50:14] Make sure to tag us in the post so we can see it. Have a good one.
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