Podcast

min read

James Dice

🎧 #194: The Condition-Based Maintenance Playbook

March 31, 2026

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Episode 194 is a conversation with James Dice and Brad Bonavida from Nexus Lab.

Summary

Episode 194 is a conversation with James Dice and Brad Bonavida from Nexus Lab. In this episode of the Nexus Podcast, the Nexus Labs team breaks down their research and shares the condition-based maintenance playbook.

Mentions and Links

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Highlights

Introduction (0:00)

How it’s done today / What is condition-based maintenance? (11:35)

Why building owners run this playbook (23:00)

The Procedure (36:05)

Step 1: Define Outcomes and Baselines (37:04)

Step 2: Map Current Workflow (49:37)

Step 3: Select Priority Assets and Condition Signals (54:13)

Step 4: Build and Validate the Signals (1:00:28)

Step 5: Add Triage Before Work Order Creation (1:06:30)

Step 6: Trigger Work Order and Execution (1:10:38)

Step 7: Establish Role Ownership (1:14:11)

Step 8: Pilot the Full Loop (1:17:19)

Step 9: Standardize, Scale, and Continuously Improve (1:18:21)

Maturity framework (1:20:31)

Level 1: Reactive + Calendar PM dominant (1:20:57)

Level 2: Signals without execution (1:21:13)

Level 3: Controlled Pilot Loop (1:22:12)

Level 4: Programmatic Deployment (1:23:53)

Level 5: Portfolio Optimization (1:24:12)

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Music credits: There Is A Reality by Common Tiger—licensed under an Music Vine Limited Pro Standard License ID: S706971-16073.

Full transcript

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!

James Dice: [00:00:00] Hey friends. Welcome to the Nexus Podcast, where we talk about connected buildings and the playbooks behind them. This episode is for facility managers primarily. They're focused on moving away from reactive maintenance, which we'll define here in a little bit, uh, reducing costs, increasing uptime, improving user experience.

And today we're digging into condition-based maintenance and how it's being implemented in real connected buildings programs. Uh, this is also for energy managers who are trying to get performance issues fixed in their buildings, uh, OT people who are trying to get data flowing in the right places and trying not to cause cybersecurity issues.

Um, quick note, if you're trying to stay on top of this space without wading through all of the hype, we write a short newsletter called The Connected Buildings Briefing. It's a five minute breakdown of what is worth paying attention to right now, and it's [00:01:00] read by over 8,000 people. Uh, you can grab it in the show notes.

My name is James Dice and I'm joined here by Brad Bonavita. Hi, Brad.

Brad Bonavida: Hey, how's it going?

James Dice: We're gonna get into how it's done today. What is condition-based maintenance? Why building owners run this playbook, the step-by-step procedure? Um, we're gonna get into the marketplace breakdown, so what technology and services are involved?

Um, we're gonna explore, like our idea here is to sort of take the buyer's perspective and talk about, uh, what we're curious about, but also what we're skeptical about. Um, and then we'll talk about a maturity framework. So if you're on the billing owner side. We'll walk through from the, just getting started to all the way to very, very mature implementation of this playbook.

Um, definitely check out our Nexus cast if it's before April 15th, and you're gonna come to our event, um, come join us on April 15th. We're gonna do a three [00:02:00] hour virtual conference talking only about condition-based maintenance, if it's AP after April 15th. Um, go to the link in the show notes and you can get our condition-based maintenance playbook.

Give us your email and we'll send you that playbook. And it's gonna be a summary of all the research we've done on this playbook. Alright, without further ado, let's get into it. Uh, Brad, will you start us off with, um, just, I came to you with this new format. What is this new format of podcast?

Brad Bonavida: Yeah, we, we've been on a journey for the last, what, two months?

Um. You, you kind of brought this idea to the next slabs team of producing these playbooks this year, which we're all really excited about. And it's distilling these, these things, these, these things that, uh, building owners are running to achieve outcomes into just like the steps that someone can really operationalize.

This is kind of the first one that we're doing. So we've got, like you said, the condition-based maintenance nexus cast event coming up. While we're [00:03:00] preparing for that, it's like, let's build the playbook of how people actually do this. So, um, you and I are gonna basically deep dive into everything that you and I have learned at our time at Nexus and before as professional engineers into what condition-based maintenance is, how people are doing it, how people should do it, where they get stuck.

Um, so hopefully this is like super comprehensive and recovering it from basically all angles. So, yeah, this is kind of new, so please, if you're listening to this, like give us some feedback. We're planning on doing more of these and let us know if it, if it lands for you.

James Dice: And you, you kind of went into a deep dive on this.

Brad Bonavida: Yeah.

James Dice: You found that we produced 58 pieces of content on this topic since 2020. Can you tell everyone about your little, little deep dive there?

Brad Bonavida: Sure. So my deep dive was mainly on our deep dive that we've done over the last, you know, six years. Yeah. But, you know, I opened up [00:04:00] Codex to got an agent going just like everyone else's these days, figured out how to get it a Nexus Pro account so it could see everything on our website.

You know, like you can actually log in and be a a, an agent on the other side, seeing all the content we have. I taught it a little bit about what condition-based maintenance is, like, what we mean by that term. And then I said, go find where we've talked about this. 'cause we have over a thousand pieces of content in our, you know, library.

And it came back with a ranked tier of 58 pieces that we have discussed, condition-based maintenance. And almost all of those are with a specific building owner's case study of like, here's the building owner, here's them, explaining how they're using it or how they've applied it. So like there's no lack of information here about like real world examples.

I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna shoot these off. This is not all of 'em, but through that Codex project we heard stories of condition-based maintenance from. Amazon, Auburn University, Cornell University, CU Anschutz, Delta Airlines, Embry [00:05:00] Riddle, epic Investment Services, Glenstone Museum, Hudson Pacific Properties, Hyatt Regency, Indiana University, Intermountain Health.

Kip DC Schools. Kilroy Lendlease, Lincoln Property Company, LinkedIn, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft Northern Arizona, quadri, uc, Irvine, university of Iowa, Woolworth's. That was just like the top, the top list. There's more that are like, you know, adjacent to condition based maintenance. So, so we had a project to get all this distilled into like what is the common thread here For sure.

James Dice: And I think we should say here that this episode that we're about to do is not gonna be short. So this might be used on six commutes for you, or you're cooking some sort of long dinner, or you are on the long run in the mountains, maybe like, this is gonna be a long episode. Um, if you want a shorter version of this, more distilled.

Um, that's when you would go download the playbook that we're gonna write after this. That's gonna be just a few pages, uh, sort of distilling the step-by-step process. Um, [00:06:00] so let's kick it off then. Brad. What is condition-based maintenance?

Brad Bonavida: Yeah, so 62nd version. 'cause we're about to do the, the very long version.

I was trying to think of the simplest analogy. If you didn't know anything about condition based maintenance, what are we talking about? Well, there's one piece of maintenance that I think is most common ar uh, among Americans. I don't know, people in general, which is like changing your oil in your car, which actually is kind of changing 'cause a lot of people are driving electric vehicles.

So it's, it's aging. But what is one piece of maintenance we all deal with, we deal with our oil changes. How do you, how do you change your oil? How do you know when. It's a scheduled piece of maintenance. It's typically scheduled on the amount of miles on your odometer. I, I change my mile or my oil every 5,000 miles.

So there's nothing to what my oil is doing. It's just, I've done 5,000 miles, now I know I need to go change my oil. It's just a scheduled thing. If I weren't to do that, I would start to see failure. So your engine [00:07:00] would start to seize. It would knock, you would have these signs that you're breaking, so you're doing the scheduled thing to avoid this failure.

But what if it was condition based? How would oil changes be condition based if you had sensors in your car that were checking, you know, the history of your oil temperature? It's viscosity how pure it is. I could get way more dialed in and know that, you know, this time I need to change my oil at 3,400 miles and the next time I need to do it at 6,200 and change on that.

But most cars don't have that. But that, that would be the condition based maintenance version. Now, if you extrapolate that, like if you think of a car as one system and a building owner has a portfolio of buildings, hundreds of buildings with thousands of devices in them, it's like you're trying to track oil changes across, you know, who knows how many equivalent assets and then you need those conditions.

'cause you can't just do this scheduled routine. So that's how I'm bringing the idea of condition-based maintenance into your, into your day-to-day life of how people [00:08:00] should think about it.

James Dice: Love that. Love that. My dad's a mechanic, or was a mechanic before he retired. He's gonna love that. We're gonna have to send him this episode.

Um, alright, I love that. Let's, let's jump in. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about, kick us off with sort of how maintenance is done today. And I should say that while Brad and I are both professional engineers and we have a lot of experience, neither of us have worked in maintenance teams before.

Brad Bonavida: Right.

But James, I think you, you should just give, even if it's 30 seconds, like a little bit of history about your experience with this particular topic because I, I consider you one of the experts. Like you, you're the probably the person I know who knows the most about this topic. So tell the audience why, you know, about condition-based maintenance from your history.

James Dice: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's because the, the maintenance world and the energy management world are so heavily intertwined, right? And then the controls world and the maintenance [00:09:00] world are so heavily intertwined. And so when I have done, you know. Consulting and mechanical contracting. And even working at NRLI was working on the campus sustainability team.

It was always from the standpoint of how do you optimize a, a building's performance, usually from an energy standpoint to save money and produce ROI, right? But what you quickly find out is that if you want someone to go change an, uh, some sort of issue on the energy side, you quickly realize that you need someone on the maintenance side to go fix that thing.

Right? Um, and so th that's not quite what we're talking about today, but you, you quickly realize that these issues on the energy start side are going to start to pile up. You're not gonna be able to get them implemented unless you have an engaged maintenance team and someone to actually go change the thing on, on the maintenance side and.

That's not [00:10:00] quite what we're gonna talk about today. The energy piece will save that for the next episode. But, um, on the maintenance side, it's, it's actually a completely different world, right? You're actually coming in and saying like, I want you to prioritize my thing. And so today what we're gonna talk a little bit more about is like, what are the maintenance teams doing?

How do they, you know, schedule their work? How do they prioritize? How, how, like what does their day to day look like? And I think when you're trying to make, like in, in my career, I've always been trying to make buildings operate better from an energy standpoint. You can't do that without actually engaging the maintenance people as well.

And

so,

Brad Bonavida: yeah, but that, that, uh, that friction between maintenance and energy came up in so many interviews about this topic. So I'm excited to

James Dice: Yeah, yeah. To

Brad Bonavida: dig deeper into that. But,

James Dice: but I think, I think what we're gonna take, uh, uh, here a little bit is like a little bit of a skeptical kind of. Owner side focus, which is like, we don't actually, we [00:11:00] don't have that experience of working in these teams.

