Case Study: Limbach Holdings is Digitizing HVAC and Controls Service

Welcome to our Case Study series, where we dive into case studies of real-life, large-scale deployments of smart building technologies, supported by the Nexus Marketplace.

I emphasize “real life” because this isn’t a marketing fluff story. We're here to share real lessons from leaders who have done the work to integrate smart building technology into their operations. I also emphasize “large scale” because we're not here to talk about pilot projects. We're here to talk about deeper commitments to changing how buildings are operated.

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Case Study Data:

• Technology Categories Mentioned: Service Layer - Master Systems Integrator, Data Layer, Application Layer - Fault Detection & Diagnostics (FDD), Application Layer - Asset Management, Application Layer - Energy Management, Device Layer - HVAC Control
• Key Stakeholders: Richard Davis, Director of Product Management at Limbach Holdings
• Vendors: Limbach Holdings - mechanical and controls contractor, Facilio “Connected Buildings” - data layer, coupled with applications for FDD and Energy Management.
• Number of Buildings: 20 buildings across multiple building owners, 1,000,000 SQFT and counting
• Project Dates: November 2022 to Present

Case Study Outline:

• Introduction
• Background
• Technical Overview
• Challenges & Lessons Learned
• Conclusion

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Limbach Holdings provides mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and control (MEP+C) contracting services to building owners throughout the United States. 

The Limbach team struggled with consistently gathering the data and insights they needed from different building equipment in a standardized fashion to provide efficient and data-driven services to those buildings. Collecting data on the equipment they were servicing was a custom, cumbersome, confusing, and often futile exercise.

Richard Davis, the Director of Product Management at Limbach, led his team to find and deploy a universal solution to their problem. Through an extensive evaluation and pilot phase, Davis guided Limbach to Facilio’s data and application layer software tools, like energy management and fault detection and diagnostics (FDD). 

Limbach is now deploying these software tools to their customers’ buildings, which helps bring the distributed team of service contractors to the digital era of what is possible through tech-backed services. We sat down with Davis and had him walk us through what it took to get to where they are today, how it benefits their customers, and what the future holds for their modernized service offerings.

Background

Limbach Holdings, founded in 1901, has historically operated as a mechanical, electrical, and plumbing (MEP) contractor throughout the eastern United States, focusing on design-build style projects. More recently, they have added controls contracting to their offering (MEP+C) and expanded past just construction and renovation to the service world, which required Limbach to develop more sustained relationships with building owners. Today, Limbach has 17 offices and 1,500 employees across the United States.

Limbach’s distributed team found a common gap in their services: a lack of essential information for the items they were responsible for maintaining. This lack of information was a shared challenge between the data sources owned by Limbach as well as the building owners and operators. Regardless, Limbach needed a standardized solution to this problem.

“Living in a compartmentalized, chaotic world as a service provider is not ideal. At times, I considered it like the Wild West out there. By using all these different applications, we had no way to combine all the data together.”
—Richard Davis

Data was inconsistent in how it was provided (spreadsheets, notebooks, word docs, etc.), or there was no way to gather the data, even though it existed. Picture a boiler controller with no integration method to allow users to see the data its sensors collect or an electricity meter that only provides data to the utility company, not the building owner.

With the problem well defined, Davis and his team went on a mission to start a digital revolution in how Limbach provided their services. If they could solve this data-based problem, they could strengthen customer relationships, increase efficiency, and differentiate themselves within the market.

After an extensive evaluation phase and pilot phase of options for their problem, Davis and the team landed on Facilio’s Connected Builidings Platform as a standardized method of integration, energy management, and FDD. Limbach has deployed the Facilio solution on approximately one million square feet across over 20 buildings. Limbach has already had more than 30 report-driven meetings with the building owners, where they have reviewed more than 400 insights or issues on building performance uncovered through FDD. Although not quantifiable yet, Limbach is beginning calculations around total energy savings associated with resolving these issues and total avoided equipment downtime.

Technical Overview

Limbach’s digital transformation is most straightforward to examine chronologically in three phases:

Phase 1: Evaluation Phase

Davis emphasized the importance of starting with the business requirements and existing problems. It is critical to avoid starting with a solution in search of a problem. Limbach began evaluating different options, with the problem well defined as needing more consistent information on the building equipment.

Many different branches within Limbach were already using technologies that were good candidates to be adopted by the whole organization. Similarly, executive leadership and board members brought recommendations to Davis that they were familiar with through their networks. Davis didn’t belittle the struggle of this evaluation phase. He received constant emails and cold calls from potential vendors and sat through several demos, meetings, interviews, and pilots. 

