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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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Paul Bunyan is a fictional character in American and Canadian folklore. He’s known for being a lumberjack with a superhuman skillset. In 1958, Walt Disney created an animated musical short film about Paul Bunyan. In the movie, Paul is challenged to a timber-cutting competition with Joe Muffaw. While Muffaw uses modern steam-powered chainsaws to cut trees, Bunyan uses an axe and brute strength to cut trees. Ultimately, the steam-powered technology prevails over Bunyan’s manual labor. The story is a metaphor for the Industrial Revolution: the mechanization of work would inevitably become more efficient than manual labor, transforming the job market.
Today, another transformation of the job market is occurring as part of the Digital Revolution within our buildings. Skilled labor shortages and overwhelming maintenance backlogs can cripple service providers who rely on the historic way of servicing buildings. Focusing solely on recruitment, labor utilization, and keeping the maintenance Excel spreadsheet up to date is no different than Paul Bunyan trying to beat new tech with brute force alone. Meanwhile, there are shining examples of embracing digitization and climbing up the value chain to provide efficient solutions to building owners. Tools like fault detection & diagnostics (FDD), when implemented and adopted appropriately, can enable service providers to elevate their value proposition by tapping into the data within the buildings they serve.
In this case study, we sat down with Laura Towsley of RYCOM and Leon Wurfel of Bueno to hear the story of using data-driven tools, like FDD, to guide a smart building service provider through the Digital Revolution, leading to more efficient and valuable services to their customers.
RYCOM is a smart building service company founded in 1997 and headquartered in Toronto, Ontario. RYCOM doesn’t make hardware or software but helps its customers select, design, install, and service technologies for their buildings. They have customers across all of Canada.
Laura Towsley is the Director of Data Intelligence at RYCOM, where she started in 2017. Today, RYCOM focuses on reducing energy and GHG emissions, increasing operational efficiency, and lowering risk for building owners and third-party property management companies.
Bueno is a Fault Detection and Diagnostics vendor founded in 2013 and headquartered in Sydney, Australia.
Leon Wurfel, the founder of Bueno, started his career as a mechanical engineer using archaic spreadsheets and trend logs to seek out building issues inefficiently. Australia was an early adopter of publicized building performance standards, with the National Australian Built Environment Rating System (NABERS) starting in 1999. A clear incentive for Australian building owners to improve building performance created a great starting place for Wurfel to develop an FDD platform. Today, Bueno has saved its customers over 2.5 million tons of CO2 and has over 115 billion dollars of connected assets on their software. (For more backstory, listen to our podcast on how NABERS transformed the Australian real estate industry)
Around the time Towsley came on board, RYCOM’s focus was supporting many of its customers by building fiber optic backbones for their operational technology (OT) networks. Additionally, RYCOM had a strong service background, with a 24/7 bilingual call center for their customers and 24/7 monitoring of network devices.
Meanwhile, increased energy costs, carbon regulations, and sustainability metrics were pushing RYCOM’s customers to find new solutions to energy optimization. To support these demands, RYCOM added Bueno’s FDD tool to the RYCOM HIVE, a package of solutions for network, security, telecom, and BAS operations management deployed in over 100 buildings across Canada.
The implementation of FDD drove a closer collaboration between RYCOM and its clients. Monthly meetings were held to ensure that the issues being discovered by the FDD tool were able to be addressed by operations. Throughout this improved collaboration, RYCOM gained visibility of where operational efficiencies were breaking down within their clients’ organizations. They discovered that the OT networks they were helping their clients create and manage were missing crucial integration opportunities. To address the new opportunities to support their client's integrations, RYCOM added to its master system integration (MSI) capabilities.
Finally, RYCOM saw that their clients were having difficulty hiring skilled building operators and were not getting as much building automation (BAS) service from their contractors as they needed, even when they were willing to pay more. Given the intimate knowledge that RYCOM gained about their client’s operations through their other services, RYCOM began offering remote facility management services.