Um, so we're gonna try to explain it to the people that also aren't in those teams, how this actually works. Um,

Brad Bonavida: right.

James Dice: But what we also want to do is, is engage the maintenance side. So if you're working in maintenance and you're hearing this, we want to hear your perspective as well. We want you to engage with us.

'cause what we're really trying to do at the end of the day is remove the obstacles to moving towards condition-based maintenance with this episode. So,

Brad Bonavida: yep.

James Dice: Let's jump in. So I think, I think the best place to start with this is talking about how maintenance is done today. It's very much not based on any sort of real time conditions.

Right. Um, the best word that I came up with for it is actually called hybrid. Uh, the word that I have for it is hybrid, because most building maintenance programs today are a hybrid of. Um, and I'm gonna define these next, which is reactive work, periodic preventative maintenance or PMs, [00:12:00] um, inspections usually for compliance.

And then, um, what we're gonna call backlog triage. So if we, if we take those four terms, let's define them next. The first one is reactive, which is like something breaks or an occupant complains. Um, and now the maintenance team is then going into this reaction to that, um, initial stimulus, right? Um, we hear the, we hear the word a lot in our content with, which is firefighting.

Like we're trying to change a maintenance team who is used to just every day being a little bit like an emergency, right? Um, the next one is periodic preventative maintenance. So these are your time or your interval based checks and tasks, right? Um. A a little bit like your oil change example, right? Um, that's based on a certain amount of miles.

It could be for an air handler based on a certain amount of time that [00:13:00]it's, or days that it's run or whatever starts and stops, like those sorts of things. Um, usually it's calendar based, right? Um, IFMA has a lot of, and boma both have a lot of content here. Um, IFMA says that most companies strive for a, a mixture, um, of preventative or scheduled maintenance versus reactive to be somewhere between 65 to 85%.

That's what good looks like. That's what, that's what our FMS and our community are striving for, and meaning that most of the time spent on maintenance is being spent on preventative or scheduled to prevent reactive, right. Um. Then we have our inspections or our mandatory PMs, that's like a, a type of PMs, which is, um, you know, fire and life safety systems just like have to be checked and then you have to log that check because someone's gonna come check and fine you or shut you down.

If you don't do those from, [00:14:00] from the standpoint of the law, um, then you have backlog, triage. And this is an important because these all tie together. Maintenance teams have limited staff, right? They have limited staff with limited time and backlog is when you basically think back up. So if you have reactive work that you're not getting to and so you have broken shit throughout your portfolio, or you have preventative tasks that you've decided you're gonna schedule and you don't get to those things, right?

Those two things then start to pile up. And so, um. These different organizations define backlog. I think I have this somewhere. Yeah. So I, I think I follow, I saw this somewhere in my research when a PM task is three months overdue. That's when it offic officially joins the, the backlog.

Brad Bonavida: It's, it's just such a vicious cycle like.

The like, I just think of so many like examples of how a technician or a [00:15:00] maintenance person has to be reactive. Like example number one is you're walking down the hall to go do a preventative maintenance scheduled thing and someone's like, Hey, this is like broken right now. And you're like, what am I gonna do?

Am I gonna ignore this person or, and go fix that thing? That's not broken. No, you're gonna go fix it. The second example is like, let's say you go to an air handler unit and you're doing, I mean, a filter change is like the most common example of preventative maintenance. You're going to change that filter and you realize that the motor's burned out on that unit.

Well now you're like on a preventative maintenance work order. You're doing that task, but you have this reactive thing that you need to handle right there. And like you're probably not gonna log it differently. I mean, you're not gonna like spend the time to do that, but like everything you do daily, you get pointed towards the reactive thing first.

So this concept that you're bringing up of backlog, triage. How could you possibly not have that growing almost indefinitely? If this is your, you know, yeah. If this is [00:16:00] the way you're tackling your maintenance.

James Dice: So every maintenance team out there has this triage happening daily, hourly, right? Where they're constantly deciding with my limited time, what's the best thing for me to spend that time on right now?

Um, there's been a very, like all of these organizations, ifma, boma, apa, Ashe, they all have, um, documented research around this pattern that when staffing and reduce staffing and resources reduce, you replace preventative work with reactive work. Yeah. Like, that is a very documented pattern. Um, and so the definition of condition-based maintenance then is maintenance that is then performed based on an equipment's actual condition rather than a schedule.

Um. So it could be reactive because the condition is, that's broken. But I think what we're trying to capture is actually [00:17:00] this. Maybe you're catching the condition before it fails, or at least you're not relying on the occupant or the tenant to tell you that there's a problem. You know that there's a problem whenever there is a problem.

Brad Bonavida: Yep.

James Dice: Um, and a little bit of just final definition. We hear a lot about predictive based maintenance or predictive maintenance, and I don't think it's that sep that's, that's useful to separate them. Um, you look at the technologies in the market, which we'll talk about in a little bit. Mostly all of them are just simply measuring conditions with sensors.

They're not really doing a lot of prediction. I think that maybe. Maybe in in edge cases, but I just don't think it's that useful to then create a separate term. Um,

Brad Bonavida: so, so common in our industry Right. To like bombard it with like four more terms than it needs. Yeah, I, I saw another one in a report that was reliability centered maintenance.

Which is also like, maybe that's a little bit nuanced, but it's [00:18:00] like, to your point, I'm not sure it's valuable to keep adding 'em. Like the point is that you're reading your building signals and doing something about it before you,

James Dice: I think those are a little bit, there's a little bit of nuance there in that predictive, I feel like comes from the vendors.

Reliability comes reliability centered maintenance is like a style of maintenance, like a, A practice, like a school of thought that there's a way to do maintenance based on what produces more, most reliability. I think we'll just leave that to the side right now and what, okay. But I think predictive, I think people can just assume that we're grouping predictive in with condition-based maintenance for the purposes of this playbook.

Then we have, oh, this is where the three month thing comes in. So deferred maintenance is a technical term that is broadly. Any of the above that should have happened, but is not, has not happened yet. So, um, the APPA [00:19:00]explicitly includes a three month backlog of preventative maintenance work orders. If you have a three month backlog that is officially described as deferred maintenance.

And so that's, you hear a lot about like the, that's a k, a common KPI, right. In manual

Brad Bonavida: circle. And you said any of the, any of the above. So you mean any reactive periodic or backlog triage that has been ignored in three months as being

James Dice: or condition-based? Like if, you know,

Brad Bonavida: like

James Dice: you, you could certainly ignore a condition.

Right. And then that is now deferred maintenance. Yeah. And so people use the word deferred maintenance to talk about the total dollars that they're basically in the whole, like a, a maintenance or capital program could be in the whole. Um, and with, with deferred maintenance of all this stuff that needs to have happened by now and it hasn't,

Brad Bonavida: this is probably a good point like that, just that concept of deferred maintenance.

The, the way that Steve Burrell, the, the, uh, CIO, the former CIO of na u said it in our podcast and we were with him, he said [00:20:00] we couldn't get away from firefighting long enough to prune the forest to prevent it from happening again. So it's like that idea of like, you're just, all you're doing is firefighting, 'cause you've got all this deferred maintenance, right?

You're always behind. You can never get ahead to prune the forest. To stop the next forest fire.

James Dice: Yeah. Yeah. All right. So last piece of like describing how maintenance is done today. We're just hearing from every angle how we've talked about what happens when you have less maintenance time. Well, this thing that's happening is just staff shortages are.

Pervasive, like people are doing, are being expected to do in their maintenance programs more with less, more with less people. Um, so we've heard about this from Lincoln Property Company on the podcast a few weeks ago. We've heard, heard about this from quad reel in their presentations. Um, basically what we're seeing is less and less people either on purpose, like they might [00:21:00]decide that they're gonna run buildings remotely, and so therefore you have less onsite staff and more portfolio level staff.

Um, but, or you're doing it because the budget cuts and people just are, are deciding. Um, I'm just gonna run my buildings to failure, run my equipment to failure. Um,

Brad Bonavida: or, or a third one. It is just, I found one more stat on that. It's just like the turnover too, because these people are just

James Dice: Yeah.

Brad Bonavida: You know, often overworked so much.

Zito Education Report did a report on this in 2026, and they cited a 40% annual turnover rate for facility technicians. So if you have 10, yeah, you're gonna lose like four of them once a year because of all sorts of reasons. But yeah, you've got that to deal with as well.

James Dice: Yeah. And so when I was doing research, uh, research on this, what I found was an interesting stat in that in 2017, um, facilities net reported a national median of [00:22:00] 50,000 square feet per FTE, some Ashe says 30 in healthcare, which is, you know, more labor intensive, 31,000 square foot in healthcare per FTE.

And then we're hearing reports. Front of 300,000 square foot per FTE. So like,

Brad Bonavida: not, not very close

James Dice: six times, what is that? 10? Yeah. 6, 7, 8, 10 times the amount of square foot per engineer. And so this is where we get into, like, that's the state of maintenance that leads a building owner to start to think about condition-based maintenance, right?

So, um, as staffing gets tighter and your portfolios get larger with the same amount of staff, your PM completion slips, your backlog grows, your deferred maintenance grows, um, and then teams just basically fall into firefighting mode. And that gets us into condition-based maintenance, right? Why do I wanna shift to [00:23:00] condition-based maintenance?

Um, I think there's a myth out here that says condition-based maintenance is a progression from. Like you start off at reactive. It's like the, the Darwin Evolution graphic, right? You start off at reactive and then you're going to preventative, and then once you graduate from preventative, now you're going to condition based.

And that, I think that's absolutely not true, right? Yeah. Um, that's not how this works. It's more of, um, condition-based is sort of like a layer on top. So whatever mix you had before, you might have been completely reactive or you might have been all the way up on your PMs, right? Whatever. Wherever you are on that spectrum, condition-based is this layer on top saying like, what data can we get about all of all the things we're maintaining across all our portfolio?

What data can we get to actually make that shift away from reactive to more preventative?

Brad Bonavida: That's, that's [00:24:00] a really important distinction. Like there's not this like. North star at the end, where you're just sitting there waiting for a signal to come up that you're going to go fix. Like, that doesn't, no one has ever talked about getting rid of preventative maintenance because they have condition-based maintenance.

It still happens. Absolutely. Yeah.

James Dice: Yeah. And, and it, it would be asinine to think you wanted to get conditions on every single device in your whole portfolio. Like there are things that you maintain that you just don't need to turn into an iot device that's gonna give you conditions. And so you're never gonna be able to just graduate your entire maintenance workflows into this.

Right?

Brad Bonavida: Yep, exactly.

James Dice: So just that's the first, I guess, part about this is it's a layer on top, so all you're trying to do is produce better outcomes for the building owner organization with this playbook. And let's talk about the outcomes. The first is reactive maintenance is just like. Very, very well documented to be [00:25:00]higher total cost of ownership over the long term.