(If only someone were building a marketplace to solve the pain of vendor evaluation…)

After wading through the sea of options, Davis and his team saw Facilio rise to the top as the premier choice for their needs. Davis explained that there were four main reasons that Facilio became the outlier:

1. Cybersecurity - Facilio was able to technically validate that they were a partner Limbach could trust to handle massive amounts of Limbach’s data, as well as Limbach’s customer data.
2. Flexibility - Each stakeholder, between the customer and Limbach’s internal employees, had different needs for the data, and Facilio could offer a tailored experience for each stakeholder. They want the same data but a different way of looking at it, depending on the user's goals.
3. Integration - Limbach’s customers had many different systems generating valuable data. BAS, CMMS, utilities, and metering were all various sources that Facilio was prepared to integrate with to capture data.
4. Workflow Focused - Facilio prioritizes supporting the user's workflows. As Limbach adopted the new software, change management became necessary. The 17 branches of Limbach would need to adopt this new way of working and getting service-related information from a standard tool.

Phase 2: Pilot Phase

As Davis and the wider team at Limbach became more convinced that Facilio was the solution to their problem, they began to educate customers about the goal of running pilots with the new application on their buildings. As Davis explained, “We told our customers what we were doing, we started collecting data from their buildings, and we had to make sense of that data. Understanding point names, understanding data relationships, all that could be time-consuming - although the whole team was surprised how quickly we could do this with the application.”

With the data aggregated from many different systems within the building into the Facilio application, Limbach could begin analyzing the relationships in the data. This included building new data representation methods within Facilio’s applications: new charts and views that could help the Limbach team tell a story, gather insights, and put these insights into action.

As integrations improved and data became richer, the Limbach team could bring these actionable insights to their customer so they could begin to see the value of the software.

Davis noted that Limbach has performed three large-scale pilots to date and has a 100% renewal rate: all the building owners/operators see the value in the new service.

Phase 3: Scaling the Solution

Davis explained Limbach’s current state as “rinse and repeat.” They’ve proven the process to pilot customers, and now they are focusing on fine-tuning the offering, marketing the solution, and managing the change to their internal employees and customers so that everyone understands the value that this offers.

“Our team sees a ton of value in having that data available. As a service provider, think how great it is when we pick up the phone and call the customer because there is an issue, instead of the other way around.”
—Richard Davis

As Limbach becomes more comfortable showing value to its customers, they are also trying to improve their own utilization of the Facilio product. Facilio’s workflow management support can act similarly to a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) to help the service providers be more efficient in their maintenance.

Davis also explained that his team can now identify which customers may not be a great fit for a data layer coupled with FDD and energy management applications. Customers with more negligible electrical consumption may not be spending enough on utilities to see as much value in the capital investment. 

Additionally, actionable insights are only as valuable as the actions taken. If facilities and service teams are unable or unwilling to do maintenance and repair based on the insights, the value isn’t recognized. Finally, Davis noted that some customers still operate on pneumatic and proprietary controls. If a program like Facilio cannot integrate with the controls, changes at the device layer must occur first.

This concept of starting a smart building renovation at the device layer is a common lesson in Nexus’s teachings. We explain it thoroughly in the Buyer's Guide to HVAC and Lighting Controls.

At this point, we’ve covered how Limbach decided on and implemented the Facilio offering, but we’ve been light on what that technical offering actually is.

What is FDD and Energy Management on the Application Layer?

The key to the viability of any energy management or FDD application lies in integrating data from multiple sources (aka “bringing data to the data layer”). First, the Facilio application collects data from utility bills, whole building interval meters, and weather data to benchmark the energy consumption of a building and compare it to other similar buildings or the same building at different time intervals. This is the energy management portion of the application. 

Second, you add integration of building automation system (BAS) and submeter data to help understand where different areas of the building might be affecting overall energy consumption and performance. When these metrics of building performance and operation are exposed to one another, it significantly simplifies the analytics of what’s working and what’s costing money. The system has enough data to understand when a portion of the building isn’t performing as expected and can even identify the root cause of an issue. This is the FDD portion of the application.

Nexus covers FDD and Energy Management thoroughly in our buyer’s guides. Check out the FDD Buyers Guide and the Energy Management Buyer’s Guide.