With OT network management, RYCOM was initially focused on the infrastructure that allowed a client’s data to flow efficiently. However, when FDD was incorporated into their service offering, RYCOM leveled up to be able to provide insights based on the data within the networks they were managing. FDD acted as the lynchpin that moved RYCOM’s services up the value chain: from network management to energy optimization, MSI services, and remote facility management.
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We had Towsley and Wurfel help us break down the change management process that allowed RYCOM to evolve its service offerings to satisfy customer needs, embrace digital transformation, and move up the value chain.
Perhaps the most important characteristic contributing to RYCOM’s success is its willingness to reinvent its offering as the world transforms and new technology emerges. Towsley emphasized that RYCOM has always believed in using a combination of people, technology, and processes to optimize building operations. Building operations is an industry that has been limited by the human resources available to solve problems. RYCOM has constantly looked for new technology methods to reduce and centralize the workforce required.
“For a really long time, RYCOM has believed this is a manpower-heavy industry, and there’s an opportunity to use technology to reduce the amount of onsite manpower and provide better operational oversight. FDD is one technology tool to do that, but this has been the core of our belief before we started using FDD.” — Towsley
Since Bueno frequently partners with service providers, Wurfel shared what differentiates the success of service providers like RYCOM compared to ones who struggle to adopt new technology. Wurfel said, “The people who are the winners in this market are people who are taking the adoption of these tools as a strategic decision. It’s coming down from a desire to actually transform what they’re doing with their business.”
For RYCOM, the strategic decision to invest in this technology originated from simply listening to their customers and being willing to pivot based on what they heard. Increased energy costs, carbon regulations, sustainability metrics, and a shrinking supply of skilled building labor were pushing RYCOM’s customers to find solutions to energy optimization. FDD was a tool that offered the potential for RYCOM to support energy optimization while leaning into their core value of using technology to reduce the onsite workforce.
To begin adopting FDD for energy optimization, RYCOM needed to understand what expertise they did and didn’t already have. RYCOM has historically been strong in IT and network expertise but lacked BAS and energy management expertise.
RYCOM was willing to go to the market to find the right people to round out their team. They recognized that the success of the FDD tool hinged on experts using the tool. Additionally, RYCOM found it very important to keep that expertise in-house to remain the friendly face to their clients. Towsley explains, “We don’t view it as a remote service; we meet with our clients monthly to develop relationships of trust around our BAS and energy expertise.”
Bueno was able to support RYCOM in training its new team members on using the FDD tools to support clients. Within the Australian market, Bueno staffs its own data operations team that uses the Bueno FDD platform to directly support building operators. Essentially, the Bueno data operations team is a power user of the Bueno platform, which gives Bueno the unique ability to train service providers on how to build their own data operations teams.
With a team of internal BAS and energy experts, training from Bueno, and growing trust from its customers, RYCOM was able to start delivering energy optimization results.
As tangible results grew, new doors opened for RYCOM. They became the first FDD provider to be listed by the Independent Electrical Systems Operator (IESO) of Ontario for incentive support after IESO saw the energy savings results RYCOM was achieving with their HIVE solution.
RYCOM’s full embrace of FDD started with energy optimization results for its customers, but soon after, RYCOM started to tac on master systems integration (MSI) services to fulfill more of their customers’ needs.
“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. Beyond energy optimization, we started to see problems bubble up, sometimes energy problems and sometimes business problems, that could be solved by integrating different systems together.”
— Towsley
Within the monthly meetings with their clients, the prioritization of faults became just the tip of the iceberg of what RYCOM could troubleshoot and fix for their clients. Operational challenges and inefficiencies became clear to RYCOM and their clients, and getting disparate systems to talk to one another, something RYCOM was already fully capable of, became more evident.
In addition to the MSI services that were unlocked through FDD, RYCOM also became closer than ever to the client’s struggles to staff skilled building operators post-COVID. This wasn’t just a problem for typical BAS support, but also for network and security support.