So I think this is another thing to think about is that you could spend $0 on maintenance, and over the short term, that's gonna be very high, high, ROI for you, right? If, if you fire your whole maintenance team and you don't do any maintenance, right, you're gonna have a very high short-term ROI. But what we've documented, like I say, we um, mainly the DOE has documented very, very, and very heavy detail with their o and m best practices guide that they most recently updated around 2020, I think it was 2021.

Um, that reactive maintenance has a very high. Total cost of ownership over time. Um, and I'll just like run through the mechanics of that. We're not like people can download the playbook to get the actual citations here, but um, emergency work is [00:26:00] dramatically more expensive. Everyone that's listening to this knows like.

If an air handler breaks on Friday night and you gotta call the guy that's gonna fix it from his kid's baseball game, like of course that's gonna be more expensive than if it were to fix. You were to plan out that fix over time.

Brad Bonavida: And one, one addition to that point, and I might bring this up two or three more times 'cause I think it's one of the most confusing parts of this all is the mix of in-house labor versus outsourced labor for the people who are dealing with these problems.

Because when you say reactive maintenance is more expensive, one of the big reasons it's more expensive is 'cause you're usually hiring somebody who doesn't work for your company to do that emergency repair.

James Dice: Yeah.

Brad Bonavida: And so in all these situations there's this some, some flexibility between, am I gonna have my person who is paid hourly take care of this?

Or are they too busy or not, you know, at the building right now or whatever. And I'm gonna go hire. 800. You fix it right now for premium price to do it. [00:27:00] So that comes up throughout this whole conversation, is that mix and how it affects what you do. Yeah.

James Dice: And when you have an emergency, you have, like, you're alluding to overtime labor.

You have to rush parts. And then I think the big thing to think about with an emergency is that you have operational disruption. So whatever type of building we're talking about here, you could have to shut that operation down. Yes. Which is top line. Now we're not talking about less expenses, we're talking about less revenue for whatever, build businesses in there.

Brad Bonavida: Yep.

James Dice: Um, so the doe's rule of thumb here is three to five times higher costs, then preventative maintenance. Um, all right, let's keep running through these issues. I'm trying to do this in sort of like a rapid fire sort of way here. The next way that condition base is lower, lower total cost of ownership is you're catching issues before the damage compounds.

And so a good example here would be like if you're, if you have a water leak and you catch that with leak detection. You're catching that before it soaks through the floor and then goes into the next floor [00:28:00] and then ruins the ceiling and then ruins an air handler, right? Like that's, that's what you're trying to prevent.

Um, the next is, the next way is emergency capital replacement. Similar to emergency maintenance, same thing. Um, if you have to do something very large, you can expect that very large cost to compound in the same way. The next one is unnecessary preventative maintenance consumes labor also without actually improving outcomes.

So if you're going and checking things on a schedule, right, um, but you didn't actually need to do that check, that's actually wasting money as well. Um, okay, next one. Um, the DOE says that poorly maintained equipment. Re, um, increases energy consumption 10 to 20%. Um, that one will be pretty obvious for most, most people listening to this.

Um, next one, asset life shortens. So this is a, this is a very also like well documented pattern in the maintenance world, which is neglected. Equipment [00:29:00] can fail 30% sooner than well-maintained assets. So again, total cost of ownership is all of these things, right? Eventually, that asset fails. It now moves from maintenance to capital.

Budgets, and obviously if you're a building owner, you want to defer that cost as long as possible. If you're not maintaining it, then you can just assume that that service life is reduced by 30%. Um, last one is fines. So if you don't have time to get to those mandatory PMs because you're, all you're doing is firefighting all the time, you actually are gonna get fined and maybe potentially shut down by regulatory agencies.

So basically, condition-based lets you, um, we have well-documented, um, we have an article last year that we wrote about clockworks in their new compliance, um, dashboard, right? So the ability to actually, if, if compliance is mandatory, um, and it's [00:30:00] mandatory that you do some sort of check, how can you get a piece of technology to do that check for you and then also document that that check happened at the same time.

Um, so total cost of ownership is like a big, big reason why you make the shift to condition-based maintenance. The second big one is it's just a worse occupant experience for them to have to point out that stuff's broken in your building. The occupants are the ones that you're trying to, the building exists for the occupants experience at the end of the day, and so improving your occupant experience, improving your tenant experience is, is, this just happened actually a couple weeks ago with our building owner concierge program.

We got a call from a multi-family operator. They have 400 apartment buildings in their portfolio, and their biggest problem is it's a tenant experience thing. They want their renters [00:31:00] to not have to call. Say, Hey, my, they're in the south. All these apartment buildings are in the south. It's hot. And they, they don't want them to be the ones to figure out whether the HVAC's broken.

They want the technician to already be on their way by the time the space gets too hot. And the occupant realizes that the air conditioner's broken. And so this guy was reaching out to us and saying like, how do I get ahead of that? And the reason is they want to create that better occupant experience.

Brad Bonavida: The, the, I saw a stat from JLL kind of on this same subject that was building quality and operational performance are the number two and number three most important things behind location for leasing decisions. So aside from where your building's at making sure that it's performing well and that there's a high quality, that's like literally the only other thing that your tenants care about.

So, totally, if you can fix this, like they're gonna stick around, your building's gonna be better than the building across the street.

James Dice: Yeah. I think the big [00:32:00] thing is we'll talk about this in a sup in a separate playbook in the future. The big thing before we move on here is just reducing downtime. So like you do not want to disrupt whatever sort of thing is happening in your building.

If it's a lab building on a university, you're really trying not to disrupt that research. Right. Um, apply it to whatever, whatever type of building you're talking about. Um, alright, last one. The reason to switch to condition based maintenance or move towards it is that 70% PMs, which we started this section talking about, that's, that's the definition of good that has just becoming unrealistic.

Like that, that that good is unattainable. And so I think, I think maintenance leaders are looking at this going, how can I use technology to only use my scarce labor on assets that are actually showing signs of degradation?

Brad Bonavida: Uh, well, I, I have a question that I think we're going to like [00:33:00] probably try to address within the procedure here, but that, that thing that you just said, 70% percent of PMs is unrealistic.

What I can't wrap my head around is how building owners who are successful at condition-based maintenance are figuring out how to lower the PMs that they're doing. Like you've got a condition based maintenance program, things are rolling. What's the step where you're like sitting in a conference room and you're like, okay, we no longer need to do PMs X, Y, and Z because we're covered.

Like, it's not clear to me how that decision's made. Like even if your condition-based maintenance is rocking, how do you understand that you like don't need to do that particular PM anymore? That, that sounds hard to figure out to me. Yeah. I'm not really sure I've seen the perfect example of it.

James Dice: Yeah, it's, it's, it's interesting being around this space for so long.

I think there was a time when it. Everyone used filters as an example, right? So you, you would change your filters every six months, [00:34:00] that would be preventative maintenance. And then, um, Delta P sensors came along and it became standard. You put a control system in your air handler and now you have, uh, differential pressure across the filter.

And now you can tell when exactly that needs to be changed and when it doesn't. Um, and I think what people found is like, that's actually an example where, um, it maybe made sense to do preventative maintenance because now you're then having to maintain those pressure sensors and now I need to do preventative maintenance on those pressure sensors or condition based mainten.

So I think everybody, I think we're still trying to figure that out based on what I've heard. And I think most, it just kind of depends on the space, the piece of equipment. And this is part of the playbook, right? We have to decide which conditions we're gonna pay attention to. And so, yeah, we'll get there in a minute, but I, I think most of them are kind of doing that.

On a case by case basis. And it, that's why the program takes a while to get off the ground. Yeah.

Brad Bonavida: It's so [00:35:00] complex. Like, to take your example one step further, another classic one is like a motor's amperage. And as that motor's amperage raises, now you might need to replace that motor before it burns out and dies.

Well, if that motor is serving a blower on an A HU that has filters, should you just replace the filters when you're fixing the motor that's condition based and they would kind of like merge together based on the asset. And it's a really complicated formula to figure out how you get rid of some PMs or

James Dice: Yeah.

Brad Bonavida: You know, merge them together

James Dice: in the building already. Or are they rolling a truck? Right. So that they could get to that air handler and like Yeah, that's the game. That's, that's the, the playbook that we're gonna jump into.

Brad Bonavida: Yeah.

James Dice: Um, but generally that's the, that, those are the three reasons. So if we look at the arc of this conversation, the three reasons people are moving towards condition-based maintenance is lowering cost of ownership.

Um. Improving the occupant experience and just acknowledging that trying to get to 70% PMs is unrealistic and they're realizing that they're getting [00:36:00] taken over by firefighting.

Brad Bonavida: Right. Okay. So you just like set the stage. You've got like the way it's done today that's broken and why people are shifting to this.

So now what you and I have done is at least version one of going through all those different examples we've seen over the last six years and trying to create like one set of procedures of how, how people do this. Like what's the most common way people go about this. So we've got nine steps here. I wanna walk you through the nine steps.

I'll preface that like they're a little iterative, right? You know, you're kind of. Looking at all these, it's not like you just do step one and then two, and then three. You're kind of doing them all at once. But this is, I think, the best framework we've come up with of how we've seen people address these, um, in an orderly fashion that actually adjusts their operations, not just slapping technology on top of it.

James Dice: And this is us synthesizing what we've heard. So if you have a better roadmap out there that we should be following, let us know and reach [00:37:00] out

Brad Bonavida: please. So the first step is maybe the first step in like every playbook that we'll write. And you've covered most of this already, but defining the outcomes and the baselines of your condition-based maintenance program that you're trying to build.

So I think that really hits on like kind of the importance of really figuring out what your targets are and what you're gonna measure. I mean, you just laid out so many different examples of how you can decrease your total cost of ownership, you can improve occupant satisfaction, all these things. But like.

You can't get lost in the sauce of all of 'em. You kind of have to like know what you're gonna measure and how you're gonna do this. So, um, you know, just examples of operational stats that we've seen people like hone in on early, um, is, you know, number of faults detected. If you didn't have a condition-based maintenance program, you probably were at zero.

One indicator of a good condition-based maintenance program is how many faults is it actually coming up with? What percentage [00:38:00] of those faults are getting fixed? Uh, how many of those faults are actually turning into work orders that people are executing? How many reactive maintenance tickets were opened before you had condition-based maintenance?

And how many are being opened after you have condition-based maintenance? What's your repeat failure rate? How often are the same pieces of equipment failing in the same timeframe, you know, in a year or in five years? Um, and then comfort complaints. Like how many times are you actually having someone who's an occupant raise their hand and be like, Hey, this isn't right.

Those are some examples on the operational side of like, people really. People we've seen do this successfully will hone in to a couple of those that really matter to them and like know how to track it and know how to measure it and know that that's what they're going for to gauge their success.

