EllisDon’s Playbook for Using FDD to De-Risk the Warranty Period

This NexusCon 2025 presentation features James Donahue, Vice President of Customer Success at Clockworks Analytics, and Joe Coady, Manager at EllisDon, walking through how EllisDon used fault detection and diagnostics during the warranty phase of large healthcare projects. They compare two nearly identical facilities—one with FDD in place during warranty and one without—to show how the process, priorities, and outcomes diverged.

The focus isn’t on commissioning theory, but on what actually happens when a building is handed over and the clock starts ticking. The context spans hospitals and rehab facilities ranging from ~150,000 to nearly 1 million square feet, with energy guarantees and operational risk on the line.

Inside the paywall, you’ll see how EllisDon shifted from hunting for problems to prioritizing them, using automated checks to surface issues that would normally take months or years to find. The presenters walk through what went wrong—early onboarding, inconsistent room naming, lost diagnostics—and how they adapted workflows to still extract value fast.

You’ll hear concrete examples like terminal units never truly commissioned, closed isolation valves, misconfigured schedules, and cycling booster pumps caught before failure. Most importantly, this recording shows why warranty is a missed leverage point for FMs and owners—and how using FDD early can compress time-to-performance and lock in savings before those issues become your problem to own.‍

Watch the full recording inside Nexus Pro →