RYCOM began offering remote facility management services to their clients to help fill that gap. While typical service providers are one level removed with limited permissions and limited hours, the new level of integration that RYCOM was developing with its customers allowed for a much more collaborative and holistic solution. Towsley explains, “Instead of just informing our clients, we can actually take action remotely resolving problems or taking on the dispatch of 3rd parties on behalf of our clients.”
In summary, as RYCOM made the leap to implement FDD to support customers with energy optimization, they grew a better understanding of their clients' operational processes. Identifying gaps in these operational processes led to integration opportunities between siloed systems. RYCOM built out its MSI services to support clients on these integration opportunities. With network management, energy optimization, and MSI services being provided as bundled services to clients, RYCOM was embedded enough to offer a remote facilities management solution to round out the comprehensive offering.
Although the adoption of an FDD tool initially required a small team wearing many hats, RYCOM's success with this solution thus far has allowed them to grow the ideal team. We asked Towsley to break down the organizational makeup of the team required to support their FDD offering.
This is the group responsible for the “classic FDD stuff.” They focus on things like maintaining the metadata tagging model and reviewing typical FDD alerts with quick turnaround (hunting valves, stuck dampers, etc.).
This is a group of senior employees with background knowledge in control programming and HVAC design. They use the FDD tools and independent data layers (IDLs) to provide higher-level solutions, like peak demand response and measurement and verification (M&V) of other product implementations.
This group consists of software developers and BAS technicians who support customers' master system integration needs. These people implement solutions to operational problems uncovered by the FDD tool. For example, they integrate room booking systems and lighting occupancy sensors with HVAC scheduling to avoid wasted energy.
RYCOM’s internal network monitoring, which provides network management for customers, also gives them the advantage of already being set up to connect remotely to clients' systems in a safe and efficient manner.
This case study aims to share success stories that can benefit similar service providers trying to adopt modern technology like FDD to support their customers. Towsley and Wurfel shared some of the most significant challenges and opportunities for service providers when adopting FDD.
FDD can benefit sustainability, energy management, asset management, and operations teams. However, if only one group within an organization is using it, you are not getting full utilization. The success of an FDD implementation depends on the client getting as much value out of it as possible. The service provider implementing the technology needs to be in contact with each stakeholder group. Being in contact with different stakeholders also allows the service provider to break down the invisible silos that may exist within the building owner’s organization, inevitably leading to opportunities for operational efficiency gains through systems integration.
Towsley shared an example of implementing FDD in a client’s buildings. After several months of meetings, none of the recommendations were acted upon. Only then was RYCOM able to realize there was another process on a different team that was used to allocate the time of the building operators. Although the FDD tool discovered issues to be fixed, they were never scheduled into the work of the operations team.
Service providers must constantly remind themselves that they are only one piece of the puzzle, and discovering issues to address is only the beginning for the client. It is critical to success to support the client with change management and operational adjustments to make FDD work in their system.
While FDD tools have typically only been used in large complex buildings with existing BAS infrastructure, RYCOM has seen requests grow for implementation of the tool with their clients that have a large portfolio of simple buildings like warehouses, retail buildings, and residential buildings. Utilizing a cloud MQTT integration has unlocked the ability for FDD products like Bueno to be used on facilities that don’t have traditional BAS but are continually adopting new IoT devices. This could be a pivotal solution to simplifying controls for simple buildings, as discussed in our whitepaper, The Untapped 87%.
The case study of RYCOM incorporating Bueno FDD tools into the RYCOM HIVE is really a story of a company being able to listen to its customers and reinvent its offering. It is not Paul Bunyan’s axe being replaced by the steam-powered chainsaw, or Blockbuster failing to match Netflix’s transition from a DVD rental company to an online streaming service. As the skilled labor market continues to be strained, and the data within buildings proliferates, service providers must embrace a significant change to how things have always been. Adopting software applications like FDD brings service to the modern era.
If you’d like to further explore what FDD can do for your organization, we encourage you to rewatch our Buyer’s Guide to Fault Detection and Diagnostics. We cover a diverse range of smart building technologies through our buyer’s guide series, which are live Zoom webinars that are free for the public to join and rewatch.