James Dice: Yeah.

Um, I'd say one thing that the vendors of the smart buildings world, whether they're tech or service providers, they're trying to like influence how maintenance people do their work and telling them the number of faults you detected is [00:39:00] not motivational given, given what we just talked about as the backdrop to this playbook.

Like they already have way more shit than they can get done in a given day. So for you to tell them, I detected in 2000 faults in the last month, they're fighting fires already so that like everyone has seen the eyes glaze over at that. Like they already know shit is broken in their buildings. Like, congratulations.

You know,

Brad Bonavida: that's a great point. When, when I was a controls contractor and we would do service work, sometimes we'd go to like, uh, usually healthcare and one of the main service tasks that we'd have would be to go to the front end building automation system and go to the alarms tab that had 1000 open alarms and just try to like, delete them if they didn't need to be there or get rid of 'em.

So, well, well said. Like if you, if you just change the word alarms to faults and tell people that you've got a bunch more of 'em and they're not gonna be happy to hear that, they don't see how that's productive to, to what they're doing. [00:40:00]

James Dice: Yeah. I think it's, it's like all of those KPIs are great. I think focusing on what, going back to the outcome that you're trying to, like the business outcome that you're trying to influence, I think this is, we don't see enough of this from the, the vendors can't quite do this, right?

The building owner has to do this, which is what is the outcome that your C-suite or your. Whoever holds that budget, what is the outcome that they're paying for with this change?

Brad Bonavida: Yeah.

James Dice: Um, is it lowering cost? Total cost of ownership. Okay. Well then your measure, your, your thing that you're measuring to prove that it's working needs to tie into that.

Right. Um, if it's actually occupant experience, well you can, you measure that differently, totally. Differently than your total cost of ownership. Right? So it really kind of depends on what are the outcomes that your organization is paying for and expecting to change. With this, it could be a bunch of different things.

Yeah. But the key is that you're actually [00:41:00] measuring it.

Brad Bonavida: And I just had listed all the operational ones. You know, the whole other side of this coin, which you talked about a little bit in your history, is the energy consumption side. So that's another route that people go. And, uh, you know, Utah, I think you said earlier.

DOE cited 10 to 20% more energy usage from poorly maintained equipment. Yeah, I was just looking through some of our case studies that we had seen in 15 to 30%. So pretty close, uh, energy savings, maybe a little bit higher actually in some of the stories that we've heard, but yeah, I mean, that's aside from their operational stuff, if you have the ability to submeter the equipment that you're running condition based maintenance on, that's another route that people frequently go is tracking the energy usage before and after, and figuring out the utility savings you get.

James Dice: And, and we know how that happens, right? It's just a bunch of tiny little things that just get added up. Right. If you don't maintain. Um, that sensor that runs your chilled water loop, right? [00:42:00] And then all of a sudden your chilled water is now, um, operating in the, um, out of, out of spec. And then all of a sudden you realize, oh, my chilled water plant, uh, isn't maintaining temperature, so let me go override that chiller.

And now that chiller's running when it's cold outside, like these things compound. Yeah. And it could have started as just like a simple sensor that needed to be switched out, and all of a sudden it, it compounds into this much higher energy consumption. Um, energy engineers are out there going like, God damn.

Brad Bonavida: So James in, in our last podcast, I think this is the right time to bring it up at the end. I was talking with Kelly. Kelly Burke from, uh, she, she works for JLL and we were talking about the, the pilot that FDD pilot, they had run condition based maintenance, and her and I were talking about how we believe that, you know, proving energy usage before and after is such a great way to start your program because it's such a trackable thing.

And then you just,

James Dice: I let [00:43:00] you

Brad Bonavida: guys dropped the hammer and you were like, I disagree with both of you. Let's wrap the podcast up. So now you're on the spot. Like

James Dice: on

the

Brad Bonavida: spot. I will, I will let you go first. Like, why am why is that wrong? Why shouldn't you just start with energy? Like, talk to me?

James Dice: Well, well, I think we walked through all the reasons that you'd switched to condition-based maintenance, right?

Um. Total cost of ownership is the main thing. We, we also walk through total cost of ownership is, is based on all these different factors, right? Would it have broken before? Would I need it? When do I need to replace that thing? Uh, if I do condition based that happens 30% later than it would if I like didn't like, all of those things are, are simply just assumptions.

And the point I was trying to make is like on the energy side, it's no different, right? You're making assumptions about how the, the system in question would have operated if it weren't for the intervention, right? You can do the exact same thing on the maintenance side to like, I can make an assumption about [00:44:00] when this piece of equipment would have failed and then when it did fail if I didn't intervene, right?

There's assumptions on both sides. The business case in smart buildings requires assumptions and it requires the people that are reviewing your ROI calculation, whether it's the CFO or whoever it requires you to. Um. Get on the same page with that person about the assumptions because you're making an intervention in the building.

We can't do a perfect science experiment on everything that we're like implementing in our buildings. There is a way it would have happened if it weren't for the intervention. And then when you make the intervention, you're no longer measuring that hypothetical. Right. And so on the maintenance side, it's simply about you can calculate savings.

You just have to make assumptions. When would this have failed? Um, what sort of catastrophic problem would've happened if that chill water coil froze and we didn't catch it [00:45:00] early enough? Like you can make those calculations. And I think people have a little bit of, there's a little bit of a myth that's happened.

That's like because energy savings are more, are they more accepted? Is it because this, like software programs calculate energy savings automatically that you can like. They're more tangible and, and more accepted. I'm just, my point to you guys was the maintenance savings are, are actually no different.

Brad Bonavida: Yeah. I, I don't disagree. I just think that they're a lot more hypothetical. Like if you're going to A-C-F-O-C-F-O listens all day to pitches and they're just judging risk and they're counting the assumptions in your pitch about what they should spend money on. Like the, the line that you can draw from.

Like, I have a submeter, I install condition-based maintenance, you know, processes. And now that Submeter says less multiplied by the utility rate equals this dollar. That's easier to track if you don't live in this. And then, and then the other point I'll make is just that, as I'm sure we'll get [00:46:00] into later, if you're doing condition-based maintenance, you are.

Your maintenance costs, your amount of work that needs to be done is probably going to initially spike. 'cause you're gonna know about all these things that you didn't know about before, that you want to go fix, you wanna get ahead of, you're doing this preventative, uh, condi and condition-based maintenance and like, you might actually have a larger labor bill for operations for the first, who knows how long before you get ahead of all this.

So I just think like, if you're trying to prove to somebody who doesn't work in this industry, like why you should do it, I can draw the line to money quicker for energy than I can for operational labor costs. I think

James Dice: that's, that's the myth that I'm trying to disagree with, which is when you say you submeter a chiller, for example, you're, you're, you're still measuring the like.

You, there's no way to actually measure the two things that CFO is comparing against. They're not, they can't compare before and after because the [00:47:00]conditions have changed, the weather has changed, the building has changed. You're, you're measuring the thing you're measuring against is what the building would have, would be doing and then what it is currently doing.

So there are assumptions that are built into that

Brad Bonavida: for sure.

James Dice: Even, even if you're sub reading. So all I'm trying to say is the maintenance is the same, same thing. And so the work that the community needs to do, especially on the building owner side is document and like back up the assumptions that you're making.

That's the work. Um, I think it was funny at, uh, we'll give a shout out to Thano at Nexus Con last year and the building owner pre meetup to Nexus Con. He basically said like. Your job is to sort of get to where you don't need to back it up because you're just saying like, this is the way, this is the way that it's gonna happen from now on.

And whatever you have to do to convince your internal stakeholders that this is the way, um,

Brad Bonavida: yeah.

James Dice: [00:48:00] Whether it's backing up your assumptions or just being like, this is, this is how we're gonna do things. Right. That's, that's the job. And that's, that's what's hard about it.

Brad Bonavida: Yeah. I, I, that that hot take was good.

Like very much. He was kind of just bashing the concept of you have to prove every single thing down to the dollar too, like mm-hmm. If you're the expert in this field and you know it's going to be the right thing for your business, like

James Dice: Yeah.

Brad Bonavida: Couldn't some of that energy go towards implementing it rather than trying to spend all of your time proving it through a calculation to somebody, so,

James Dice: yeah.

Yeah. Totally. I think the second thing you said though is also a little bit of a myth, which is if you had unlimited resources Sure. The things, all of these things would be backing up and then you or costs would go up. But remember, there's fixed resources, there's fixed budget, and there's fixed time. And so the myth here is that like I don't actually have more money to spend.

What I'm, what I am spending is the time that I and money that I do spend needs to go towards the highest priority [00:49:00] thing. That's what condition-based maintenance is all about. So we don't wanna act like we're gonna sort of, well at least the job if you run this playbook right, is to not overwhelm budget or people with new conditions.

It's to decide what the highest priority thing to do with that give that hour that I have right now is

Brad Bonavida: Sure.

James Dice: Yeah. All right. We gotta keep

Brad Bonavida: going. I'll, I'll leave it there. Yeah. 'cause we're like diving into other steps, so, so, okay. I agree. I think, I think, uh, everybody's CFO's different. You figure out how you pitch to them, but no, that's, you bring up strong points.

So let's go to step number two. Uh, we, we just did step number one, which was outcomes. So step two is mapping your current workflow. Um, and hot take,

James Dice: sorry, real quick, hot take is that this, this step is almost never done.

Brad Bonavida: I was just gonna say, this is always overlooked. Always overlooked. I, I, I actually struggled to find examples of people talking about it specifically in the case studies that we've [00:50:00] done, but.

I think the key word is current. So you're tracing how an issue moves today from detection to validation, to prioritization, to work order, creation, execution, and closure. How is that actually done today? And it's not like, oh, here's the official process that, you know, the head of engineering has laid out.

It's like, go ask the, the, the people on the ground floor who do it, the, the operation or the procedure that they're actually following. Yeah. If you don't have that mapped out, how could you possibly understand how condition-based maintenance is going to fit into this whole thing?

James Dice: The que the key question is where are you going to insert these conditions, right?

At what a point in this system are you going to intervene? Where, where is the change gonna be made? I think this is where I, I come up with this. I don't know where this term came in my mind, but I'm, most condition-based maintenance programs are what I would call bolt-on programs where. [00:51:00] They're not actually doing this pro, this step we're talking about here.

They're setting up this sort of like separate program, separate from their maintenance workflows. That is, you know, you might call it monitoring based commissioning or whatever, where you have a, maybe a consultant service provider over here that is coming up with a list of things to do and they haven't thought through, they haven't done this step, so they haven't thought through how this, that list is actually gonna get checked off.

