Join us at NexusCon 2024 - Get your ticket now
"We have helped our clients reduce building energy consumption by 35% in some properties. Our average client has received 13% total building energy savings. Since weâve started this seven years ago weâve raised over seven thousand tickets on the Bueno platform and closed over five million dollars in savings.â
âLaura Towsley
Welcome to Nexus, a newsletter and podcast for smart people applying smart building technologyâhosted by James Dice. If youâre new to Nexus, you might want to start here.
The Nexus podcast (Apple | Spotify | YouTube | Other apps) is our chance to explore and learn with the brightest in our industryâtogether. The project is directly funded by listeners like you who have joined the Nexus Pro membership community.
You can join Nexus Pro to get a weekly-ish deep dive, access to the Nexus Vendor Landscape, and invites to exclusive events with a community of smart buildings nerds.
Sign-up (or refer a friend!) to the Nexus Newsletter.
Learn more about the Smart Building Strategist Course and the Nexus Courses Platform.
Check out the Nexus Labs Marketplace.
Learn more about Nexus Partnership Opportunities.
Episode 166 is a conversation with Laura Towsley from RYCOM and Leon Wurfel from Bueno.
Episode 166 features Laura Towsley from RYCOM and Leon Wurfel from Bueno and is our 11th episode in the Case Study series looking at real-life, large-scale deployments of smart building technologies. These are not marketing fluff stories, these are lessons from leaders that others can put into use in their smart buildings programs. This conversation explores how RYCOM has used FDD to catalyze the digital transformation of their business, providing services to building owners. Enjoy!
You can find Laura and Leon on LinkedIn.
Introduction (0:51)
Intro to Laura (1:26)
RYCOMâs Services (1:50)
Why RYCOM uses FDD (5:16)
Intro to Leon (7:00)
Where is FDD today (9:53)
Why FDD is vital for service providers (17:07)
Service providers at risk (20:00)
Phases in changing (23:29)
The team (33:26)
Storytelling (38:01)
Lessons learned (42:04)
Music credits: There Is A Reality by Common Tigerâlicensed under an Music Vine Limited Pro Standard License ID: S597943-16073.
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!
â
James Dice: [00:00:00] Hey friends, if you like the Nexus podcast, the best way to continue the learning is to join our community. There are three ways to do that. First, you can join the Nexus ProMembership. It's our global community of smart building professionals. We have monthly events, paywall deep dive content, and a private chat room, and it's just 35 a month.
Second, you can upgrade from the ProMembership to our courses offering. It's headlined by our flagship course, the Smart Building Strategist. And we're building a catalog of courses taught by world leading experts on each topic under the smart buildings umbrella. Third and finally, our marketplace is how we connect leading vendors with buyers looking for their solutions.
The links are below in the show notes. And now let's go on to the podcast.
Welcome to the Nexus podcast. This is the next episode in our series, diving into case studies of real life, large scale deployments of smart buildings. [00:01:00] Um, and again, these are not marketing fluff stories. We're here to sort of share lessons from leaders that others can use to put, uh, to use in their smart buildings programs.
So today we have a story coming out of Canada, uh, where RYCOM has over the last seven years used FDD to catalyze the sort of digital transformation of their business, providing services to building owners. And we have Laura Towsley here from RYCOM. Welcome, Laura. Can you introduce yourself?
Laura Towsley: Absolutely.
Thanks for having me on today. I'm the Director of the Data Intelligence team at RYCOM. I joined the team in 2017 and I have had the privilege over the last seven years of helping build out our team and build out our data intelligence service offerings at RYCOM.
James Dice: And let's, let's set a little context.
For people that don't know RYCOM, can you talk about all the different services that you, that you provide?
Laura Towsley: Absolutely. So RYCOM is a smart building services company. We focus on delivering services to the market around operational technology [00:02:00] networks, technical security, Telecom, riser management, and data intelligence.
We're technology agnostic, so we don't make any of our own hardware or software, but we look to third party solutions in the market and help our clients select, design, install, and service systems using that technology.
James Dice: Awesome. And when you think about, um, Sort of the, you came on board, what, seven years ago, you said, what was the company like before then?
And then what, what has changed since then?
Laura Towsley: Rikom had a really big business in installing and servicing operational technology networks. So we had a pretty big group of clients, commercial real estate clients, where we had installed fiber backbones. So, we've seen a lot of great use cases in the building, helped them get all their OT devices connected to the networks, and we really saw that these networks were being a little bit underutilized.
So, it was great for their capital budgets, it was great for their operational budgets in terms of upgrading technology in the building, but they weren't really integrating the systems together [00:03:00] to create use cases or experiences, and they weren't really pulling data off the networks and leveraging them to create operational strategies.
James Dice: So Laura, when you talk about, you're, you're a service provider. So sometimes when we do these case studies, we're talking to building owners. You guys are serving the building owners. You're an extension of their staff, basically. So can you talk about, um, Um, sort of the outcomes that you guys help building owners with.
Laura Towsley: Yeah, absolutely. So we're typically hired, like you said, by either building owners or third party property management companies who are looking to optimize their operations. And a lot of times that's around improving their. Energy consumption or reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Uh, but sometimes it's also about, um, improving the sort of labor ratio to troubleshoot or get things done on site.
Um, improving the resilience of their asset, making it a little bit easier to monitor risks, um, and sort of unleashing that, that operational efficiency that lets them respond to tenant complaints and other things that they need to [00:04:00] do.
James Dice: Got it. And so when you got brought on board, like seven years ago, Battling the company really started to integrate fault detection and diagnostics into these different services that you're providing.
Can you talk about why from a RYCOM standpoint and why from a standpoint of your customers businesses? You guys started to head down this path that we're going to sort of unpack today.
Laura Towsley: Yeah, RYCOM already had a really strong service background. So we already had a 24 7 bilingual operations center in Montreal that's set up to take phone calls and complaints from customers.
We already have staff who are 24 7 monitoring network devices. So our ability to deploy So we were able to deploy this new layer of software and have a technology and IT team, you know, managing the cloud, keeping it secure, keeping the data uptime there. We already had all of those technologies and resources there.
So we were able to take what we already had and take the service model that we already had and the trust that we already had built [00:05:00] up with a lot of the Canadian commercial real estate clients. And then add on an offering that focused around BAS operations.
James Dice: Fascinating. So let's do a couple of rapid fire questions to sort of like, continue to give people context before we dive into the meat of this case study.
Um, so can you talk about who provides the software in these, um, services?
Laura Towsley: We, uh, primarily use Bueno for our fault detection diagnostics, um, to support the existing sort of technology stacks we had around security monitoring and network monitoring. Thank you.
James Dice: Okay. And then you guys sort of package it and call it your own thing, right?
What's the name of that?
Laura Towsley: Yeah, we brand our services to the market as RYCOM Hive. So that includes, like I said, technology offerings around networks, security, telecom, riser management, and now also FDD with Buena.
James Dice: Got it. And how many buildings have you sort of deployed this, this service or FTD in today?
Laura Towsley: The RYCOM Hive is in [00:06:00] hundreds of buildings across Canada and we have 86 buildings where the Bueno FTD platform is installed as part of that.
James Dice: Awesome. And then give us a sense of square footage, if that's a number that you have in that unit.
Laura Towsley: Yeah, so the Bueno platform is in 17 million square feet. And yes, I had to convert it from square meters for this conversation.
James Dice: And then when you think about the results you guys have driven, What would be like the headline, um, whether it's energy savings or dollar savings or whatever?
Laura Towsley: So we've helped our clients reduce building energy consumption by up to 35 percent in some properties, which is a huge number. Um, our average client has achieved 13 percent total building energy savings, um, using our services.
And 7, 000 tickets in the window platform and closed over 5 million in savings.
James Dice: That's awesome. All right. So it's a, it's a great time to bring on Leon Werfel, who's the founder of [00:07:00] Bueno. Um, he's been lurking in the background here. This will be the third different English accent that we've added to this pod, this podcast.
And so have fun, uh, analyzing all of our different accents to the audience. Um, Leon, can you introduce yourself? This is the second time you've been on, um, last time we talked about similar topics here. We're just, we're just adding in the RYCOM story to this.
Leon Wurfel: Thanks for having me. Um, you have no idea how much like self control it took me not to just say g'day mate after that introduction to really hem up the, the third accent.
Uh, yeah. Thanks for having me back. Um, uh, Yeah, I think the first time that we did this was during COVID and it was like the world was in a really different place. So yeah, it's nice that, um, uh, it's nice to be back. Thanks for having me. Um, so my, uh, background is I was, I was a mechanical engineer. I was working with a team of, uh, energy efficiency experts and using all of the old school archaic, [00:08:00] um, Uh, engineering tools that we would all be familiar with, uh, AKA spreadsheets, right?
Spreadsheets and trend logs, and hence, you know, I came across FDD, uh, in my, um, uh, travels and, uh, you know, funnily enough, FDD is actually a 30 year old, uh, 30 year old invention, but it just hadn't really made its way to the property industry yet. And so I saw, uh, FDD as an opportunity to put myself out of a job and just think about Thought that, you know, who better to put myself out of a job than me.
Uh, I started Bueno, uh, and, uh, that was 12 years ago. So as of the 1st of July, um, that will be the 12th anniversary of Bueno. Um, you know, obviously started out of, out of Australia, had a really, uh, good, um, market there for, um, you know, being early, relatively early adopters of, of FDD, early wide adopters of FDD, given the, you Billing performance standards, which had actually been in place in Australia since 1998.
Um, and where we've kind of taken 0.02 now is the two [00:09:00] stats that I'm most proud of is we've saved, uh, two and a half million tons of CO2. And the second is that we have, uh, a hundred, $115 billion US of connected assets on our, uh, software.
James Dice: Yeah, big numbers. So cool. And that's why we're doing these case studies.
I think there's a perception that this is a new thing in some parts of the industry. And it's like, these are, there's a, there's a lot of deployments out there. And there's a lot of, a big, big track record. Leon, the last time you were on the show, we talked about FDD and where it is in terms of crossing the chasm.
Um, you had helped me write an article, or just conversations with you had helped me write an article about this. And it was really like, here's what FDD needs to do to sort of go mainstream. Where do you think, you know, you're sitting in the perfect place to tell us where we're at on that journey? Where do you think?
FDD is on that sort of scaling up, uh, phase.