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.
---
---
Paul Bunyan is a fictional character in American and Canadian folklore. He’s known for being a lumberjack with a superhuman skillset. In 1958, Walt Disney created an animated musical short film about Paul Bunyan. In the movie, Paul is challenged to a timber-cutting competition with Joe Muffaw. While Muffaw uses modern steam-powered chainsaws to cut trees, Bunyan uses an axe and brute strength to cut trees. Ultimately, the steam-powered technology prevails over Bunyan’s manual labor. The story is a metaphor for the Industrial Revolution: the mechanization of work would inevitably become more efficient than manual labor, transforming the job market.
Today, another transformation of the job market is occurring as part of the Digital Revolution within our buildings. Skilled labor shortages and overwhelming maintenance backlogs can cripple service providers who rely on the historic way of servicing buildings. Focusing solely on recruitment, labor utilization, and keeping the maintenance Excel spreadsheet up to date is no different than Paul Bunyan trying to beat new tech with brute force alone. Meanwhile, there are shining examples of embracing digitization and climbing up the value chain to provide efficient solutions to building owners. Tools like fault detection & diagnostics (FDD), when implemented and adopted appropriately, can enable service providers to elevate their value proposition by tapping into the data within the buildings they serve.
In this case study, we sat down with Laura Towsley of RYCOM and Leon Wurfel of Bueno to hear the story of using data-driven tools, like FDD, to guide a smart building service provider through the Digital Revolution, leading to more efficient and valuable services to their customers.
RYCOM is a smart building service company founded in 1997 and headquartered in Toronto, Ontario. RYCOM doesn’t make hardware or software but helps its customers select, design, install, and service technologies for their buildings. They have customers across all of Canada.
Laura Towsley is the Director of Data Intelligence at RYCOM, where she started in 2017. Today, RYCOM focuses on reducing energy and GHG emissions, increasing operational efficiency, and lowering risk for building owners and third-party property management companies.
Bueno is a Fault Detection and Diagnostics vendor founded in 2013 and headquartered in Sydney, Australia.
Leon Wurfel, the founder of Bueno, started his career as a mechanical engineer using archaic spreadsheets and trend logs to seek out building issues inefficiently. Australia was an early adopter of publicized building performance standards, with the National Australian Built Environment Rating System (NABERS) starting in 1999. A clear incentive for Australian building owners to improve building performance created a great starting place for Wurfel to develop an FDD platform. Today, Bueno has saved its customers over 2.5 million tons of CO2 and has over 115 billion dollars of connected assets on their software. (For more backstory, listen to our podcast on how NABERS transformed the Australian real estate industry)
Around the time Towsley came on board, RYCOM’s focus was supporting many of its customers by building fiber optic backbones for their operational technology (OT) networks. Additionally, RYCOM had a strong service background, with a 24/7 bilingual call center for their customers and 24/7 monitoring of network devices.
Meanwhile, increased energy costs, carbon regulations, and sustainability metrics were pushing RYCOM’s customers to find new solutions to energy optimization. To support these demands, RYCOM added Bueno’s FDD tool to the RYCOM HIVE, a package of solutions for network, security, telecom, and BAS operations management deployed in over 100 buildings across Canada.
The implementation of FDD drove a closer collaboration between RYCOM and its clients. Monthly meetings were held to ensure that the issues being discovered by the FDD tool were able to be addressed by operations. Throughout this improved collaboration, RYCOM gained visibility of where operational efficiencies were breaking down within their clients’ organizations. They discovered that the OT networks they were helping their clients create and manage were missing crucial integration opportunities. To address the new opportunities to support their client's integrations, RYCOM added to its master system integration (MSI) capabilities.
Finally, RYCOM saw that their clients were having difficulty hiring skilled building operators and were not getting as much building automation (BAS) service from their contractors as they needed, even when they were willing to pay more. Given the intimate knowledge that RYCOM gained about their client’s operations through their other services, RYCOM began offering remote facility management services.