Like, it's almost like you get all the way to where you have this full technology stack implemented and now you're like, oh wait, well how are we actually supposed to, who should I call? And they almost think that they're gonna find such cool stuff. And I'm calling myself out in the past, you think you're gonna find such cool stuff that the list of things that you produce is gonna create such urgency.

I think that that's, that's the psychology behind it. Like,

Brad Bonavida: sure,

James Dice: wait, wait till I deploy this [00:52:00] technology, they're not gonna be able to continue, you know, the way they were before. Right. And you're almost like, and then you find like the the fault That's so exciting. And you're like, don't you wanna change?

Like don't you wanna implement this? And you haven't thought through like, what is their job today? Like

Brad Bonavida: what, yeah, what are they doing? What are they

James Dice: doing today? You know,

Brad Bonavida: this is the second place I'll bring up to the concept of like in-house labor versus contracted labor. And I think one of the reasons that so many building owners struggle to map this current process is so much of that lives outside of their organization.

You're like, I don't know. We pay. We pay mechanical contractor a to, you know, this much a month and they kind of just deal with it. So I don't really, you know, know, we've even had an example where, to your bolt-on point, like there was a higher ed institution we were talking about who had all outsourced service work and then they had a condition-based maintenance program that they purchased to come in.

And so you've got the technology vendor from the condition-based [00:53:00]maintenance program giving the faults to this outsourced service provider. And the building owner is just like completely outside of this, has no idea, you know, what, what is happening, what the service workflow is before and what it needs to be after.

So this is tough. Yeah, this is hard.

James Dice: It's tough. I think that we have to limit this a little bit to the owner's workflows, right? Um, we're gonna have a sort of like outcome-based service contracts future episode that will do sort of this same transformation if you're a service provider. What is the transformation?

What is the playbook that you need to implement? Um, we'll do that in the fall slash later in the year.

Brad Bonavida: Sure.

James Dice: Let's keep going.

Brad Bonavida: The one, the one last example on that one is just at Nexus Con Nada from Epic Investment Services was talking about when she mapped this out, or her team worked on it, they were basically finding that like most of the reactive, uh, maintenance was happening with like hallway discussions, right?

Like someone would walk by someone else and that's when that person would go do the [00:54:00] reactive maintenance. So like V one of their map of this is hallway conversations are like in the middle of it. So those, that's just an example of the type of thing that you don't realize is actually happening that you have.

Be realistic about to. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So step number three is selecting priority assets and condition signals. So to me, this is kind of where the rubber hits the road of like, where are you actually doing condition-based maintenance? So by selecting priority assets, it's like you're not going to, just, like you said, we'll never put this signal on everything that would be a waste of money.

You're not gonna censor every single thing in your building. So if you're gonna begin this, how do you decide what pieces of equipment you're actually going to start with and what signals within that equipment that you're going to look at? Like, are you gonna go to the central utility plant? Are you gonna go to the chillers?

Are you gonna go to the boilers? Are you gonna go to the air handlers? Are you gonna go to the lab? People have to make that determination. And I'll just say I've heard very, uh, different. [00:55:00] Different perspectives on the most effective way to do this. Like very, very different on the most effective way to pick which pieces of equipment that you're gonna go after.

James Dice: Me too. Yeah.

Brad Bonavida: Yeah.

James Dice: It's all over the map, isn't it? It,

Brad Bonavida: I thought it's, it really is.

James Dice: I, maybe this is recency bias, but there was one recent story that we heard from Steve at NAU, which is he started in the IT group and the IT group's biggest problem was the projectors in all of the classrooms across the university.

And they actually started condition-based maintenance within it, right? Mm-hmm. How do I put like up, I don't remember. I don't even know what the technology was that they put on these projectors, but all of a sudden they're changing filters based on conditions of filters inside these projectors. And then the question was how do we apply that thinking to facilities?

Brad Bonavida: Yeah.

James Dice: Um, and so I think the question for all of us here is when you're starting down this program, what, like, look at. This is why you do step two first, which is like when you [00:56:00] map out your current workflows, where are the biggest headaches? Where are the biggest costs? Where are the biggest critical issues?

Where are the biggest occupant complaints? Um, and then go from there, right?

Brad Bonavida: Yeah. And, and with that mapping the current workflows as well, you want to pick assets that. Involve like a small subset of people. Like you wouldn't want to pick four different groups of assets that are serviced by four different teams.

'cause now you're just like, ballooning the amount of people who have to be involved in this. Like you want this to be a concentrated project to begin. And it's like, how can you pick a, a list of things that involves the least amount of people to service So you're not getting, you know, way over your, your, uh, feet with what you're doing here.

James Dice: And, and what you're trying to do in this early stage of the playbook is like validate that the organization can make a workflow change. Right? Yeah. And so that's what, yeah. Picking a limited build. Is it a building on the campus? Is it one building in the portfolio within that building? Is it, uh, only [00:57:00] the subsystem.

Within that subsystem, if there are five people that normally do work orders, is it this, is it Jerry? Because we know Jerry is most likely to be onboard with new things. Like what is that limited? Yeah. Yeah. And then that then leads into the, the next question, which is, um, signals. Yeah. Which signals are you going for?

And that gets that then decides, oh, which categories of smart building technologies are you using to produce those signals? Yep. So if it's HVAC control, that might lead into, you know, you could use alarms or you could go with fault detection diagnostics because they're better than alarms. Um, we, we've, we've in, in the 58 case studies we've done, like, they're, they're all over the map.

We even have, at the event coming this in, in April, um, there's gonna be an exhibitor that offers drones as a service. And their idea is, um, instead of going in, uh, looking at the condition of your roof, like fly a drone over [00:58:00]and. Um, you know, reduce the, the cost and time it takes to do the PMs for the roof.

Brad Bonavida: Sure. Yep. Yeah, you got, you just mentioned drone. IAQ is another place that signals come from just a, any iot platform that is sensors that are easy to install, leak detection. Uh, we talked to Kilroy a lot about their leak detection program, but, you know, obviously fault detection diagnostics is a huge part of this too.

It's kind of like the key or the main platform that does this on a holistic level. Um,

James Dice: yeah.

Brad Bonavida: Right. Like, I mean, it's, it's the single place that a lot of signals are typically gone. I, I just wanna ask you, like, I, when I'm thinking about what, how FDD fits into condition based maintenance like. I think that one of the keys is that condition or FDD programs have been working on what signals you should look at.

For years they've been building these proprietary rule sets so that you don't have to go try to figure out what conditions matter to you. Right? Is that how you would think of it?

James Dice: [00:59:00] Um, I would think of it. Well, we have a white paper on this topic, by the way. So someone like, if they're, if they wanna dive into this, we have a white paper that looks at the difference between alarms, fault detection, and then fault detection diagnostics.

So we won't like, repeat that. People can go check that out. Um, but generally it's helping actually with the next FT d platforms can be thought of produ as producing the signal, right? That's the first, that's this. Where are you gonna produce condition signals for your condition-based maintenance program?

The next two, two steps they've built. Workflows to help with them. So we won't get into the first, next two steps yet, but like you're, you're then producing this software platform where the user can then go from condition detected to condition validated and condition prioritized, and then you can, and some FDD platforms then take the action.

I don't want, I wanna push that to my CMMS and push [01:00:00] that into a work order. Yeah. Right. So you're, you're almost creating the, you're doing all the math, that's great, but then you're providing the workflow for someone to do the next few steps that we're talking about next. Right?

Brad Bonavida: Right.

James Dice: Whereas if you're just buying an IOT sensor, you're just gonna get an alert that says there's a water leak.

Right. You still need that workflow to then say, okay, well I have 2000 water leaks. Which one's the worst water leak? Right. So you, you, you, you, there's more for the user to do.

Brad Bonavida: Yeah. I think we're already kind of, uh, like getting into step four, so we should just go there. Step four is building and validating the signal, which is kind of what we've been talking about.

You in step three, you were figuring out what assets you were going to, you know, focus on and what signals, but building the signal, that's where this actually happens in like an FDD platform or in an IAQ platform or within the drone software platform that people are using. So getting those, uh, those rules that I was talking about, that as you were explaining and trying to operationalize them.

James Dice: One thing to think about [01:01:00] here is, is when you look at a, so let's just say a preventative maintenance task can be akin to sort of like checking something. So I'm gonna go out into the state, into the field, and I'm gonna check the condition, right? I'm gonna do that once a quarter and that's my preventative maintenance for that piece of equipment.

A software, if you're using data to now perform that check. You can now do that check on an daily basis, an hourly basis, a five minute basis. Right. And now all of a sudden you have a lot better outcome

Brad Bonavida: Yes.

James Dice: That you're trying to accomplish. Right. So it's almost, it is an evolution from preventative maintenance in that you can check things more often.

Well, I'd say one piece of the, the world that's exciting right now is it's not just about checking anymore passively, right? There are platforms in our community, mark, in our marketplace, that are now able to say, [01:02:00] well, let me, it's overnight. This building's unoccupied. Now let me stroke that valve from zero to 100 and back again to make sure it's performing properly.

Right. So now all of a sudden you're not waiting till something breaks. You are also then saying like, how do I, um, catch. Something that would have broken when the spring comes around and it gets warmer, like you're able to actually find stuff using supervisory control. Right.

Brad Bonavida: That would be, you would call that automated functional testing, right?

James Dice: Yeah,

Brad Bonavida: yeah. Yeah. The, I loved the, you, you know, you brought up like the ability to check these things all the time compared to an engineer who could maybe look at it for a second. Uh, Leslie be from Clockworks Analytics. She, she did a subject matter expert, uh. Uh, webinar with us one time, and she started it with like this, this graphic of this, uh, central plant that had a boiler in it.

And she like asks our audience, you know, like, what's going wrong here? And of course there's like a [01:03:00] hundred really smart people in there. And for 10 minutes she kind of like went back and forth with the audience about like, oh yeah, like there is like this alarm here that pressure's too high. And like the audience converged that there was an isolation valve on boiler number two that was like open, it shouldn't be open.

That was making flow go through both boilers when only one was running. But all that. And at the end she's like, it took us, you know, 50 people, 12 minutes to converge on this when if you have a condition-based maintenance program, it's like all of us watching every system in our building all the time doing these checks.

Rosy Khalife: Totally.

Brad Bonavida: Um, and I thought that was pretty cool. And then, and then to bring that even one step further, it was in the, in the Glenstone ex uh, Glenstone museum, Brendan was talking about how. He believes his team completes 2,500 checks per year. And when they put in an FDD platform, that platform does 157,000 checks per year on their system.

So it's just like the multiplication of you being able to find things is, is absurd when you have these, uh, [01:04:00] platforms built in.

James Dice: Absolutely. All right. Back to step four. Right Step,

Brad Bonavida: yeah. Step four is build and validate signals. Um, what else do we have here? I think, uh, we are gonna get into this at Nexus Cast, uh, Terrell Whitson.