Leon Wurfel: I think the thing that I said last time was that I can't believe we're sitting here 10 years later and everyone isn't doing [00:10:00] FDD already, right? And so I kind of feel now that I can't believe we're sitting here 12 years later and everyone isn't doing FDD already.
Um, so, uh, I mean, I'm like a pretty cynical person, uh, so the analogy is I feel like we're still banging our head against the brick wall of that chasm. You know, it's not as though the industry hasn't made, um, made a bunch of progress in that time and adoption hasn't grown, but we have, we certainly haven't hit that inflection point that we're all waiting for where Everyone just suddenly wakes up one day and starts treating it as a no brainer.
I mean, as the no brainer that it probably is. Um, you know, we saw an inflection point for ESG reporting software. You know, that kind of happened around 2021, uh, when there was like an exponential growth in the, um, Uh, uptake of that kind of software along with all of these, you know, um, market pressures around ESG reporting, et cetera.
Our hypothesis has been that, um, you know, people can only report this, you know, they're doing ESG reporting, people can only probably report [00:11:00]the same number for so many years in a row before their shareholders start to ask, like, um, what are they going to do about it? So we, we, we, we look at that as a leading indicator of demand for performance improvement solutions, which we would put ourselves.
Uh, and what we do with RYCOM in that basket. So I think, I think that we'll be dragged along by that inflection point. Uh, uh, you know, pending what happens in the market. But you know, there's, there's a whole bunch of other stuff that probably needs to fall into place before we really are ready to, to inflect.
James Dice: Um, I, yeah, totally agree. I think that is a thing that has changed since the last time we talked about this, which is getting pulled along. It's, it's a natural question to ask, okay, what do we do after reporting? And we've reported on progress that isn't where we want to be. So at some point, action needs to occur.
And I think it's natural that you guys get pulled along with that. So in terms of, so RYCOM is one of Bueno's channel partners. You guys are seeing, uh, one way for FDD to [00:12:00] scale up is that channel partners like RYCOM take them to their clients. Um, and so can you talk about what you're seeing in other countries as well?
So before we sort of dive into RYCOM and Canada, you guys are also doing this in Australia, you're doing this in the UK, you're now doing this in the U S as well. Can you talk about like kind of the progress you're seeing? In terms of that channel where it seems like building owners sometimes aren't able to, um, you know, put FDD to use in their operations.
And so some sort of service provider is that sometimes the best channel for them to do so. So what are you seeing in that channel?
Leon Wurfel: You've actually reminded me of something else important that has changed since the last time that we talked, and that is I am a New Yorker now. So yeah, I've moved to the US to set up our US HQ for Bueno.
So yeah, we are getting much more serious about the US as a market. It was definitely hard to manage all of our clients over there remotely with time zone differences and that kind of thing as well. But there's been a big, uh, there's been a [00:13:00] big learning curve, I guess, for us. Um, you know, we had been in the app market for a while, uh, but there's still kind of always more to learn.
Um, I'll start in order of how you asked the question. So Australia, that's where we started. That's where we've got the most mature, uh, Understanding of the market and the most mature, um, client base. Um, you know, the real difference between Australia as a market and all the other property markets in the world is how, uh, intrinsically adopted building performance standards are in that market.
And so that has created a real market appetite for building performance. So there was an appetite for performance there, even before there was, you know, the real market demand for really detailed ESG reporting. So it's kind of. The other way around in Australia, um, you know, where landlords, their lease rental, their, their different segments of the tenant, tenant market, uh, uh, close to them.
If they don't have a certain neighbor's rating, they lose rent reviews. If they don't maintain their neighbor's ratings, it's really tied to their core business. And so what's interesting about Australia as a market. And I know that you've had [00:14:00] Dexus on your podcast, but they are very, um, they're an example of a very sophisticated, sophisticated.
Uh, you know, an owner with a very sophisticated approach to these technologies, you know, they're really kind of segmenting out the benefits that they want to get from FDD. And so they actually, as part of their maintenance contracts, will specify that their mechanical and BMS contractors have to use an FDD platform.
Um, so they, they, they've, they've, uh, segmented out that kind of day to day operational benefit, um, to be delivered by their service contractors. They kind of don't want that. All they're building optimization experts to be service providers, like a Brycon, for example, they don't want the billing performance specialists to be bogged down by finding all the broken sensors and broken valves, et cetera.
And so then they've also segmented out an optimization layer, which is being provided by a separate party, FDD solution. And where possible, they try to uniformly deliver that, but they have a very big and non homogeneous portfolio, so it's like not, not always that simple. Um, [00:15:00] so Australia is like a, it's a really interesting, uh, And a case study for this stuff, you know, it's probably tells, tells a story where the rest of the world might go to eventually.
Um, EU, uh, for us was a really late starter. So EU slash UK, late starter. Um, but it's really been on a tear over the past little while. You know, we've seen some very, um, and this, this could be an example of where ESG reporting requirements are actually leading. And pulling along, um, uh, pulling along demand for solutions like ours.
I mean, also something that's interesting is the UK market itself has adopted Australia's building performance standard verbatim. So UK uses neighbors. Neighbours, National Australian Built Environmental Rating System, UK, is actually the title that they came up with. So, I mean, it's great that they're doing that.
But, we've got a partner that has gone from zero to like 200 buildings in the last year alone in that market. So, [00:16:00] it's on a tear. U. S. uh, onto your third question, U. S. is like, one thing that I've observed is it's very fragmented, uh, it's just very fragmented and it's like a loose collection of different markets that all kind of have slightly different priorities of where they put this stuff.
Um, the winners that we're seeing in this market are people that are strategically adopting, you know, I was going to say there was like a predictor for, Partners that we talked to on who's going to be like very, very successful, like RYCOM versus who's going to kind of probably stagnate and not get where they want to go.
Um, the people that are the winners in this market are people that are taking that the adoption of these tools out of as part of a strategic decision, you know, it's coming down from a desire to actually transform what they're doing with their business.
James Dice: Totally. Um, and, and Laura, can you talk about that from, from RYCOM's perspective, like in terms of the business?
of RYCOM. Why is this [00:17:00] so vital? Like if you were talking to a service provider that hasn't started this journey yet, what do you think Leon's talking about there? And then Leon, you can, you can be more specific after, after we hear from Laura.
Laura Towsley: Yeah, so I think RYCOM's whole business really believes in using technology, people, and processes to optimize What's happening on the ground floor of operating buildings.
So for a really long time, we believed that this is sort of a manpower heavy industry. There's opportunity to use technology to reduce some of the manpower that's happening on site, provide a little bit better operational oversight. And This is one technology tool to do that, but it's really, it has been the core of our belief and our being since before we started doing FDD.
So I think it really helped us that we already sort of had that vision going into this and we really did [00:18:00] set out to change the way that our clients were operating their buildings. And we want to keep changing it further, right? As we do more MSI engagements and we do more remote facilities management engagements, all of that is about helping our clients respond to their difficulty finding skilled labor.
Um, there are difficulties with cost pressures and operational models, the increasing carbon taxes, all of the pressures that our clients are facing. We believe we can help them solve some of those problems with the technologies that we're using and the processes that we're helping them put in place.
Leon Wurfel: I, I have another angle on this as well.
And one thing that I want to give RYCOM credit for is that they actually have a history of reinventing themselves. So, um, if you rewind the clock, you know, probably 15 years, I'd say the majority of RYCOM's business was, uh, around, um, managing a, a payments network. You know, we, we'd still follow the same thread [00:19:00] where it's, it's, they've got a network that they're managing.
This is like a national one. And it was, I was processing, I don't know what, 50 percent of the payments. In, in, in Canada at the time, uh, but you've got like a, an operation center and a network that's being managed. Um, then they reinvented themselves to, uh, deliver converged networks and telecom property management for commercial buildings.
Same principles. They already had that infrastructure and that know how in their business, but they took it into a different industry and reinvented themselves. And we see the same pattern again, where they have successfully done that with, um, building out their, uh, DART intelligence business unit.
James Dice: And so before we dive into that, because we're about to, the Leon, do you think about the companies, the service providers out there that you've talked to that haven't gone, like, what's the risk for them if they don't sort of go to go through this?
It sounds buzzworded to say digital transformation, but we're basically talking about integrating technology into these different services they're providing. What's the, what's the risk here for those that [00:20:00] aren't, aren't sort of going down that, that road.
Leon Wurfel: Yeah. I, so to like take a bit of the buzz out of the buzzwords, um, I'd say that like, what we're really talking about is about is changing the labor mix.
You know, if you look at like a systems integrator, changing the labor mix from truly sending people out to the sites in like trucks to more of a remote services model, where they're. You know, they still have people involved, but they're just leveraging technology to do it in a centralized way with, you know, some more productivity.
Cause really FDD is like an enhancement for people's eyeballs. You just have eyeballs looking at this. BMS started, you know, with rules rather than with people. Um, uh, what, what are the risks? I mean, the, we, I won't, I won't say who this is, but we have a partner that we work with. And over the last 12 months, they've spent 4 million on recruiter spaces.
Just trying to keep all of the, uh, you know, they've got a whole bunch of service contracts to deliver and they're just trying to, uh, trying to maintain their existing business, uh, with all the [00:21:00] different kind of churn that they have. They're trying to find good quality people at a time when, you know, the labor market is very, very tight and there's more and more people leaving it every day and barely anyone kind of coming into this space.
Um, I mean, I think that's the, that's, that's the real risk.
Laura Towsley: I think I have an example of that as well. We, we recently became an improved existing building commissioning provider, um, eligible for incentives in the province of Ontario. And it's the first time they've put a provider on that list who is. You know, not a traditional existing building commissioning engineering firm consultant, but rather an FDD provider.
And some of that has been because the ISO, which is the electrical authority in Ontario, has seen that we've achieved real results with some of our clients. They can see it on the meters over the last few years, and they were really happy to have us As an existing building [00:22:00] commissioning provider, even though we don't, uh, do all of the same sort of standard, I'll say checklists or reports, we do it in a different way, but they know now it's proven to work and what they really wanna see is results off the meters.
And they were happy to approve us as an existing building commissioning provider. And I think we represent a real threat to traditional consultants who are doing this in a much more manpower heavy way.
James Dice: Amazing. Um, just before we move on, I want to, for anyone that's new to this podcast, um, we'll put in the show notes on our website links to Leon's podcast, John Dexus's podcast, John from Dexus's podcast.