With OT network management, RYCOM was initially focused on the infrastructure that allowed a client’s data to flow efficiently. However, when FDD was incorporated into their service offering, RYCOM leveled up to be able to provide insights based on the data within the networks they were managing. FDD acted as the lynchpin that moved RYCOM’s services up the value chain: from network management to energy optimization, MSI services, and remote facility management.
We had Towsley and Wurfel help us break down the change management process that allowed RYCOM to evolve its service offerings to satisfy customer needs, embrace digital transformation, and move up the value chain.
Perhaps the most important characteristic contributing to RYCOM’s success is its willingness to reinvent its offering as the world transforms and new technology emerges. Towsley emphasized that RYCOM has always believed in using a combination of people, technology, and processes to optimize building operations. Building operations is an industry that has been limited by the human resources available to solve problems. RYCOM has constantly looked for new technology methods to reduce and centralize the workforce required.
“For a really long time, RYCOM has believed this is a manpower-heavy industry, and there’s an opportunity to use technology to reduce the amount of onsite manpower and provide better operational oversight. FDD is one technology tool to do that, but this has been the core of our belief before we started using FDD.” — Towsley
Since Bueno frequently partners with service providers, Wurfel shared what differentiates the success of service providers like RYCOM compared to ones who struggle to adopt new technology. Wurfel said, “The people who are the winners in this market are people who are taking the adoption of these tools as a strategic decision. It’s coming down from a desire to actually transform what they’re doing with their business.”
For RYCOM, the strategic decision to invest in this technology originated from simply listening to their customers and being willing to pivot based on what they heard. Increased energy costs, carbon regulations, sustainability metrics, and a shrinking supply of skilled building labor were pushing RYCOM’s customers to find solutions to energy optimization. FDD was a tool that offered the potential for RYCOM to support energy optimization while leaning into their core value of using technology to reduce the onsite workforce.
To begin adopting FDD for energy optimization, RYCOM needed to understand what expertise they did and didn’t already have. RYCOM has historically been strong in IT and network expertise but lacked BAS and energy management expertise.
RYCOM was willing to go to the market to find the right people to round out their team. They recognized that the success of the FDD tool hinged on experts using the tool. Additionally, RYCOM found it very important to keep that expertise in-house to remain the friendly face to their clients. Towsley explains, “We don’t view it as a remote service; we meet with our clients monthly to develop relationships of trust around our BAS and energy expertise.”
Bueno was able to support RYCOM in training its new team members on using the FDD tools to support clients. Within the Australian market, Bueno staffs its own data operations team that uses the Bueno FDD platform to directly support building operators. Essentially, the Bueno data operations team is a power user of the Bueno platform, which gives Bueno the unique ability to train service providers on how to build their own data operations teams.
With a team of internal BAS and energy experts, training from Bueno, and growing trust from its customers, RYCOM was able to start delivering energy optimization results.
As tangible results grew, new doors opened for RYCOM. They became the first FDD provider to be listed by the Independent Electrical Systems Operator (IESO) of Ontario for incentive support after IESO saw the energy savings results RYCOM was achieving with their HIVE solution.
RYCOM’s full embrace of FDD started with energy optimization results for its customers, but soon after, RYCOM started to tac on master systems integration (MSI) services to fulfill more of their customers’ needs.
“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. Beyond energy optimization, we started to see problems bubble up, sometimes energy problems and sometimes business problems, that could be solved by integrating different systems together.”
— Towsley
Within the monthly meetings with their clients, the prioritization of faults became just the tip of the iceberg of what RYCOM could troubleshoot and fix for their clients. Operational challenges and inefficiencies became clear to RYCOM and their clients, and getting disparate systems to talk to one another, something RYCOM was already fully capable of, became more evident.
In addition to the MSI services that were unlocked through FDD, RYCOM also became closer than ever to the client’s struggles to staff skilled building operators post-COVID. This wasn’t just a problem for typical BAS support, but also for network and security support.