Terrell Whitson. I don't know if I'm saying Terrell Whitson. Uh, he's gonna talk a lot about, like, I just think it's important to understand like an alarm versus a fault versus a faulty signal and understanding all these here, like we're talking about validating a signal, well. The difference between showing a fault and having a faulty signal is, is everything.

Right? Um, like for example at the JLL pilot that Kelly was talking about, they had a building that just had a shitty RS 45 network, so they could not get validated signals from that building. They ended up kicking it out of their pilot, which probably saved the pilot because they were not trying to do this on an asset that didn't work.

So I think this is where you kind of get into the weeds of like what data you're actually getting [01:05:00] and how your system's analyzing it.

James Dice: Well, I think this is why I think this conversation is important for not just FM departments in our community, but also on the OT side. Like, we have a lot of people that are listening to this that aren't, that aren't in their maintenance group, right?

And they're not selling to the maintenance people. And on the OT side like that, we need that data to be correct. Right. And, and we're not gonna get into the details of that, but like that's. A huge piece of this. And I think owners need to realize that. And I think most of them that are mature in their condition-based maintenance programs do realize this is that you may actually, and a lot of them do, like create extra teams, that their, their responsibility is to now manage this tech stack, right?

Mm-hmm. That is creating these conditions. Um, and that, you know, getting the data goes into that, but keeping it up and running and making sure that the faults are correct, [01:06:00] prioritization is how you want it to be. Um, you have, uh, network issues that are getting resolved, like we talked about at Nexus Con with Microsoft.

Like those sorts of things are now part of this program. It's not just about stand up this tech and now we do maintenance better. It's now also about then maintaining this tech stack as well.

Brad Bonavida: Yep. Exactly. And I, and I think that that person that you're talking about, or group of people that's maintaining it is, is flowing in the step five now, which is

James Dice: Yeah.

Brad Bonavida: Adding triage before work order creation. So triage is this idea of you've got these faults coming into this system and you have a person, a group of people there, somebody who's looking at those faults, thinking about them, understanding how they might relate to one each other, one another, understanding if they're just bs, you know, like they just don't, they don't make any sense.

Mm-hmm. And, and, and they're that human touch that is saving it from going straight to a work order so that it actually [01:07:00] is going to make sense when it gets to somebody in the field, um, to, to actually act upon.

James Dice: Yeah. We, we talked to a big healthcare organization a couple of months ago that is working on standing up this sort of like.

Internal team right now, and they're figuring out how to hire, and their job is across, you know, about 200 hospitals. Their job is to figure out, okay, for this building, who owns, you know, it might be a campus with a hospital and moobs like, which building is it in? Uh, which control system is it based on?

Which control system it is? Who owns that control system? Is it a contractor, somebody internal? How do I actually make this fix? Do we already have a capital project that's happening there? Like it's a, mm-hmm. It's a bunch of analysis to figure out, okay, um, how do I get this assigned to the right person?

Is this a priority right now? Is it not? Can I group, can I group faults together into a bigger project so that when that person goes out, they can also fix these [01:08:00] things? Like there's a, there's a lot of, a lot that goes into that. That goes into actually then deciding what the work order is and who's, who's assigned to.

Brad Bonavida: Yep. I, I think that everyone we've talked to here is, is clear that there's a human in the loop. Now I do have a hot take that in a certain amount of years this triage will be more taken over by ai. We've seen examples of it, but like, if you have really solid data ontology of how things are connected together, you can do this fault clustering that you were just talking about.

But with AI to recognize that you have a fault on a VAV that is attached to an air handler that also has a fault that is related to this pump, which also has a fault. And like pretty soon you're kind of honing in on that. And I think right now it, I legitimately think it's a person who's running a lot of this, but

James Dice: yeah,

Brad Bonavida: I think it's gonna change someday.

Someday it's gonna change.

James Dice: Well, we've seen a little bit of inroads, right? Right. I'd say one example, and people can look at our white paper about this, but like when the [01:09:00] difference between good fault detection and okay fault detection is actually the second D. The diagnostics, like the mm-hmm. The further the platform can get into the root cause, the easier it is to then triage.

Right. Because if I don't know the root cause, I don't know whether it's like software or physical problem, for example. Well, those have two different people that need to fix those things. Right?

Brad Bonavida: Right.

James Dice: So that's just one example. The other piece is like the NNAU case study with Willow and mapped right. The ability for them to use AI to ingest.

O and m manuals from the entire fucking campus. Well now all of a sudden, you know, what type of motor is it? How big is it? Like what, what is, what sort of power comes into that motor?

Brad Bonavida: What tools you need? Yeah.

James Dice: What tools you need, right? So the ability for not only AI to help help with the triage, but also AI to help give the context to make that triage faster.

I think that's huge.

Brad Bonavida: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think the most like clear cut example we have of this is the [01:10:00] case study that you did with University of Iowa. Um, 'cause they share their flow chart of after they implemented condition-based maintenance and literally the the chart, which is, you can see in our case study, the first thing says fault and then below that is review.

Is it valid or not? Like that is like, the epitome of triage is like they're still getting things that are for some reason not valid. And that triage person is hopefully, you know, tuning the system to make it better. But you Yeah, you need that today. Yeah.

James Dice: They called that the analytic response group, the arg.

That's kind of fun. That's great. Yeah.

Brad Bonavida: Okay. We gotta keep moving. Uh, gotta keep going. So step six is triggering work order and execution. So this is legitimately where the rubber hits the road. You've, you've validated this fault and you're going to actually send it to somebody who is going to actually do something about it.

Um, the one, the one, uh, thing, the quote I'll bring up. I was talking to Alex Grace from [01:11:00] Clockworks about this way back when, and he told me that the number one thing that causes FDD pilots to fail is that the champion of the pilot. Has no ability to create a work order, which goes back to what you were saying with like the energy group and like, you've got these great faults, but like, who cares?

But he's just, you know, seen these examples of, you've got somebody typically on the energy side who's stoked about all these faults, but if that person can't physically make work happen, you're, you're dead. You're not gonna, you're not gonna go anywhere with this.

James Dice: Yeah. And this, this gets back to the customization of the program, I think too.

You're not gonna create an automatic work order for most conditions, right? Yeah. Um, it's gonna be the triage step comes first. I have to decide who gets it, what's the total scope of that work order, et cetera. Um, but you might have some that, like if I have a water leak in this room, like I wanna a work order immediately, for example.

Mm-hmm. Like, there might be some where it's just, it's just automatic. I think one project that we've [01:12:00] heard a lot of. Sophisticated, like you get down the road on the maturity scale on condition-based maintenance. One project that a lot of people are going through right now, which is mapping assets in whatever condition, you know, software you're using to those same assets in your CMMS, right?

Um,

Brad Bonavida: yes.

James Dice: So wherever you're managing work orders today, if you're gonna start to automate that connection, um, you need to make sure that those two software systems think the same asset as the same asset, right? And so that same healthcare system I just talked about, they actually have two separate workflows.

And the question is, are the FDD and CMMS integrated in that for that asset? Okay, great. That's one workflow. If they're not, that's a whole separate workflow. I need a different path to action with tho with those assets.

Brad Bonavida: Yep. Um.

James Dice: This is a good time to bring up, 'cause I know we're short on time. This is a good time to [01:13:00] bring up a trend in the tech stack, which is that if you have a software provider, code Labs is one of 'em, Willow's another.

If you have a software provider that's providing both FDD and work order management right now, you don't have that problem. Right. It's the same software platform.

Brad Bonavida: Right?

James Dice: Right. Um, same asset register, same ontology. You don't need to map between them. You are simply saying, I analyze my data and the same platform that I then schedule and manage work.

Brad Bonavida: Sure.

James Dice: And that, I think that is a compelling thing for some, for some

Brad Bonavida: of us. Yeah, of course. The other thing that a quality platform can bring you at this point is that prioritization of faults, like the, the good platforms, whether it's FDD or IQ or whatever it is, giving you some proprietary information to help you decide what's most important.

Like the, the classic example is like trying to assign a dollar value to each of the faults that it has so that [01:14:00] you can actually determine which one's costing you the most money. I think that's a huge part of why people go out and find, you know, um, specialists who know how to do this stuff to help them.

Okay. Step seven is establishing role ownership. This step to me is like, this is probably the one I, I preface at the beginning, that you need to, like, these steps aren't a perfect order. It's a little bit of an interval, like of course you're establishing role ownership, like kind of at the beginning, but here, you know, you have to like really have solid after you know, everything that you're gonna do with your program here.

How each role comes into play and who those people are. I

James Dice: think a, a better name for this step would be, um, figure out how people's roles are gonna change now moving forward. Right. Um, 'cause if I look at your list that you're about to walk through, like it's really about. You have all these people already, maybe you're hiring the analytic resp, the arg, right?

Those are new roles, but then you have a bunch of people that already had jobs that they need to change their jobs to accommodate this [01:15:00] new workflow.

Brad Bonavida: Yes. Well put. Yeah. So just rapid fire. Obviously facilities and maintenance operations, they're gonna own, typically own the day-to-day of this, unless you're doing like an AV one, like the NAU example.

Um, but, you know, usually this is gonna land in fm um, if you're outsourcing a lot of the work, you gotta make sure that your service providers and contractors understand this. They understand the triage, their contract that they have with you works for this, um, operational technology. It controls teams.

They need to make sure that those signals are getting, you know, accurately, they're validating that the signal's getting to the source, uh, accurately or to the platform that you're looking at. I guess that's, that's also the IT and data integration teams are working on that. Finance and procurement are gonna be involved with, uh, staffing, but also if there's capital planning decisions that are coming out of this, like, Hey, we've got this fault on this large piece of equipment, like we should, you know, accelerate our replacement of it, you're gonna need to make sure that they trust your condition-based maintenance [01:16:00] program.

And then we already talked about energy and sustainability teams, um, often justifying, you know, the effort that you're putting into this. They're, they're hand in hand with the facilities, but they might not have that same capability of creating work orders and making the work happen.

James Dice: I, I, something's coming back to me that we have in our notes here, which is Leon Wurfel from Bueno.

Talking about like, the goal for that maybe is that you, that someone's job that, like a field technician doesn't actually change at all. Exactly. Right. If their job before was to go fix the highest priority work order. All you're doing is changing that whatever that highest priority work order, where that came from, right.

Um, their job is still to go fix that thing. Their job might actually get better. If you're providing that context though, right?

Brad Bonavida: Yeah,

James Dice: yeah.

Brad Bonavida: That's an indication of getting a condition-based maintenance program that actually fits into your current mapping of how work orders are executed rather than a bolt on, like you said.