Um, we also have an episode that we did with Tom Balm, who used to be at Dexus, walking through how, um, service contracts should be transformed to integrate FTD. We also have an episode with Neighbors. So for just to close out that whole conversation, there is another four hours of a rabbit hole to go deeper into what we just talked about for any of you [00:23:00] that, that wants to do that.
Leon Wurfel: And not all those
people
have Australian accents. So, uh, yeah.
James Dice: Um, all right. So Laura, let's dive into, um, so let's say there's a service provider out there that says, okay, I want to go on this journey now. Um, what we're trying to do at Nexus is to accelerate that transition. And so can you talk about just, like, what were the phases of, of changing how you guys do things?
over the past seven years since you've been on board to, um, integrate FDD into some of these services. Um, and I, I think this is a really good story for people to, to sort of latch on to. So where should we start?
Laura Towsley: Um, I, I mean, I think one of the, the big things was being able to take stock of what skillsets did we already have in house and what things were we missing to be able to move forward.
So it might be different depending on. The sort of background your group is coming from. For us, we had, [00:24:00] like I said, all the IT knowledge, all the networking knowledge that we needed, but we were really sort of lacking BAS experts and energy management experts. So we did have to go to the market to find some of those people to round out our team.
And, uh, I think this would be easier today than it was seven years ago. Like we talked about how much things have changed. Most of the time when I was hiring seven years ago, I had to start from what is FDD and what are we trying to do and trust me, look at the platforms, you'll see that they're really cool and there's a few on the market that are making progress.
I rarely have to do that today, which is nice. People know that it exists and they know that it's real and that this is a real, real sort of career opportunity. For them and in a growing business. So that part is, is really nice. Um, but we did have to build order team with some additional skill sets and, and Bueno helped immensely in helping us train our own team to do our own deployments and integration so that we could [00:25:00] remain that touch point for our Canadian clients, because we thought that was really important to provide.
local support. We still hugely believe in, in customer FaceTime, and we think a huge part of why our team has been so successful is we don't view it as a software layer or, or a remote, uh, service thing. We actually spend a lot of time with our clients. We meet with them monthly. Um, so a huge part of this was developing relationships and trust with our clients that yes, we have BAS experts and energy experts who are going to support The technology side of our business as well now with this energy expertise part.
James Dice: So it sounds like the first sort of phase was like using FDD for energy optimization. It's like, okay, that's sort of the first use case that we're going to sort of go after. What were you going to say, Leon?
Leon Wurfel: I was just going to say, credit where credit's due, Laura was actually the first hire that Rikon made, um, when they were rounding out their team.
So, uh, you know, Laura has, the journey [00:26:00] that Rikon has been on, um, uh, is a journey that Laura has been on as well and has driven that journey for Rikon's business. Um, so, uh, Laura's been really transformative. Laura's been a big part of the reason for this program's success.
Laura Towsley: Well, thanks, Leon. I have had the opportunity to wear many hats, so I think I'm a jack of all trades and master of none at this point, um, when it, when it comes to sort of this type of business, but it has been really amazing to have the experience of, um, starting into this journey.
It was really energy focused at the beginning, partly due to Um, us having a large number of government clients who had a big focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, um, but we have seen as our team has built out, we've had the opportunity to hire more, um, controls experts and really start to grow our master systems integration business as well and really expand the scope of services that we're able to offer to our clients [00:27:00] using Buenos Tools as a foundation.
James Dice: And so Laura, so you're talking about going into the sort of these new MSI services, what sort of prompted that from, so you were doing energy optimization, you're using FTD for that, that was going great. We think about the phases of this sort of change management journey. What sort of prompted that next push into these MSI services from the building owner's standpoint?
Laura Towsley: One of the nice things about delivering service on an FDD platform where you're meeting with the clients monthly is you really become an embedded part of their operations team. So yes, there were a lot of challenges that we discussed and helped solve around energy, but also other operational. Problems would start to come up as well.
So we started to see problems bubble up that could be solved through integrating some different systems together, whether, you know, it's a room booking systems or lighting occupancy sensors. There was really obvious opportunities to help them solve sometimes energy problems and sometimes business [00:28:00] problems by facilitating sort of master systems integration services or by offering a remote facilities service that filled a gap.
Uh, for them that they were not able to fill themselves.
Leon Wurfel: So yeah, if you, if you really wanted to boil down the phases, um, what we saw was the initial driver of adoption being purely, um, uh, energy focused for RYCOM and how they were taking FDD to market. But then as they got, they got to know their clients better, uh, they became more of an embedded that they, they turned these same principles into becoming more of an embedded operational, um, part of their, their, their clients teams.
And. And now if you look at the future direction and the kinds of initiatives that they're working on, um, they're really taking, uh, they're offering an outsourced remote facilities management service, um, where they really take on the operation of the automation systems and the BMS at the site, leveraging all of the, you know, the productivity boosts that they get out of technologies like FDD.[00:29:00]
James Dice: Yeah, that's, that's fascinating. So, so Laura, what prompted that shift or what, what, uh, brought you into that next phase, which we're in today?
Laura Towsley: I mean, a lot of it is really about our clients pain points. So particularly since COVID, one of the things we've seen that Leon mentioned earlier is that our clients are having a really, really hard time finding and hiring skilled, uh, people.
Building operators. They're also having a hard time getting as much BAS service technician time as they want, even if they're willing to pay. Sometimes it's hard for them to get quick response and the service on site, the service level that they want and have gotten used to on site. So they're looking for other ways to support their operations.
And it's not just about the BAS. It's also about the other services we provide. So on the security side and the network side, we're seeing the same. challenges and labor shortages across all of those sort of lines of business. And this is one of the ways that we can use technology to help [00:30:00] support those teams.
So we really are sort of responding to what we're hearing in the market, the challenges that our customers are facing. And we believe that we can, continue to evolve our business using technology, so using FDD tools to help alert us to when there are challenges on site. And then instead of informing our clients, we can actually take action in remotely resolving some of those problems that are able to be Resolved remotely, or taking on the dispatch of third parties on behalf of our clients when we're able to do that on their behalf, and it removes a sort of huge part of the workload from the on site teams that can actually be done effectively remotely from skilled resources sitting in our Hive Operations Center.
James Dice: So this is fascinating because if I think about like what I know about a traditional service provider, whether there are controls or energy management, they're almost like a little bit, uh, removed, right? So they're not really a fully part of their [00:31:00] staff most of the time. Um, they don't have permission or it's very much like a, like a, I'm going to show up a day, a month, and I'm not really here that often.
I'm not really integrated into what they're doing on a day to day basis. This seems like a whole nother level of integration. Um, it seems like a big step in terms of. Like, actually, you used the word embedded in operations earlier, but this is like being, like, taking the operations over. Am I, am I thinking about that correctly?
Laura Towsley: I don't know that we intend to totally take them over, but you are right that we are very much in close contact with these sites. So any of our clients today who use all of our services, any contractor that comes to site already needs to call and get permission to access a riser room through our riser access.
The BAS technicians are sort of embedded with us. They know to communicate all of their results through the tickets to look at what they should be doing on site in the [00:32:00] platform. The security vendors, either we're the security vendor or we're working closely with their security vendors on connectivity and uptime and challenges that we see on site.
We're keeping all the network gear up and running. So, yeah, the amount that we are in communication with the building operator. If they're using all of our service, it greatly exceeds any sort of one, uh, service vendor who is focused on, on BAS alone, or on a security system alone. And the intent is sort of to have a contact for the building operator to call when they get into trouble.
Because we know already, if we use these, these examples of, you know, them losing connectivity to something on site, it's really complicated for a building operator to know, is this my switch? Is it my camera? Is it, you know, which vendor do I call? Do I call my network vendor? Do I call my security camera vendor?
Those problems exist in BAS security networking. Um, [00:33:00] and this sort of solves that problem where, you know, you call your technology vendor, you call your smart services vendor, and maybe they'll fix it themselves, but if not, they'll be able to troubleshoot the first few steps and know who to call next.
James Dice: You were the first one on the team, Laura.
How did you build the team? So if someone's thinking about, okay, I need to hire X amount of people and what are they going to do? What would you say? And like, sort of who's on your team now and what do they do?
Laura Towsley: Well, definitely we, we started, uh, had to start small and people had to wear many hats at the beginning.
Um, but now that we're a little bit larger, um, our team is really made up of So we have a data operation center, which for us does, I'll call it the classic FDD stuff. So they're responsible for maintaining all the metadata tagging model for all of our sites. They also review all the classic FDD alerts.
So things like, Hey, this valve hasn't moved in 24 hours. This damper is hunting, uh, things that can be [00:34:00] turned around quickly. They don't really require conversation in our monthly meetings. That's not where we focus our time in the monthly meetings. These are. Send them to site, send them to the BS vendor, get them fixed.
Um, the second sort of layer of that is our building systems engineers who are more senior people who either come with background knowledge in controls programming or energy management or HVAC design. So people coming with expertise who are able to use the FDD tools and the independent data layer to do, I'll call it some more complicated or sort of custom solutioning to help our clients solve their specific problems.
So, it could be something like peak demand response, uh, it could be measurement and verification of other energy things they're doing on site. They're helping support our clients challenges and problems, energy and operational, through sort of deeper knowledge and expertise. We sometimes joke that it's like rent an engineer.
It's like, you know, you get a few hours of engineering time every month. So we, we do encourage our clients [00:35:00] to come to us with their problems and tell us how they want us to use the time. Um, and as a manager, I feel so fortunate to be able to work with people from a variety of backgrounds because the learning just never stops when you have people from all these different.
Backgrounds on your team, supporting the problems that your clients are throwing at you. And then finally, the third part, we do have some integration specialists who work on our MSI projects. Uh, some of them are software developers. Some of them are kind of more classic BAS integration specialists or building systems technologists, um, and they support our custom, our client sort of custom master systems integration.
Uh, we do, we have started bidding on master systems integration projects as well and really building up that line of business in the past few years. So sometimes we get brand new clients who are looking for an MSI service provider, um, and I'll say start as an MSI client and land in FTD. And sometimes it goes the other way where they started [00:36:00] as an FTD client and then are looking for us to help them integrate.
Some things together on site is a sort of last piece of the pie is we are supported by our own internal network team. So one of the great things is that I have never had to worry about secure cloud hosting or monitoring of PCs or or cellular routers because we have a A network monitoring team to do that.