RYCOM began offering remote facility management services to their clients to help fill that gap. While typical service providers are one level removed with limited permissions and limited hours, the new level of integration that RYCOM was developing with its customers allowed for a much more collaborative and holistic solution. Towsley explains, “Instead of just informing our clients, we can actually take action remotely resolving problems or taking on the dispatch of 3rd parties on behalf of our clients.”
In summary, as RYCOM made the leap to implement FDD to support customers with energy optimization, they grew a better understanding of their clients' operational processes. Identifying gaps in these operational processes led to integration opportunities between siloed systems. RYCOM built out its MSI services to support clients on these integration opportunities. With network management, energy optimization, and MSI services being provided as bundled services to clients, RYCOM was embedded enough to offer a remote facilities management solution to round out the comprehensive offering.
Although the adoption of an FDD tool initially required a small team wearing many hats, RYCOM's success with this solution thus far has allowed them to grow the ideal team. We asked Towsley to break down the organizational makeup of the team required to support their FDD offering.
This is the group responsible for the “classic FDD stuff.” They focus on things like maintaining the metadata tagging model and reviewing typical FDD alerts with quick turnaround (hunting valves, stuck dampers, etc.).
This is a group of senior employees with background knowledge in control programming and HVAC design. They use the FDD tools and independent data layers (IDLs) to provide higher-level solutions, like peak demand response and measurement and verification (M&V) of other product implementations.
This group consists of software developers and BAS technicians who support customers' master system integration needs. These people implement solutions to operational problems uncovered by the FDD tool. For example, they integrate room booking systems and lighting occupancy sensors with HVAC scheduling to avoid wasted energy.
RYCOM’s internal network monitoring, which provides network management for customers, also gives them the advantage of already being set up to connect remotely to clients' systems in a safe and efficient manner.
This case study aims to share success stories that can benefit similar service providers trying to adopt modern technology like FDD to support their customers. Towsley and Wurfel shared some of the most significant challenges and opportunities for service providers when adopting FDD.
FDD can benefit sustainability, energy management, asset management, and operations teams. However, if only one group within an organization is using it, you are not getting full utilization. The success of an FDD implementation depends on the client getting as much value out of it as possible. The service provider implementing the technology needs to be in contact with each stakeholder group. Being in contact with different stakeholders also allows the service provider to break down the invisible silos that may exist within the building owner’s organization, inevitably leading to opportunities for operational efficiency gains through systems integration.
Towsley shared an example of implementing FDD in a client’s buildings. After several months of meetings, none of the recommendations were acted upon. Only then was RYCOM able to realize there was another process on a different team that was used to allocate the time of the building operators. Although the FDD tool discovered issues to be fixed, they were never scheduled into the work of the operations team.
Service providers must constantly remind themselves that they are only one piece of the puzzle, and discovering issues to address is only the beginning for the client. It is critical to success to support the client with change management and operational adjustments to make FDD work in their system.
While FDD tools have typically only been used in large complex buildings with existing BAS infrastructure, RYCOM has seen requests grow for implementation of the tool with their clients that have a large portfolio of simple buildings like warehouses, retail buildings, and residential buildings. Utilizing a cloud MQTT integration has unlocked the ability for FDD products like Bueno to be used on facilities that don’t have traditional BAS but are continually adopting new IoT devices. This could be a pivotal solution to simplifying controls for simple buildings, as discussed in our whitepaper, The Untapped 87%.
The case study of RYCOM incorporating Bueno FDD tools into the RYCOM HIVE is really a story of a company being able to listen to its customers and reinvent its offering. It is not Paul Bunyan’s axe being replaced by the steam-powered chainsaw, or Blockbuster failing to match Netflix’s transition from a DVD rental company to an online streaming service. As the skilled labor market continues to be strained, and the data within buildings proliferates, service providers must embrace a significant change to how things have always been. Adopting software applications like FDD brings service to the modern era.
If you’d like to further explore what FDD can do for your organization, we encourage you to rewatch our Buyer’s Guide to Fault Detection and Diagnostics. We cover a diverse range of smart building technologies through our buyer’s guide series, which are live Zoom webinars that are free for the public to join and rewatch.
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