'cause if it actually fits in there [01:17:00] then and you're doing it really effectively, it shouldn't have, it shouldn't change everybody's job. It should be producing work orders that are just better for your, you know, your, your group as a whole

James Dice: and over time doing a better work order. Over many months and years ends up in your lower total cost of ownership.

Right? That's the, to bring this full circle. Alright, we gotta, we gotta finish this.

Brad Bonavida: Okay. Step eight is piloting the full loop, which, you know, we've talked about all this setup that you're basically doing through steps one through seven. This is like, turn it on, sort of, you know, you've deter, you've determined that you've got your condition signals, you know what assets you're going after.

It's the amalgamation of all the other steps. Um, but the key here is like everything that we're talking about in this playbook is operationalizing condition-based maintenance. And I think what's confusing is if you like mix in the term FDD here, are you piloting an FDD platform? Like you're purchasing this platform, I'm quote unquote piloting this thing I'm buying.

But you can't get that mixed up with like piloting that this [01:18:00] works in your system, in your program. Those are two different things and people could say pilot and. Which one are you talking about? Are you talking about selecting the right vendor or are you talking about can your group, can your organization actually run this effectively?

Totally. Those are two different things.

James Dice: Yeah. Yeah. Outside of the scope of, of this.

Brad Bonavida: Yep. Okay. Uh, then let's go to the last step here, which is step nine, standardized scale. Continuously improve, improve. We've touched on a lot of this, but I think it's just important to recognize that condition-based maintenance is going to take continual tuning.

Um, as well, like we talked about validating signals. You're going to determine that, um, you have a signal that's, that's too sensitive. It, it's, it's recognizing a change, um, and you know, causing a fault too early and you need to broaden the threshold of that and then re-implement it with a new threshold of what sets that fault off.

And just this idea of, um, I guess [01:19:00] that's an example of continuously improving. You also are scaling, hopefully you're putting this across multiple portfolio or more of your portfolio, multiple buildings. Um, and there's a lot of, uh, what program maturity and organizational moves that need to happen. Yeah.

Right. Yeah. Change management. It's, it gets into that part of it.

James Dice: Yeah. You're changing, like not just whoever you assign that pilot to, you're changing all of the technician's jobs or all of the FM's jobs across the portfolio. And I think the, like, super mature here would be like, I've taken a list of all the assets in my portfolio and I've defined how we want to do maintenance on those assets by asset type moving forward.

And so then when someone comes in and, um, replaces a rooftop unit, for example, well, you've already defined out what sensors need to be on that rooftop unit because that. Then says what conditions you're [01:20:00]measuring and feeds into your maintenance workflows, right? So you're now changing your capital planning, you're now changing your construction processes, you're changing your master specs, all of these things to sort of feed back into this new way of doing the maintenance after it gets installed.

Brad Bonavida: Yep. A hundred percent. We, we won't even get to go there. But the whole construction side of this and getting condition-based maintenance into your new projects that are getting built is a whole nother area where people have been super successful implementing this. So, okay. So, so yeah. The last maybe step that we're, last portion we want to cover here is a concept of a maturity framework that building owners can, can look at to maybe benchmark where they're at or where they're headed to.

Um, so we've defined five levels to what your condition-based maintenance program can look like. Level one. You're reactive. Everything that James, you explained at the beginning of how it's done today, you're basically not using condition signals. You've probably got a bunch of deferred [01:21:00]maintenance like you talked about.

You can't really trace how you're doing it today. I think that's a big part too, is like, do you even know you're reactive versus your preventative numbers and how much you're doing both of those. Like, you know, that's kind of level one, uh, level two, you might have some signals, but you might not be really acting upon them.

So I brought up the example of a building automation system that has thousands of alarms on the front end. Like it's there, there's conditions that are being monitored, but no one's really reacting to them. That's kind of level two.

James Dice: That one, that one is like the condition based maintenance graveyard.

Like so many projects have gotten to that point and died like,

Brad Bonavida: yep.

James Dice: Everyone's out there shaking their head like, man, I can think of, I, I can personally think of customers where it's just like. There was this university that went through many, many rounds of, well, I won't name the OEM, but like big OEMs, various FDD products.

And they, they spent 10 years, a hundred buildings, 10 years [01:22:00] stuck at level two. Couldn't figure out how to validate and triage the stuff that was coming out of the software. So big, huge opportunity there to move to step three.

Brad Bonavida: Yeah. And one of the biggest hurdles that I heard, uh, interviewing about higher ed programs, one of the biggest hurdles to more higher ed programs using condition-based maintenance is that they'll say, we already tried that and it didn't work.

James Dice: We

already

Brad Bonavida: tried. So that's like that whole graveyard of just failed programs that, you know, are scared to try again.

James Dice: And I think, I think that if I look back on the ones that I've been involved in, they actually didn't do step level three here, which is the controlled pilot first. So a lot of times they're spending, so in the, in the case of this university, and they were at Nexus Con and it was fun to like check in with them because I hadn't been on campus for 10 years.

And it was fun to check in with them because what they did was they implemented a hundred buildings on FTD first before they figured out how they were gonna do the workflow transformation. [01:23:00] Right? Like,

yikes.

James Dice: And that's happened a in a lot of places. Somebody gets very excited about this and they're like, we're gonna roll it out.

And what we're saying is, I think it sounds like the best ones that have done the most here is they've designed not necessarily like a tech pilot, the tech works. I think that's the thing to think about with the, the confusion of the pilots. Mm-hmm. The tech works, right? What you actually need to pilot here, you might pilot.

Selecting between vendors, right. For the tech, that's great, but we don't need a pilot to prove FDD works. Like go to Nexus Labs online and check out all these case studies, right?

Brad Bonavida: Yeah.

James Dice: What we need a pilot for is like, how are you gonna actually change your fucking workflows? Right? And prove to yourself that you can do that before spending a ton of money.

Brad Bonavida: Right. And that goes back to having a very like honed in group that's working on a hone in group of group of assets and people.

James Dice: Yeah.

Brad Bonavida: Uh, okay. Level four is programmatic deployment. So if you've actually done the successful pilot that we were talking about now you've [01:24:00] standardized a process. You're like, this is how we're going to do this moving forward.

And you've started to push that out to other groups or other assets beyond that first group that you went to. Uh, and then after that we've got level five, which is the last level, which is portfolio optimization. So you've done the pilot, then you've done the specs and the, you know, scaling to get it to more than just the pilot.

And now you've got this portfolio wide program where you've got this system that is, uh, people are continuously tuning and working on the conditions that you're looking on. You have this ability to cluster faults together, to, you know, which ones should be grouped together for a work order. Um, you're, you're even adding in design criteria from your building.

Like what was the sequence of op, uh, the sequence of operation in the design, what was the supposed to run at? And comparing that to the conditions that you're seeing. Um, and then you're, you know, aligning future contracts with service providers or, um, construction projects with, with the [01:25:00] results that you want.

James Dice: Changing contracts and changing roles and compensation and like, there's this a certain amount of like organizational change that can only happen a few or multiple years into the program, right? You can't change your, um, the way that you hire and the way that you like the roles of your people, the, the service contracts that you have, or maybe they run three years at a time before you renew them.

You can't change these things immediately. And so the most mature organizations are making kind of like iterative, like you're saying, long-term change. Um, yeah. To the way that the maintenance is done, right? That's the key.

Brad Bonavida: So if you've made it this far and you're a building owner, you, you owe us, uh, some information on where you're at on this, right?

Yeah, sure. We wanna hear what maturity level you're at. Um, we have a quick, easy form that we'll link in the show notes where you can kind of tell us where you're at and we'll be happy to give you some feedback about where that's at or, you know, how that compares to [01:26:00] others or any questions that you may have.

Um, what else? James? We're wrapping it up. We, we, we flew through the end there, but, um, we've made it,

James Dice: well, if you're listening to this before April 15th, we go to our website, register for the event. What we're gonna have is an overview of this playbook quicker than this, this conversation, and then, um, presentations from owners and then demos from vendors and expo hall with 6, 7, 8 vendors that are doing this.

And so you can come check that out. And if it's after, after April 15th. Um, check the link in the show notes for the condition based maintenance playbook and, um, like this, like you said, the form they can fill out.

Brad Bonavida: Yeah. Cool. This was fun. Super. I feel like you taught me some stuff. Let's do it

James Dice: again. Taught me some stuff.

Let's do it again and people can give us feedback on this. We'd love to hear is a better version of the Nexus podcast. Let us know.[01:27:00]

Rosy Khalife: Okay, friends, thank you for listening to this episode. 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.

Make sure to tag us in the post so we can see it. Have a good one.

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Episode 194 is a conversation with James Dice and Brad Bonavida from Nexus Lab.

Summary

Mentions and Links

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Highlights

Introduction (0:00)

How it’s done today / What is condition-based maintenance? (11:35)

Why building owners run this playbook (23:00)

The Procedure (36:05)

Step 1: Define Outcomes and Baselines (37:04)

Step 2: Map Current Workflow (49:37)

Step 3: Select Priority Assets and Condition Signals (54:13)

Step 4: Build and Validate the Signals (1:00:28)

Step 5: Add Triage Before Work Order Creation (1:06:30)

Step 6: Trigger Work Order and Execution (1:10:38)

Step 7: Establish Role Ownership (1:14:11)

Step 8: Pilot the Full Loop (1:17:19)

Step 9: Standardize, Scale, and Continuously Improve (1:18:21)

Maturity framework (1:20:31)

Level 1: Reactive + Calendar PM dominant (1:20:57)

Level 2: Signals without execution (1:21:13)

Level 3: Controlled Pilot Loop (1:22:12)

Level 4: Programmatic Deployment (1:23:53)

Level 5: Portfolio Optimization (1:24:12)

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Music credits: There Is A Reality by Common Tiger—licensed under an Music Vine Limited Pro Standard License ID: S706971-16073.

Full transcript

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!

My name is James Dice and I'm joined here by Brad Bonavita. Hi, Brad.

Brad Bonavida: Hey, how's it going?

Brad Bonavida: Yeah, we, we've been on a journey for the last, what, two months?

James Dice: And you, you kind of went into a deep dive on this.

Brad Bonavida: Yeah.

James Dice: You found that we produced 58 pieces of content on this topic since 2020. Can you tell everyone about your little, little deep dive there?

Brad Bonavida: Yeah, so 62nd version. 'cause we're about to do the, the very long version.

James Dice: Love that. Love that. My dad's a mechanic, or was a mechanic before he retired. He's gonna love that. We're gonna have to send him this episode.

Brad Bonavida: Right.

And

so,

Brad Bonavida: yeah, but that, that, uh, that friction between maintenance and energy came up in so many interviews about this topic. So I'm excited to

James Dice: Yeah, yeah. To

Brad Bonavida: dig deeper into that. But,

Um, so we're gonna try to explain it to the people that also aren't in those teams, how this actually works. Um,

Brad Bonavida: right.