Leon Wurfel: One, uh, interesting point that I want to raise here is that, um, uh, when I, within Australia, we have our own equivalent to Laura's, uh, data intelligence team. Um, so we have our own energy FDD enabled, like an energy performance services team that just services the Australian market. So as we were. You know, when we work with partners like RYCOM, we really take like a white glove approach to helping them build up all the different resources they need to run this, run FDD as a services solution, not just dump a technology on their [00:37:00] lap and expect them to figure out how to use them, use it themselves.
We were the first ever customer for our own software that we built. And so, um, it puts us in a really good and a really unique position to be able to take clients like RYCOM on the journey of helping them identify, uh, the, the resources that they would need, help them put in place the right structure, the right different kind of.
Organizational functions that they need to deliver this successfully. Um, and, and we know what good looks like there because we've done it ourselves. And then that leads us into a position where, you know, seven years down the track, it's still part of our regular engagement with RYCOM to sit down, uh, and compare best practices between the groups to ensure that we're both going in the right direction in terms of like continuing to improve the, uh, the The types of services that we're offering and, uh, the, the way in which we're operating those, those, uh, those different functions.
James Dice: Awesome. So let's move into sort of a storytelling and lessons learned [00:38:00] phase here. So, Laura, can you tell us about some of the, we've been talking about sort of making FDD more mainstream. Some of the, some of the stories that kind of hit at that That people might be surprised about, like, what this is being used for at the scale it's being used for.
Laura Towsley: Yeah, so one of the things I've seen shifting over the past few years is a lot of our large clients who, you know, traditionally have focused on this for the markets of large commercial office buildings and retail shopping centers with BASs and things like that. already installed, um, have started asking, well, how do I also use this for my other properties like industrial properties or, um, you know, strip malls, the, the kinds of properties that, um, we have, you know, in years past would have said these aren't, aren't big enough to justify this, this kind of technology.
Um, and we're seeing a lot more progress in those markets and in the residential market as well. So we recently engaged with a new client who has a really large portfolio of Small residential properties. Most of them are three or four story [00:39:00] walk up. Um, buildings. So typically a much smaller building than what you would see FDD in.
And they are investing in technology on site that allows all the data to go up into a cloud. And we've actually been able to do a cloud MQTT integration into the Bueno platform. And that's something that is just so much more cost effective across a large portfolio like this. Where the number of data points they have across their whole portfolio is the same as the data.
Um, but suddenly this is possible to do if you're leveraging cloud technology and leveraging some of these new technologies. So I'm really excited about as we move forward, the capabilities of opening this up to more residential properties and more small retail properties like this, where we know that the footprint of these clients is huge spread out across the country, but not in single buildings.
So
James Dice: [00:40:00] Yeah, and that's fascinating for us as we've, you know, we've, we've, you know, covered this over the years that there's still so many more buildings that need to be digitized from an HVAC or metering or whatever standpoint, just the ability to do that and then move things, you know, to remote, remotely be able to monitor them.
At scale is a huge development.
Laura Towsley: And one of the things we're seeing that's really different from our existing clients is that they don't have onsite staff. So in some ways our ability to remotely monitor and also do some remote operations, like go in and fix equipment, restart equipment, change a set point for them, it's even more valuable to them because they really don't have the onsite staff or even the national level staff.
So it's something that is really valuable for them to be able to outsource.
James Dice: Uh, what other, what other ones come to mind?
Laura Towsley: Yeah, so one of the other big, I'll say, instigators for using this technology in Canada is that Canada does have a really robust [00:41:00]greening government strategy. And they've actually publicly stated that they 10 percent of their energy savings from smart building projects.
Programs and technologies. So, uh, we've been really lucky to be selected as one of the providers, both for the Public Works Department and for the Department of National Defense. So, uh, sort of on the other side of the spectrum, we have this huge national portfolio. of large buildings that includes, you know, laboratories and airplane hangars and office buildings across the country that have really sophisticated operations and, and really, um, critical infrastructure operations for our country to continue running.
And we've been a major partner and contributor towards helping them hit that 10 percent greenhouse gas emission reduction that they're looking to achieve by 2030.
James Dice: Those are so cool. I love the breadth here. It's, it's, it's awesome to have the breadth. I'm imagining the seven years wasn't very easy. Um, can we talk about [00:42:00] like the, the lessons learned and like.
Again, we're trying to talk to the people that are about to set out on this journey. And so what would you have them think about if they were making a plan or sort of a roadmap to sort of copy what you guys have done?
Laura Towsley: Yeah, definitely one of our lessons learned is that this can't be driven in our client's organization by sort of one goal alone.
So the one of the most amazing things about FDV and independent data layers is that it can be Sustainability and energy management. It can be valuable to asset management. It can be valuable to operations. But if only one group within an organization is using that, you're really losing the value or the power of the tool.
So it's a lot of work on the organization's part, both in the sales cycle and on the ongoing basis to make sure you're engaging with all those stakeholders and make sure that the tools and the data are being used to their sort of maximum. Capacity, [00:43:00] because we really want our clients to see the results from this.
And we know that it's possible, but the software on its own running in the cloud does nothing. Right. So, so we have to encourage our clients across all three of those, you know, siloed business lines within their organization. We have to encourage all of them to take advantage of it.
James Dice: Totally. If anyone is listening on the audio, I'm just over here, like shaking my head because you're preaching to the choir on that one.
I feel like that's probably. That's the number one thing I'd say after all my years of listening to experts like you is like, this is not just one department's thing. And so going across departments, knocking down those silos is so huge. Leon, were you going to say something?
Leon Wurfel: I was, but I feel like, uh, that's a hard act to follow.
Um, I, uh, you know, one of the things that we learned very early on is like the differences between different markets. And I remember seven years ago, we have been looking at one of our first buildings that we'd done together and our [00:44:00] team in Australia was ecstatic. We thought, Oh, we've knocked out the park already.
We've paid for ourselves. It's only been a couple of days worth of data. Look at this, you know, the, the, the boilers are running 24 seven and there's. Hitting hot water, going through all the coils like 24 seven. This is like, it's amazing. Um, little did we know that the weather's a little bit different in Canada than it is in Australia.
And they actually need to keep the heating hot water circulating to avoid their, uh, their hydraulics freezing. Um, so, you know, it's been really interesting to go along that journey about learning about these different markets and, um, uh, figuring out how to, uh, map the, the, the value that you can provide to what the specific market constraints are.
James Dice: Totally. Any other lessons learned that are popping out for you, Laura or Leon?
Laura Towsley: I think one of the other sort of big ones for us is understanding that every client has their own operational practices and processes. And we always have to take the time to understand what they are and how they [00:45:00] work. Um, we have a really early example that sounds so silly now when I talk about it.
Um, but essentially we did several months of meetings and nothing happened. No action was taken on. On any of our, uh, recommendations. And we had to go back to the client and say, Hey, look, what is happening? Why, why can't get this, this get done? And we realized that there's, you know, this other process with this other team that's used to allocate their building operators time and used to allocate.
The BAS technician's time. And we weren't get, we weren't in that workflow, so we were raising these tickets, but there was no time assigned to the operators. And the operators were assigned tasks that filled eight hours of their day. So ours were just like, maybe if I have time to look at this later, I will.
And we realized that we needed to work with the organization to get our tickets in the workflow to get them prioritized along their other tasks. And it's just a silly organizational thing, but if you don't overcome challenges like that, you know, the [00:46:00] program's gonna fail.
James Dice: No, it's not silly at all. That's like where things, yeah, that's where things go bye bye.
All right, this has been awesome. As we sort of wrap this conversation up, Are there any, is there anything we, we left out for either of you that you would, you would tell another company that's sort of just starting down this journey?
Laura Towsley: I think one of my major roles in being a leader within my own group and developing my own team to go out and do this in the market has been that We have to approach our clients understanding that we're one kind of small piece of the puzzle in this service.
So in order for us to be successful, we have to facilitate this environment on site where we truly believe and understand that the building operator is the eyes and ears on site. The BAS technician is the programming expert and understands the control system. And we have this data in the cloud, but that doesn't make us the expert on what [00:47:00] happens next.
It's one third of the puzzle that we're bringing to the table. And I feel like over my years, a huge part of our success has been the coaching and the sort of foundational. Understanding and never losing sight of as a team that we rely on these people who do boots on the ground physical work to make this happen, and that can be really hard for a technology company because we love the tech and we love the data and we think it's magical, but it really does nothing unless we can Engage with those other people.
And part of that is believing that you really are just one tiny piece of what we're trying to accomplish.
James Dice: I think that would, that, that insight right there would help so many people that are sort of banging their heads against the wall right now, because I feel like there's sometimes this like, here's my list of faults, like, why isn't anyone doing anything, anything about this?
And it's like, yeah, you have to really take a step back and think about where you're at. And how you're [00:48:00] integrating it into the operational processes and teams. Leon, anything you would add at the end here?
Leon Wurfel: I'm, I'm gonna loop it back to the beginning and at the beginning we were talking about crossing the chasm and what the remaining barriers are.
And I think that part of this is the industry's mindset in terms of looking at solutions like this as, uh, as at the huge opportunity that they are. And I think the case study. With RYCOM is really like when you boil it down, it's a case study of moving up the value chain, you know, they were, they were managing all the infrastructure of the properties, the, the, the OT infrastructure, the properties, and now they've moved up the value chain to providing value to their clients, um, from the data that was flowing through that infrastructure, moving up the value chain opened up.
A whole bunch of, as you've, as you've heard from Laura's story, a whole bunch of other service streams, uh, for, for, for RYCOM. And it's also opened up a whole bunch of extra value streams for the clients. [00:49:00] And I think as another theme from this conversation, what you've heard is that it has brought RYCOM as well, a lot closer to their clients as a result of this.
James Dice: Mic drop. All right. That's a great place to, to end our conversation here. Laura, thank you for coming on the show. Leon, thank you for coming back again. Uh, this has been super insightful. We will, um, yeah, turn this into one of our written case studies as well. So we'll have this, this version. We'll also have a written version and those will be on our website.
Thanks y'all.
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.