Davis provided a specific example of a 24/7 news studio where Limbach implemented Faclio applications. Limbach was able to map the overall system performance and pinpoint a particular section of the building that continually couldn’t hit the temperature setpoint. Data from multiple variable air volume (VAV boxes) and thermostats pointed to a larger system issue upstream, at the air handling unit (AHU). As Davis said, “When you start to take the data and roll it together like that, you start to get a much more impactful story for your customer.”

Integration, Integration, Integration

Davis mentioned at the beginning of the discussion that the keyword for the day would be integration. Facilio’s ability to integrate with a building’s different systems has been the obvious meaning behind the word. Still, there’s a second meaning that is just as important when implementing this application layer software: the integration into the processes and workflows of the people working in and on the building. 

For Limbach, this human integration, often called change management, was as crucial to the program's success as the product. Davis explained that the reports his team generates are vital in showing the required actions to the building operators so they can easily see the value and change their habits based on these insights. When human integration into the new process is complete, FDD can act as a way to triage internal workflows in CMMS, improving the efficiency of facilities teams.

Challenges & Lessons Learned

Transforming and digitizing how a nationwide service company provides its offering doesn’t come without trials and tribulations. Davis walked through his three most significant lessons learned during this process.

Lesson #1 - Ability to Drive Action from New Insights

The insights that FDD and energy management provide to a team are only as valuable as the actions they lead to. James Dice, Nexus Labs founder, often refers to this as the “path to action”—defining the process of closing the loop on the insights generated. If a facilities team cannot act on the insights gathered through FDD and energy management, they don’t provide much value.

Davis provided a specific example of a facilities manager whose system was upgraded to include FDD and energy management by Limbach. However, the manager didn’t have the bandwidth in his team to act from the hundreds of insights. Limbach worked with the manager to correlate the building issues to downtime, occupant experience, and other metrics the CFO could more readily comprehend, giving the facility manager some ammunition to obtain the required budget.

Facility managers and service contractors must be prepared for the barrage of insights and issues that FDD will find when initially implemented. Davis explained how it’s not uncommon for hundreds of issues to be initially generated. It’s important not to be overwhelmed by this and to ensure the team is prepared with a plan to triage the issues and take small bites out of the backlog in a pragmatic order.

Lesson #2 - Meaningful Analysis Comes from Meaningful Data

Any team implementing FDD and energy metering needs first to qualify the type of data available and what it has the potential to tell you. For example, customers with severe network issues will suffer from severe data gaps, which can undermine the analytical abilities of application layer software. 

But the problem doesn’t end with just the ability to gather the correct data, but also the ability to interpret the data collected. Davis shared his war stories, “I feel like sometimes [controls contractors] might be naming data points after their dog.” It is a common disease in older buildings to have non-standardized point naming conventions, which can be time-consuming to decipher at the application layer. 

Lastly, sometimes building automation systems simply lack data for no apparent reason. Before implementing FDD, a service provider might need to explain to a customer that an entire wing of their building is not shown within the BAS, and therefore, the FDD application will also have no access to that data.

Lesson #3 - Get ahead on Cybersecurity

Successful energy management and FDD software on the application layer entirely rely on seeing the whole building. That means sharing massive amounts of data with a new application. Getting ahead of these conversations with the IT departments responsible for the building’s data is imperative. Davis noted that Limbach has never had anyone say no to FDD or energy management because of cybersecurity concerns. Still, they’ve had to go through some thorough, serious, and detailed conversations about customer data safety.

This lesson is all about communication. Building owners and service contractors don’t necessarily have to be cybersecurity experts. However, getting a vendor in a room with an IT department lead early in the project so they can understand each other’s needs is paramount.

Conclusion

“...and we can put a man on the moon!”

Have you ever heard someone say this phrase out of frustration when dealing with something painstakingly archaic? 

You can look around and see the flash of artificial intelligence and a digitized world everywhere, but feel like your hands are tied behind your back when applying technology to where you need it. 

This is how it feels when someone hands you a binder full of scanned pages that act as the O&M manual for a control system. This is how Limbach and many of its customers felt about their buildings before they began the digital revolution they have been on over the past year.

Success stories like this one at Limbach can act as optimistic reminders that the smart buildings industry can advance to the modern era through the capabilities of products like FDD and energy management at the application layer. But it doesn’t happen overnight and doesn’t begin at the application layer sitting on the top of the building technology stack. 

The migration that Limbach and many of their customers have made started with detailed planning, identifying a business problem of a lack of data, and meticulously working their way up to digital actionable insights. For Limbach and their customers, gathering the correct data in the right platforms was the smart building equivalent of landing a man on the moon.