'cause what we're really trying to do at the end of the day is remove the obstacles to moving towards condition-based maintenance with this episode. So,

Brad Bonavida: yep.

James Dice: Let's jump in. So I think, I think the best place to start with this is talking about how maintenance is done today. It's very much not based on any sort of real time conditions.

Brad Bonavida: It's, it's just such a vicious cycle like.

Brad Bonavida: Yep.

They're not really doing a lot of prediction. I think that maybe. Maybe in in edge cases, but I just don't think it's that useful to then create a separate term. Um,

Brad Bonavida: so, so common in our industry Right. To like bombard it with like four more terms than it needs. Yeah, I, I saw another one in a report that was reliability centered maintenance.

James Dice: I think those are a little bit, there's a little bit of nuance there in that predictive, I feel like comes from the vendors.

And so that's, you hear a lot about like the, that's a k, a common KPI, right. In manual

Brad Bonavida: circle. And you said any of the, any of the above. So you mean any reactive periodic or backlog triage that has been ignored in three months as being

James Dice: or condition-based? Like if, you know,

Brad Bonavida: like

James Dice: you, you could certainly ignore a condition.

Brad Bonavida: this is probably a good point like that, just that concept of deferred maintenance.

You're always behind. You can never get ahead to prune the forest. To stop the next forest fire.

Um, but, or you're doing it because the budget cuts and people just are, are deciding. Um, I'm just gonna run my buildings to failure, run my equipment to failure. Um,

Brad Bonavida: or, or a third one. It is just, I found one more stat on that. It's just like the turnover too, because these people are just

James Dice: Yeah.

Brad Bonavida: You know, often overworked so much.

And then we're hearing reports. Front of 300,000 square foot per FTE. So like,

Brad Bonavida: not, not very close

What data can we get to actually make that shift away from reactive to more preventative?

It still happens. Absolutely. Yeah.

Right?

Brad Bonavida: Yep, exactly.

James Dice: Yeah.

Brad Bonavida: And so in all these situations there's this some, some flexibility between, am I gonna have my person who is paid hourly take care of this?

James Dice: And when you have an emergency, you have, like, you're alluding to overtime labor.

Brad Bonavida: Yep.

So, totally, if you can fix this, like they're gonna stick around, your building's gonna be better than the building across the street.

James Dice: Yeah, it's, it's, it's interesting being around this space for so long.

On a case by case basis. And it, that's why the program takes a while to get off the ground. Yeah.

James Dice: Yeah.

Brad Bonavida: You know, merge them together

Brad Bonavida: Yeah.

Um. Improving the occupant experience and just acknowledging that trying to get to 70% PMs is unrealistic and they're realizing that they're getting [00:36:00] taken over by firefighting.

Brad Bonavida: Right. Okay. So you just like set the stage. You've got like the way it's done today that's broken and why people are shifting to this.

James Dice: And this is us synthesizing what we've heard. So if you have a better roadmap out there that we should be following, let us know and reach [00:37:00] out

James Dice: Yeah.

You know,

The building owner has to do this, which is what is the outcome that your C-suite or your. Whoever holds that budget, what is the outcome that they're paying for with this change?

Brad Bonavida: Yeah.

James Dice: Um, is it lowering cost? Total cost of ownership. Okay. Well then your measure, your, your thing that you're measuring to prove that it's working needs to tie into that.

Yeah. But the key is that you're actually [00:41:00] measuring it.

And then you just,

James Dice: I let [00:43:00] you

Brad Bonavida: guys dropped the hammer and you were like, I disagree with both of you. Let's wrap the podcast up. So now you're on the spot. Like

James Dice: on

the

Brad Bonavida: spot. I will, I will let you go first. Like, why am why is that wrong? Why shouldn't you just start with energy? Like, talk to me?

James Dice: Well, well, I think we walked through all the reasons that you'd switched to condition-based maintenance, right?

James Dice: that's, that's the myth that I'm trying to disagree with, which is when you say you submeter a chiller, for example, you're, you're, you're still measuring the like.

So there are assumptions that are built into that

Brad Bonavida: for sure.

And whatever you have to do to convince your internal stakeholders that this is the way, um,

Brad Bonavida: yeah.

Brad Bonavida: Yeah. I, I, that that hot take was good.

James Dice: Yeah.

Brad Bonavida: Couldn't some of that energy go towards implementing it rather than trying to spend all of your time proving it through a calculation to somebody, so,

James Dice: yeah.

It's to decide what the highest priority thing to do with that give that hour that I have right now is

Brad Bonavida: Sure.

James Dice: Yeah. All right. We gotta keep

So let's go to step number two. Uh, we, we just did step number one, which was outcomes. So step two is mapping your current workflow. Um, and hot take,

James Dice: sorry, real quick, hot take is that this, this step is almost never done.

James Dice: The que the key question is where are you going to insert these conditions, right?

I think that that's, that's the psychology behind it. Like,

Brad Bonavida: sure,

Like don't you wanna implement this? And you haven't thought through like, what is their job today? Like

Brad Bonavida: what, yeah, what are they doing? What are they

James Dice: doing today? You know,

So this is tough. Yeah, this is hard.

What is the playbook that you need to implement? Um, we'll do that in the fall slash later in the year.

Brad Bonavida: Sure.

James Dice: Let's keep going.

James Dice: Me too. Yeah.

Brad Bonavida: Yeah.

James Dice: It's all over the map, isn't it? It,

Brad Bonavida: I thought it's, it really is.

Brad Bonavida: Yeah.

Where are the biggest occupant complaints? Um, and then go from there, right?

It's kind of like the key or the main platform that does this on a holistic level. Um,

James Dice: yeah.

For years they've been building these proprietary rule sets so that you don't have to go try to figure out what conditions matter to you. Right? Is that how you would think of it?

Brad Bonavida: Right.

James Dice: Whereas if you're just buying an IOT sensor, you're just gonna get an alert that says there's a water leak.

Right. You still need that workflow to then say, okay, well I have 2000 water leaks. Which one's the worst water leak? Right. So you, you, you, you, there's more for the user to do.

Brad Bonavida: Yes.

James Dice: That you're trying to accomplish. Right. So it's almost, it is an evolution from preventative maintenance in that you can check things more often.

Brad Bonavida: That would be, you would call that automated functional testing, right?

James Dice: Yeah,

Rosy Khalife: Totally.

So it's just like the multiplication of you being able to find things is, is absurd when you have these, uh, [01:04:00] platforms built in.

James Dice: Absolutely. All right. Back to step four. Right Step,

Brad Bonavida: yeah. Step four is build and validate signals. Um, what else do we have here? I think, uh, we are gonna get into this at Nexus Cast, uh, Terrell Whitson.

So I think this is where you kind of get into the weeds of like what data you're actually getting [01:05:00] and how your system's analyzing it.

Like those sorts of things are now part of this program. It's not just about stand up this tech and now we do maintenance better. It's now also about then maintaining this tech stack as well.

Brad Bonavida: Yep. Exactly. And I, and I think that that person that you're talking about, or group of people that's maintaining it is, is flowing in the step five now, which is

James Dice: Yeah.

James Dice: Yeah. We, we talked to a big healthcare organization a couple of months ago that is working on standing up this sort of like.

James Dice: yeah,

Brad Bonavida: I think it's gonna change someday.

Someday it's gonna change.

Right. Because if I don't know the root cause, I don't know whether it's like software or physical problem, for example. Well, those have two different people that need to fix those things. Right?

Brad Bonavida: Right.

James Dice: So that's just one example. The other piece is like the NNAU case study with Willow and mapped right. The ability for them to use AI to ingest.

O and m manuals from the entire fucking campus. Well now all of a sudden, you know, what type of motor is it? How big is it? Like what, what is, what sort of power comes into that motor?

Brad Bonavida: What tools you need? Yeah.

James Dice: What tools you need, right? So the ability for not only AI to help help with the triage, but also AI to help give the context to make that triage faster.

I think that's huge.

James Dice: They called that the analytic response group, the arg.

That's kind of fun. That's great. Yeah.

James Dice: Yeah. And this, this gets back to the customization of the program, I think too.

Um,

Brad Bonavida: yes.

Brad Bonavida: Yep. Um.

If you have a software provider that's providing both FDD and work order management right now, you don't have that problem. Right. It's the same software platform.

Brad Bonavida: Right?

James Dice: Right. Um, same asset register, same ontology. You don't need to map between them. You are simply saying, I analyze my data and the same platform that I then schedule and manage work.

Brad Bonavida: Sure.

James Dice: And that, I think that is a compelling thing for some, for some

How each role comes into play and who those people are. I

Those are new roles, but then you have a bunch of people that already had jobs that they need to change their jobs to accommodate this [01:15:00] new workflow.

James Dice: I, I, something's coming back to me that we have in our notes here, which is Leon Wurfel from Bueno.

Um, their job is still to go fix that thing. Their job might actually get better. If you're providing that context though, right?

Brad Bonavida: Yeah,

James Dice: yeah.

James Dice: and over time doing a better work order. Over many months and years ends up in your lower total cost of ownership.

Right? That's the, to bring this full circle. Alright, we gotta, we gotta finish this.

Totally. Those are two different things.

James Dice: Yeah. Yeah. Outside of the scope of, of this.

Right. Yeah. Change management. It's, it gets into that part of it.

James Dice: That one, that one is like the condition based maintenance graveyard.

Like so many projects have gotten to that point and died like,

Brad Bonavida: yep.

James Dice: We

already

Brad Bonavida: tried. So that's like that whole graveyard of just failed programs that, you know, are scared to try again.

yikes.

James Dice: And that's happened a in a lot of places. Somebody gets very excited about this and they're like, we're gonna roll it out.

Selecting between vendors, right. For the tech, that's great, but we don't need a pilot to prove FDD works. Like go to Nexus Labs online and check out all these case studies, right?

Brad Bonavida: Yeah.

James Dice: What we need a pilot for is like, how are you gonna actually change your fucking workflows? Right? And prove to yourself that you can do that before spending a ton of money.

Brad Bonavida: Right. And that goes back to having a very like honed in group that's working on a hone in group of group of assets and people.

James Dice: Yeah.

Brad Bonavida: So if you've made it this far and you're a building owner, you, you owe us, uh, some information on where you're at on this, right?

Um, what else? James? We're wrapping it up. We, we, we flew through the end there, but, um, we've made it,

Brad Bonavida: Yeah. Cool. This was fun. Super. I feel like you taught me some stuff. Let's do it

James Dice: again. Taught me some stuff.

Let's do it again and people can give us feedback on this. We'd love to hear is a better version of the Nexus podcast. Let us know.[01:27:00]

Make sure to tag us in the post so we can see it. Have a good one.

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