â
"We have helped our clients reduce building energy consumption by 35% in some properties. Our average client has received 13% total building energy savings. Since weâve started this seven years ago weâve raised over seven thousand tickets on the Bueno platform and closed over five million dollars in savings.â
âLaura Towsley
Welcome to Nexus, a newsletter and podcast for smart people applying smart building technologyâhosted by James Dice. If youâre new to Nexus, you might want to start here.
The Nexus podcast (Apple | Spotify | YouTube | Other apps) is our chance to explore and learn with the brightest in our industryâtogether. The project is directly funded by listeners like you who have joined the Nexus Pro membership community.
You can join Nexus Pro to get a weekly-ish deep dive, access to the Nexus Vendor Landscape, and invites to exclusive events with a community of smart buildings nerds.
Sign-up (or refer a friend!) to the Nexus Newsletter.
Learn more about the Smart Building Strategist Course and the Nexus Courses Platform.
Check out the Nexus Labs Marketplace.
Learn more about Nexus Partnership Opportunities.
Episode 166 is a conversation with Laura Towsley from RYCOM and Leon Wurfel from Bueno.
Episode 166 features Laura Towsley from RYCOM and Leon Wurfel from Bueno and is our 11th episode in the Case Study series looking at real-life, large-scale deployments of smart building technologies. These are not marketing fluff stories, these are lessons from leaders that others can put into use in their smart buildings programs. This conversation explores how RYCOM has used FDD to catalyze the digital transformation of their business, providing services to building owners. Enjoy!
You can find Laura and Leon on LinkedIn.
Introduction (0:51)
Intro to Laura (1:26)
RYCOMâs Services (1:50)
Why RYCOM uses FDD (5:16)
Intro to Leon (7:00)
Where is FDD today (9:53)
Why FDD is vital for service providers (17:07)
Service providers at risk (20:00)
Phases in changing (23:29)
The team (33:26)
Storytelling (38:01)
Lessons learned (42:04)
Music credits: There Is A Reality by Common Tigerâlicensed under an Music Vine Limited Pro Standard License ID: S597943-16073.
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!
â
James Dice: [00:00:00] Hey friends, if you like the Nexus podcast, the best way to continue the learning is to join our community. There are three ways to do that. First, you can join the Nexus ProMembership. It's our global community of smart building professionals. We have monthly events, paywall deep dive content, and a private chat room, and it's just 35 a month.
Second, you can upgrade from the ProMembership to our courses offering. It's headlined by our flagship course, the Smart Building Strategist. And we're building a catalog of courses taught by world leading experts on each topic under the smart buildings umbrella. Third and finally, our marketplace is how we connect leading vendors with buyers looking for their solutions.
The links are below in the show notes. And now let's go on to the podcast.
Welcome to the Nexus podcast. This is the next episode in our series, diving into case studies of real life, large scale deployments of smart buildings. [00:01:00] Um, and again, these are not marketing fluff stories. We're here to sort of share lessons from leaders that others can use to put, uh, to use in their smart buildings programs.
So today we have a story coming out of Canada, uh, where RYCOM has over the last seven years used FDD to catalyze the sort of digital transformation of their business, providing services to building owners. And we have Laura Towsley here from RYCOM. Welcome, Laura. Can you introduce yourself?
Laura Towsley: Absolutely.
Thanks for having me on today. I'm the Director of the Data Intelligence team at RYCOM. I joined the team in 2017 and I have had the privilege over the last seven years of helping build out our team and build out our data intelligence service offerings at RYCOM.
James Dice: And let's, let's set a little context.
For people that don't know RYCOM, can you talk about all the different services that you, that you provide?
Laura Towsley: Absolutely. So RYCOM is a smart building services company. We focus on delivering services to the market around operational technology [00:02:00] networks, technical security, Telecom, riser management, and data intelligence.
We're technology agnostic, so we don't make any of our own hardware or software, but we look to third party solutions in the market and help our clients select, design, install, and service systems using that technology.
James Dice: Awesome. And when you think about, um, Sort of the, you came on board, what, seven years ago, you said, what was the company like before then?
And then what, what has changed since then?
Laura Towsley: Rikom had a really big business in installing and servicing operational technology networks. So we had a pretty big group of clients, commercial real estate clients, where we had installed fiber backbones. So, we've seen a lot of great use cases in the building, helped them get all their OT devices connected to the networks, and we really saw that these networks were being a little bit underutilized.
So, it was great for their capital budgets, it was great for their operational budgets in terms of upgrading technology in the building, but they weren't really integrating the systems together [00:03:00] to create use cases or experiences, and they weren't really pulling data off the networks and leveraging them to create operational strategies.
James Dice: So Laura, when you talk about, you're, you're a service provider. So sometimes when we do these case studies, we're talking to building owners. You guys are serving the building owners. You're an extension of their staff, basically. So can you talk about, um, Um, sort of the outcomes that you guys help building owners with.
Laura Towsley: Yeah, absolutely. So we're typically hired, like you said, by either building owners or third party property management companies who are looking to optimize their operations. And a lot of times that's around improving their. Energy consumption or reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Uh, but sometimes it's also about, um, improving the sort of labor ratio to troubleshoot or get things done on site.
Um, improving the resilience of their asset, making it a little bit easier to monitor risks, um, and sort of unleashing that, that operational efficiency that lets them respond to tenant complaints and other things that they need to [00:04:00] do.
James Dice: Got it. And so when you got brought on board, like seven years ago, Battling the company really started to integrate fault detection and diagnostics into these different services that you're providing.
Can you talk about why from a RYCOM standpoint and why from a standpoint of your customers businesses? You guys started to head down this path that we're going to sort of unpack today.
Laura Towsley: Yeah, RYCOM already had a really strong service background. So we already had a 24 7 bilingual operations center in Montreal that's set up to take phone calls and complaints from customers.
We already have staff who are 24 7 monitoring network devices. So our ability to deploy So we were able to deploy this new layer of software and have a technology and IT team, you know, managing the cloud, keeping it secure, keeping the data uptime there. We already had all of those technologies and resources there.
So we were able to take what we already had and take the service model that we already had and the trust that we already had built [00:05:00] up with a lot of the Canadian commercial real estate clients. And then add on an offering that focused around BAS operations.
James Dice: Fascinating. So let's do a couple of rapid fire questions to sort of like, continue to give people context before we dive into the meat of this case study.
Um, so can you talk about who provides the software in these, um, services?
Laura Towsley: We, uh, primarily use Bueno for our fault detection diagnostics, um, to support the existing sort of technology stacks we had around security monitoring and network monitoring. Thank you.
James Dice: Okay. And then you guys sort of package it and call it your own thing, right?
What's the name of that?
Laura Towsley: Yeah, we brand our services to the market as RYCOM Hive. So that includes, like I said, technology offerings around networks, security, telecom, riser management, and now also FDD with Buena.
James Dice: Got it. And how many buildings have you sort of deployed this, this service or FTD in today?
Laura Towsley: The RYCOM Hive is in [00:06:00] hundreds of buildings across Canada and we have 86 buildings where the Bueno FTD platform is installed as part of that.
James Dice: Awesome. And then give us a sense of square footage, if that's a number that you have in that unit.
Laura Towsley: Yeah, so the Bueno platform is in 17 million square feet. And yes, I had to convert it from square meters for this conversation.
James Dice: And then when you think about the results you guys have driven, What would be like the headline, um, whether it's energy savings or dollar savings or whatever?
Laura Towsley: So we've helped our clients reduce building energy consumption by up to 35 percent in some properties, which is a huge number. Um, our average client has achieved 13 percent total building energy savings, um, using our services.
And 7, 000 tickets in the window platform and closed over 5 million in savings.
James Dice: That's awesome. All right. So it's a, it's a great time to bring on Leon Werfel, who's the founder of [00:07:00] Bueno. Um, he's been lurking in the background here. This will be the third different English accent that we've added to this pod, this podcast.
And so have fun, uh, analyzing all of our different accents to the audience. Um, Leon, can you introduce yourself? This is the second time you've been on, um, last time we talked about similar topics here. We're just, we're just adding in the RYCOM story to this.
Leon Wurfel: Thanks for having me. Um, you have no idea how much like self control it took me not to just say g'day mate after that introduction to really hem up the, the third accent.
Uh, yeah. Thanks for having me back. Um, uh, Yeah, I think the first time that we did this was during COVID and it was like the world was in a really different place. So yeah, it's nice that, um, uh, it's nice to be back. Thanks for having me. Um, so my, uh, background is I was, I was a mechanical engineer. I was working with a team of, uh, energy efficiency experts and using all of the old school archaic, [00:08:00] um, Uh, engineering tools that we would all be familiar with, uh, AKA spreadsheets, right?
Spreadsheets and trend logs, and hence, you know, I came across FDD, uh, in my, um, uh, travels and, uh, you know, funnily enough, FDD is actually a 30 year old, uh, 30 year old invention, but it just hadn't really made its way to the property industry yet. And so I saw, uh, FDD as an opportunity to put myself out of a job and just think about Thought that, you know, who better to put myself out of a job than me.
Uh, I started Bueno, uh, and, uh, that was 12 years ago. So as of the 1st of July, um, that will be the 12th anniversary of Bueno. Um, you know, obviously started out of, out of Australia, had a really, uh, good, um, market there for, um, you know, being early, relatively early adopters of, of FDD, early wide adopters of FDD, given the, you Billing performance standards, which had actually been in place in Australia since 1998.
Um, and where we've kind of taken 0.02 now is the two [00:09:00] stats that I'm most proud of is we've saved, uh, two and a half million tons of CO2. And the second is that we have, uh, a hundred, $115 billion US of connected assets on our, uh, software.
James Dice: Yeah, big numbers. So cool. And that's why we're doing these case studies.
I think there's a perception that this is a new thing in some parts of the industry. And it's like, these are, there's a, there's a lot of deployments out there. And there's a lot of, a big, big track record. Leon, the last time you were on the show, we talked about FDD and where it is in terms of crossing the chasm.
Um, you had helped me write an article, or just conversations with you had helped me write an article about this. And it was really like, here's what FDD needs to do to sort of go mainstream. Where do you think, you know, you're sitting in the perfect place to tell us where we're at on that journey? Where do you think?
FDD is on that sort of scaling up, uh, phase.
Leon Wurfel: I think the thing that I said last time was that I can't believe we're sitting here 10 years later and everyone isn't doing [00:10:00] FDD already, right? And so I kind of feel now that I can't believe we're sitting here 12 years later and everyone isn't doing FDD already.
Um, so, uh, I mean, I'm like a pretty cynical person, uh, so the analogy is I feel like we're still banging our head against the brick wall of that chasm. You know, it's not as though the industry hasn't made, um, made a bunch of progress in that time and adoption hasn't grown, but we have, we certainly haven't hit that inflection point that we're all waiting for where Everyone just suddenly wakes up one day and starts treating it as a no brainer.
I mean, as the no brainer that it probably is. Um, you know, we saw an inflection point for ESG reporting software. You know, that kind of happened around 2021, uh, when there was like an exponential growth in the, um, Uh, uptake of that kind of software along with all of these, you know, um, market pressures around ESG reporting, et cetera.
Our hypothesis has been that, um, you know, people can only report this, you know, they're doing ESG reporting, people can only probably report [00:11:00]the same number for so many years in a row before their shareholders start to ask, like, um, what are they going to do about it? So we, we, we, we look at that as a leading indicator of demand for performance improvement solutions, which we would put ourselves.
Uh, and what we do with RYCOM in that basket. So I think, I think that we'll be dragged along by that inflection point. Uh, uh, you know, pending what happens in the market. But you know, there's, there's a whole bunch of other stuff that probably needs to fall into place before we really are ready to, to inflect.
James Dice: Um, I, yeah, totally agree. I think that is a thing that has changed since the last time we talked about this, which is getting pulled along. It's, it's a natural question to ask, okay, what do we do after reporting? And we've reported on progress that isn't where we want to be. So at some point, action needs to occur.
And I think it's natural that you guys get pulled along with that. So in terms of, so RYCOM is one of Bueno's channel partners. You guys are seeing, uh, one way for FDD to [00:12:00] scale up is that channel partners like RYCOM take them to their clients. Um, and so can you talk about what you're seeing in other countries as well?
So before we sort of dive into RYCOM and Canada, you guys are also doing this in Australia, you're doing this in the UK, you're now doing this in the U S as well. Can you talk about like kind of the progress you're seeing? In terms of that channel where it seems like building owners sometimes aren't able to, um, you know, put FDD to use in their operations.
And so some sort of service provider is that sometimes the best channel for them to do so. So what are you seeing in that channel?
Leon Wurfel: You've actually reminded me of something else important that has changed since the last time that we talked, and that is I am a New Yorker now. So yeah, I've moved to the US to set up our US HQ for Bueno.
So yeah, we are getting much more serious about the US as a market. It was definitely hard to manage all of our clients over there remotely with time zone differences and that kind of thing as well. But there's been a big, uh, there's been a [00:13:00] big learning curve, I guess, for us. Um, you know, we had been in the app market for a while, uh, but there's still kind of always more to learn.
Um, I'll start in order of how you asked the question. So Australia, that's where we started. That's where we've got the most mature, uh, Understanding of the market and the most mature, um, client base. Um, you know, the real difference between Australia as a market and all the other property markets in the world is how, uh, intrinsically adopted building performance standards are in that market.
And so that has created a real market appetite for building performance. So there was an appetite for performance there, even before there was, you know, the real market demand for really detailed ESG reporting. So it's kind of. The other way around in Australia, um, you know, where landlords, their lease rental, their, their different segments of the tenant, tenant market, uh, uh, close to them.
If they don't have a certain neighbor's rating, they lose rent reviews. If they don't maintain their neighbor's ratings, it's really tied to their core business. And so what's interesting about Australia as a market. And I know that you've had [00:14:00] Dexus on your podcast, but they are very, um, they're an example of a very sophisticated, sophisticated.
Uh, you know, an owner with a very sophisticated approach to these technologies, you know, they're really kind of segmenting out the benefits that they want to get from FDD. And so they actually, as part of their maintenance contracts, will specify that their mechanical and BMS contractors have to use an FDD platform.
Um, so they, they, they've, they've, uh, segmented out that kind of day to day operational benefit, um, to be delivered by their service contractors. They kind of don't want that. All they're building optimization experts to be service providers, like a Brycon, for example, they don't want the billing performance specialists to be bogged down by finding all the broken sensors and broken valves, et cetera.
And so then they've also segmented out an optimization layer, which is being provided by a separate party, FDD solution. And where possible, they try to uniformly deliver that, but they have a very big and non homogeneous portfolio, so it's like not, not always that simple. Um, [00:15:00] so Australia is like a, it's a really interesting, uh, And a case study for this stuff, you know, it's probably tells, tells a story where the rest of the world might go to eventually.
Um, EU, uh, for us was a really late starter. So EU slash UK, late starter. Um, but it's really been on a tear over the past little while. You know, we've seen some very, um, and this, this could be an example of where ESG reporting requirements are actually leading. And pulling along, um, uh, pulling along demand for solutions like ours.
I mean, also something that's interesting is the UK market itself has adopted Australia's building performance standard verbatim. So UK uses neighbors. Neighbours, National Australian Built Environmental Rating System, UK, is actually the title that they came up with. So, I mean, it's great that they're doing that.
But, we've got a partner that has gone from zero to like 200 buildings in the last year alone in that market. So, [00:16:00] it's on a tear. U. S. uh, onto your third question, U. S. is like, one thing that I've observed is it's very fragmented, uh, it's just very fragmented and it's like a loose collection of different markets that all kind of have slightly different priorities of where they put this stuff.
Um, the winners that we're seeing in this market are people that are strategically adopting, you know, I was going to say there was like a predictor for, Partners that we talked to on who's going to be like very, very successful, like RYCOM versus who's going to kind of probably stagnate and not get where they want to go.
Um, the people that are the winners in this market are people that are taking that the adoption of these tools out of as part of a strategic decision, you know, it's coming down from a desire to actually transform what they're doing with their business.
James Dice: Totally. Um, and, and Laura, can you talk about that from, from RYCOM's perspective, like in terms of the business?
of RYCOM. Why is this [00:17:00] so vital? Like if you were talking to a service provider that hasn't started this journey yet, what do you think Leon's talking about there? And then Leon, you can, you can be more specific after, after we hear from Laura.
Laura Towsley: Yeah, so I think RYCOM's whole business really believes in using technology, people, and processes to optimize What's happening on the ground floor of operating buildings.
So for a really long time, we believed that this is sort of a manpower heavy industry. There's opportunity to use technology to reduce some of the manpower that's happening on site, provide a little bit better operational oversight. And This is one technology tool to do that, but it's really, it has been the core of our belief and our being since before we started doing FDD.
So I think it really helped us that we already sort of had that vision going into this and we really did [00:18:00] set out to change the way that our clients were operating their buildings. And we want to keep changing it further, right? As we do more MSI engagements and we do more remote facilities management engagements, all of that is about helping our clients respond to their difficulty finding skilled labor.
Um, there are difficulties with cost pressures and operational models, the increasing carbon taxes, all of the pressures that our clients are facing. We believe we can help them solve some of those problems with the technologies that we're using and the processes that we're helping them put in place.
Leon Wurfel: I, I have another angle on this as well.
And one thing that I want to give RYCOM credit for is that they actually have a history of reinventing themselves. So, um, if you rewind the clock, you know, probably 15 years, I'd say the majority of RYCOM's business was, uh, around, um, managing a, a payments network. You know, we, we'd still follow the same thread [00:19:00] where it's, it's, they've got a network that they're managing.
This is like a national one. And it was, I was processing, I don't know what, 50 percent of the payments. In, in, in Canada at the time, uh, but you've got like a, an operation center and a network that's being managed. Um, then they reinvented themselves to, uh, deliver converged networks and telecom property management for commercial buildings.
Same principles. They already had that infrastructure and that know how in their business, but they took it into a different industry and reinvented themselves. And we see the same pattern again, where they have successfully done that with, um, building out their, uh, DART intelligence business unit.
James Dice: And so before we dive into that, because we're about to, the Leon, do you think about the companies, the service providers out there that you've talked to that haven't gone, like, what's the risk for them if they don't sort of go to go through this?
It sounds buzzworded to say digital transformation, but we're basically talking about integrating technology into these different services they're providing. What's the, what's the risk here for those that [00:20:00] aren't, aren't sort of going down that, that road.
Leon Wurfel: Yeah. I, so to like take a bit of the buzz out of the buzzwords, um, I'd say that like, what we're really talking about is about is changing the labor mix.
You know, if you look at like a systems integrator, changing the labor mix from truly sending people out to the sites in like trucks to more of a remote services model, where they're. You know, they still have people involved, but they're just leveraging technology to do it in a centralized way with, you know, some more productivity.
Cause really FDD is like an enhancement for people's eyeballs. You just have eyeballs looking at this. BMS started, you know, with rules rather than with people. Um, uh, what, what are the risks? I mean, the, we, I won't, I won't say who this is, but we have a partner that we work with. And over the last 12 months, they've spent 4 million on recruiter spaces.
Just trying to keep all of the, uh, you know, they've got a whole bunch of service contracts to deliver and they're just trying to, uh, trying to maintain their existing business, uh, with all the [00:21:00] different kind of churn that they have. They're trying to find good quality people at a time when, you know, the labor market is very, very tight and there's more and more people leaving it every day and barely anyone kind of coming into this space.
Um, I mean, I think that's the, that's, that's the real risk.
Laura Towsley: I think I have an example of that as well. We, we recently became an improved existing building commissioning provider, um, eligible for incentives in the province of Ontario. And it's the first time they've put a provider on that list who is. You know, not a traditional existing building commissioning engineering firm consultant, but rather an FDD provider.
And some of that has been because the ISO, which is the electrical authority in Ontario, has seen that we've achieved real results with some of our clients. They can see it on the meters over the last few years, and they were really happy to have us As an existing building [00:22:00] commissioning provider, even though we don't, uh, do all of the same sort of standard, I'll say checklists or reports, we do it in a different way, but they know now it's proven to work and what they really wanna see is results off the meters.
And they were happy to approve us as an existing building commissioning provider. And I think we represent a real threat to traditional consultants who are doing this in a much more manpower heavy way.
James Dice: Amazing. Um, just before we move on, I want to, for anyone that's new to this podcast, um, we'll put in the show notes on our website links to Leon's podcast, John Dexus's podcast, John from Dexus's podcast.
Um, we also have an episode that we did with Tom Balm, who used to be at Dexus, walking through how, um, service contracts should be transformed to integrate FTD. We also have an episode with Neighbors. So for just to close out that whole conversation, there is another four hours of a rabbit hole to go deeper into what we just talked about for any of you [00:23:00] that, that wants to do that.
Leon Wurfel: And not all those
people
have Australian accents. So, uh, yeah.
James Dice: Um, all right. So Laura, let's dive into, um, so let's say there's a service provider out there that says, okay, I want to go on this journey now. Um, what we're trying to do at Nexus is to accelerate that transition. And so can you talk about just, like, what were the phases of, of changing how you guys do things?
over the past seven years since you've been on board to, um, integrate FDD into some of these services. Um, and I, I think this is a really good story for people to, to sort of latch on to. So where should we start?
Laura Towsley: Um, I, I mean, I think one of the, the big things was being able to take stock of what skillsets did we already have in house and what things were we missing to be able to move forward.
So it might be different depending on. The sort of background your group is coming from. For us, we had, [00:24:00] like I said, all the IT knowledge, all the networking knowledge that we needed, but we were really sort of lacking BAS experts and energy management experts. So we did have to go to the market to find some of those people to round out our team.
And, uh, I think this would be easier today than it was seven years ago. Like we talked about how much things have changed. Most of the time when I was hiring seven years ago, I had to start from what is FDD and what are we trying to do and trust me, look at the platforms, you'll see that they're really cool and there's a few on the market that are making progress.
I rarely have to do that today, which is nice. People know that it exists and they know that it's real and that this is a real, real sort of career opportunity. For them and in a growing business. So that part is, is really nice. Um, but we did have to build order team with some additional skill sets and, and Bueno helped immensely in helping us train our own team to do our own deployments and integration so that we could [00:25:00] remain that touch point for our Canadian clients, because we thought that was really important to provide.
local support. We still hugely believe in, in customer FaceTime, and we think a huge part of why our team has been so successful is we don't view it as a software layer or, or a remote, uh, service thing. We actually spend a lot of time with our clients. We meet with them monthly. Um, so a huge part of this was developing relationships and trust with our clients that yes, we have BAS experts and energy experts who are going to support The technology side of our business as well now with this energy expertise part.
James Dice: So it sounds like the first sort of phase was like using FDD for energy optimization. It's like, okay, that's sort of the first use case that we're going to sort of go after. What were you going to say, Leon?
Leon Wurfel: I was just going to say, credit where credit's due, Laura was actually the first hire that Rikon made, um, when they were rounding out their team.
So, uh, you know, Laura has, the journey [00:26:00] that Rikon has been on, um, uh, is a journey that Laura has been on as well and has driven that journey for Rikon's business. Um, so, uh, Laura's been really transformative. Laura's been a big part of the reason for this program's success.
Laura Towsley: Well, thanks, Leon. I have had the opportunity to wear many hats, so I think I'm a jack of all trades and master of none at this point, um, when it, when it comes to sort of this type of business, but it has been really amazing to have the experience of, um, starting into this journey.
It was really energy focused at the beginning, partly due to Um, us having a large number of government clients who had a big focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, um, but we have seen as our team has built out, we've had the opportunity to hire more, um, controls experts and really start to grow our master systems integration business as well and really expand the scope of services that we're able to offer to our clients [00:27:00] using Buenos Tools as a foundation.
James Dice: And so Laura, so you're talking about going into the sort of these new MSI services, what sort of prompted that from, so you were doing energy optimization, you're using FTD for that, that was going great. We think about the phases of this sort of change management journey. What sort of prompted that next push into these MSI services from the building owner's standpoint?
Laura Towsley: One of the nice things about delivering service on an FDD platform where you're meeting with the clients monthly is you really become an embedded part of their operations team. So yes, there were a lot of challenges that we discussed and helped solve around energy, but also other operational. Problems would start to come up as well.
So we started to see problems bubble up that could be solved through integrating some different systems together, whether, you know, it's a room booking systems or lighting occupancy sensors. There was really obvious opportunities to help them solve sometimes energy problems and sometimes business [00:28:00] problems by facilitating sort of master systems integration services or by offering a remote facilities service that filled a gap.
Uh, for them that they were not able to fill themselves.
Leon Wurfel: So yeah, if you, if you really wanted to boil down the phases, um, what we saw was the initial driver of adoption being purely, um, uh, energy focused for RYCOM and how they were taking FDD to market. But then as they got, they got to know their clients better, uh, they became more of an embedded that they, they turned these same principles into becoming more of an embedded operational, um, part of their, their, their clients teams.
And. And now if you look at the future direction and the kinds of initiatives that they're working on, um, they're really taking, uh, they're offering an outsourced remote facilities management service, um, where they really take on the operation of the automation systems and the BMS at the site, leveraging all of the, you know, the productivity boosts that they get out of technologies like FDD.[00:29:00]
James Dice: Yeah, that's, that's fascinating. So, so Laura, what prompted that shift or what, what, uh, brought you into that next phase, which we're in today?
Laura Towsley: I mean, a lot of it is really about our clients pain points. So particularly since COVID, one of the things we've seen that Leon mentioned earlier is that our clients are having a really, really hard time finding and hiring skilled, uh, people.
Building operators. They're also having a hard time getting as much BAS service technician time as they want, even if they're willing to pay. Sometimes it's hard for them to get quick response and the service on site, the service level that they want and have gotten used to on site. So they're looking for other ways to support their operations.
And it's not just about the BAS. It's also about the other services we provide. So on the security side and the network side, we're seeing the same. challenges and labor shortages across all of those sort of lines of business. And this is one of the ways that we can use technology to help [00:30:00] support those teams.
So we really are sort of responding to what we're hearing in the market, the challenges that our customers are facing. And we believe that we can, continue to evolve our business using technology, so using FDD tools to help alert us to when there are challenges on site. And then instead of informing our clients, we can actually take action in remotely resolving some of those problems that are able to be Resolved remotely, or taking on the dispatch of third parties on behalf of our clients when we're able to do that on their behalf, and it removes a sort of huge part of the workload from the on site teams that can actually be done effectively remotely from skilled resources sitting in our Hive Operations Center.
James Dice: So this is fascinating because if I think about like what I know about a traditional service provider, whether there are controls or energy management, they're almost like a little bit, uh, removed, right? So they're not really a fully part of their [00:31:00] staff most of the time. Um, they don't have permission or it's very much like a, like a, I'm going to show up a day, a month, and I'm not really here that often.
I'm not really integrated into what they're doing on a day to day basis. This seems like a whole nother level of integration. Um, it seems like a big step in terms of. Like, actually, you used the word embedded in operations earlier, but this is like being, like, taking the operations over. Am I, am I thinking about that correctly?
Laura Towsley: I don't know that we intend to totally take them over, but you are right that we are very much in close contact with these sites. So any of our clients today who use all of our services, any contractor that comes to site already needs to call and get permission to access a riser room through our riser access.
The BAS technicians are sort of embedded with us. They know to communicate all of their results through the tickets to look at what they should be doing on site in the [00:32:00] platform. The security vendors, either we're the security vendor or we're working closely with their security vendors on connectivity and uptime and challenges that we see on site.
We're keeping all the network gear up and running. So, yeah, the amount that we are in communication with the building operator. If they're using all of our service, it greatly exceeds any sort of one, uh, service vendor who is focused on, on BAS alone, or on a security system alone. And the intent is sort of to have a contact for the building operator to call when they get into trouble.
Because we know already, if we use these, these examples of, you know, them losing connectivity to something on site, it's really complicated for a building operator to know, is this my switch? Is it my camera? Is it, you know, which vendor do I call? Do I call my network vendor? Do I call my security camera vendor?
Those problems exist in BAS security networking. Um, [00:33:00] and this sort of solves that problem where, you know, you call your technology vendor, you call your smart services vendor, and maybe they'll fix it themselves, but if not, they'll be able to troubleshoot the first few steps and know who to call next.
James Dice: You were the first one on the team, Laura.
How did you build the team? So if someone's thinking about, okay, I need to hire X amount of people and what are they going to do? What would you say? And like, sort of who's on your team now and what do they do?
Laura Towsley: Well, definitely we, we started, uh, had to start small and people had to wear many hats at the beginning.
Um, but now that we're a little bit larger, um, our team is really made up of So we have a data operation center, which for us does, I'll call it the classic FDD stuff. So they're responsible for maintaining all the metadata tagging model for all of our sites. They also review all the classic FDD alerts.
So things like, Hey, this valve hasn't moved in 24 hours. This damper is hunting, uh, things that can be [00:34:00] turned around quickly. They don't really require conversation in our monthly meetings. That's not where we focus our time in the monthly meetings. These are. Send them to site, send them to the BS vendor, get them fixed.
Um, the second sort of layer of that is our building systems engineers who are more senior people who either come with background knowledge in controls programming or energy management or HVAC design. So people coming with expertise who are able to use the FDD tools and the independent data layer to do, I'll call it some more complicated or sort of custom solutioning to help our clients solve their specific problems.
So, it could be something like peak demand response, uh, it could be measurement and verification of other energy things they're doing on site. They're helping support our clients challenges and problems, energy and operational, through sort of deeper knowledge and expertise. We sometimes joke that it's like rent an engineer.
It's like, you know, you get a few hours of engineering time every month. So we, we do encourage our clients [00:35:00] to come to us with their problems and tell us how they want us to use the time. Um, and as a manager, I feel so fortunate to be able to work with people from a variety of backgrounds because the learning just never stops when you have people from all these different.
Backgrounds on your team, supporting the problems that your clients are throwing at you. And then finally, the third part, we do have some integration specialists who work on our MSI projects. Uh, some of them are software developers. Some of them are kind of more classic BAS integration specialists or building systems technologists, um, and they support our custom, our client sort of custom master systems integration.
Uh, we do, we have started bidding on master systems integration projects as well and really building up that line of business in the past few years. So sometimes we get brand new clients who are looking for an MSI service provider, um, and I'll say start as an MSI client and land in FTD. And sometimes it goes the other way where they started [00:36:00] as an FTD client and then are looking for us to help them integrate.
Some things together on site is a sort of last piece of the pie is we are supported by our own internal network team. So one of the great things is that I have never had to worry about secure cloud hosting or monitoring of PCs or or cellular routers because we have a A network monitoring team to do that.
Leon Wurfel: One, uh, interesting point that I want to raise here is that, um, uh, when I, within Australia, we have our own equivalent to Laura's, uh, data intelligence team. Um, so we have our own energy FDD enabled, like an energy performance services team that just services the Australian market. So as we were. You know, when we work with partners like RYCOM, we really take like a white glove approach to helping them build up all the different resources they need to run this, run FDD as a services solution, not just dump a technology on their [00:37:00] lap and expect them to figure out how to use them, use it themselves.
We were the first ever customer for our own software that we built. And so, um, it puts us in a really good and a really unique position to be able to take clients like RYCOM on the journey of helping them identify, uh, the, the resources that they would need, help them put in place the right structure, the right different kind of.
Organizational functions that they need to deliver this successfully. Um, and, and we know what good looks like there because we've done it ourselves. And then that leads us into a position where, you know, seven years down the track, it's still part of our regular engagement with RYCOM to sit down, uh, and compare best practices between the groups to ensure that we're both going in the right direction in terms of like continuing to improve the, uh, the The types of services that we're offering and, uh, the, the way in which we're operating those, those, uh, those different functions.
James Dice: Awesome. So let's move into sort of a storytelling and lessons learned [00:38:00] phase here. So, Laura, can you tell us about some of the, we've been talking about sort of making FDD more mainstream. Some of the, some of the stories that kind of hit at that That people might be surprised about, like, what this is being used for at the scale it's being used for.
Laura Towsley: Yeah, so one of the things I've seen shifting over the past few years is a lot of our large clients who, you know, traditionally have focused on this for the markets of large commercial office buildings and retail shopping centers with BASs and things like that. already installed, um, have started asking, well, how do I also use this for my other properties like industrial properties or, um, you know, strip malls, the, the kinds of properties that, um, we have, you know, in years past would have said these aren't, aren't big enough to justify this, this kind of technology.
Um, and we're seeing a lot more progress in those markets and in the residential market as well. So we recently engaged with a new client who has a really large portfolio of Small residential properties. Most of them are three or four story [00:39:00] walk up. Um, buildings. So typically a much smaller building than what you would see FDD in.
And they are investing in technology on site that allows all the data to go up into a cloud. And we've actually been able to do a cloud MQTT integration into the Bueno platform. And that's something that is just so much more cost effective across a large portfolio like this. Where the number of data points they have across their whole portfolio is the same as the data.
Um, but suddenly this is possible to do if you're leveraging cloud technology and leveraging some of these new technologies. So I'm really excited about as we move forward, the capabilities of opening this up to more residential properties and more small retail properties like this, where we know that the footprint of these clients is huge spread out across the country, but not in single buildings.
So
James Dice: [00:40:00] Yeah, and that's fascinating for us as we've, you know, we've, we've, you know, covered this over the years that there's still so many more buildings that need to be digitized from an HVAC or metering or whatever standpoint, just the ability to do that and then move things, you know, to remote, remotely be able to monitor them.
At scale is a huge development.
Laura Towsley: And one of the things we're seeing that's really different from our existing clients is that they don't have onsite staff. So in some ways our ability to remotely monitor and also do some remote operations, like go in and fix equipment, restart equipment, change a set point for them, it's even more valuable to them because they really don't have the onsite staff or even the national level staff.
So it's something that is really valuable for them to be able to outsource.
James Dice: Uh, what other, what other ones come to mind?
Laura Towsley: Yeah, so one of the other big, I'll say, instigators for using this technology in Canada is that Canada does have a really robust [00:41:00]greening government strategy. And they've actually publicly stated that they 10 percent of their energy savings from smart building projects.
Programs and technologies. So, uh, we've been really lucky to be selected as one of the providers, both for the Public Works Department and for the Department of National Defense. So, uh, sort of on the other side of the spectrum, we have this huge national portfolio. of large buildings that includes, you know, laboratories and airplane hangars and office buildings across the country that have really sophisticated operations and, and really, um, critical infrastructure operations for our country to continue running.
And we've been a major partner and contributor towards helping them hit that 10 percent greenhouse gas emission reduction that they're looking to achieve by 2030.
James Dice: Those are so cool. I love the breadth here. It's, it's, it's awesome to have the breadth. I'm imagining the seven years wasn't very easy. Um, can we talk about [00:42:00] like the, the lessons learned and like.
Again, we're trying to talk to the people that are about to set out on this journey. And so what would you have them think about if they were making a plan or sort of a roadmap to sort of copy what you guys have done?
Laura Towsley: Yeah, definitely one of our lessons learned is that this can't be driven in our client's organization by sort of one goal alone.
So the one of the most amazing things about FDV and independent data layers is that it can be Sustainability and energy management. It can be valuable to asset management. It can be valuable to operations. But if only one group within an organization is using that, you're really losing the value or the power of the tool.
So it's a lot of work on the organization's part, both in the sales cycle and on the ongoing basis to make sure you're engaging with all those stakeholders and make sure that the tools and the data are being used to their sort of maximum. Capacity, [00:43:00] because we really want our clients to see the results from this.
And we know that it's possible, but the software on its own running in the cloud does nothing. Right. So, so we have to encourage our clients across all three of those, you know, siloed business lines within their organization. We have to encourage all of them to take advantage of it.
James Dice: Totally. If anyone is listening on the audio, I'm just over here, like shaking my head because you're preaching to the choir on that one.
I feel like that's probably. That's the number one thing I'd say after all my years of listening to experts like you is like, this is not just one department's thing. And so going across departments, knocking down those silos is so huge. Leon, were you going to say something?
Leon Wurfel: I was, but I feel like, uh, that's a hard act to follow.
Um, I, uh, you know, one of the things that we learned very early on is like the differences between different markets. And I remember seven years ago, we have been looking at one of our first buildings that we'd done together and our [00:44:00] team in Australia was ecstatic. We thought, Oh, we've knocked out the park already.
We've paid for ourselves. It's only been a couple of days worth of data. Look at this, you know, the, the, the boilers are running 24 seven and there's. Hitting hot water, going through all the coils like 24 seven. This is like, it's amazing. Um, little did we know that the weather's a little bit different in Canada than it is in Australia.
And they actually need to keep the heating hot water circulating to avoid their, uh, their hydraulics freezing. Um, so, you know, it's been really interesting to go along that journey about learning about these different markets and, um, uh, figuring out how to, uh, map the, the, the value that you can provide to what the specific market constraints are.
James Dice: Totally. Any other lessons learned that are popping out for you, Laura or Leon?
Laura Towsley: I think one of the other sort of big ones for us is understanding that every client has their own operational practices and processes. And we always have to take the time to understand what they are and how they [00:45:00] work. Um, we have a really early example that sounds so silly now when I talk about it.
Um, but essentially we did several months of meetings and nothing happened. No action was taken on. On any of our, uh, recommendations. And we had to go back to the client and say, Hey, look, what is happening? Why, why can't get this, this get done? And we realized that there's, you know, this other process with this other team that's used to allocate their building operators time and used to allocate.
The BAS technician's time. And we weren't get, we weren't in that workflow, so we were raising these tickets, but there was no time assigned to the operators. And the operators were assigned tasks that filled eight hours of their day. So ours were just like, maybe if I have time to look at this later, I will.
And we realized that we needed to work with the organization to get our tickets in the workflow to get them prioritized along their other tasks. And it's just a silly organizational thing, but if you don't overcome challenges like that, you know, the [00:46:00] program's gonna fail.
James Dice: No, it's not silly at all. That's like where things, yeah, that's where things go bye bye.
All right, this has been awesome. As we sort of wrap this conversation up, Are there any, is there anything we, we left out for either of you that you would, you would tell another company that's sort of just starting down this journey?
Laura Towsley: I think one of my major roles in being a leader within my own group and developing my own team to go out and do this in the market has been that We have to approach our clients understanding that we're one kind of small piece of the puzzle in this service.
So in order for us to be successful, we have to facilitate this environment on site where we truly believe and understand that the building operator is the eyes and ears on site. The BAS technician is the programming expert and understands the control system. And we have this data in the cloud, but that doesn't make us the expert on what [00:47:00] happens next.
It's one third of the puzzle that we're bringing to the table. And I feel like over my years, a huge part of our success has been the coaching and the sort of foundational. Understanding and never losing sight of as a team that we rely on these people who do boots on the ground physical work to make this happen, and that can be really hard for a technology company because we love the tech and we love the data and we think it's magical, but it really does nothing unless we can Engage with those other people.
And part of that is believing that you really are just one tiny piece of what we're trying to accomplish.
James Dice: I think that would, that, that insight right there would help so many people that are sort of banging their heads against the wall right now, because I feel like there's sometimes this like, here's my list of faults, like, why isn't anyone doing anything, anything about this?
And it's like, yeah, you have to really take a step back and think about where you're at. And how you're [00:48:00] integrating it into the operational processes and teams. Leon, anything you would add at the end here?
Leon Wurfel: I'm, I'm gonna loop it back to the beginning and at the beginning we were talking about crossing the chasm and what the remaining barriers are.
And I think that part of this is the industry's mindset in terms of looking at solutions like this as, uh, as at the huge opportunity that they are. And I think the case study. With RYCOM is really like when you boil it down, it's a case study of moving up the value chain, you know, they were, they were managing all the infrastructure of the properties, the, the, the OT infrastructure, the properties, and now they've moved up the value chain to providing value to their clients, um, from the data that was flowing through that infrastructure, moving up the value chain opened up.
A whole bunch of, as you've, as you've heard from Laura's story, a whole bunch of other service streams, uh, for, for, for RYCOM. And it's also opened up a whole bunch of extra value streams for the clients. [00:49:00] And I think as another theme from this conversation, what you've heard is that it has brought RYCOM as well, a lot closer to their clients as a result of this.
James Dice: Mic drop. All right. That's a great place to, to end our conversation here. Laura, thank you for coming on the show. Leon, thank you for coming back again. Uh, this has been super insightful. We will, um, yeah, turn this into one of our written case studies as well. So we'll have this, this version. We'll also have a written version and those will be on our website.
Thanks y'all.
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.
â
Head over to Nexus Connect and see whatâs new in the community. Donât forget to check out the latest member-only events.
Go to Nexus ConnectJoin Nexus Pro and get full access including invite-only member gatherings, access to the community chatroom Nexus Connect, networking opportunities, and deep dive essays.
Sign Up
Nexus Labs exists to move the smart buildings industry forward, without the fluff.
On Wednesday, we send out the renowned (and free) Nexus Newsletter.