Pro Member Gathering | Quadreal's Smart Buildings Program and the Operations of the Future

Thano Lambrinos, Senior Vice President of Digital Buildings, Experiences & Innovation at QuadReal Property Group, dove into QuadReal's Smart Buildings Program.

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Rosy Khalife 00:20
Hi everyone, Welcome. Nice to see you all. Hi, Nick. Okay, well cry. Awesome. Can Canwhoever is a new member like raise your hand or something so we can all give you a warmwelcome a proper welcome today. Like Oh, Hi, Michael Hannah. Nice to see

James Dice 00:45
lots of foundation students here we just weekly workshop with foundations, folks. So lots of newmembers that are students as well. Yes, for

Rosy Khalife 00:57
awesome. While everyone get situated and get in, we'll kick it off. So welcome, everyone. Thankyou for joining us today, this is our April pro member gathering. And since there's a bunch ofyou, that are either new members, or are taking our foundation's course, just give you a quickbackground, in terms of what usually happens on these calls. So this is a monthly gathering, thisis a time for you to get to know your other Nexus community members, we always have a guestjoin us. So today we have fanno eye fan. Oh, thanks for coming. So we always invite a buildingowner to come speak to the group, there'll be a chance for q&a at the end. And he'll bespeaking about operations of the future and change management today. So that the the kind offormat of this usually starts off with quick hello. And then we'll do a breakout room for 15minutes where you'll meet four to six other members. And there'll be a question that will ask you,and then we'll jump into the presentation portion. And then there'll be time for q&a. Andsometimes we do another breakout room or if there's a lot of questions, we kind of just keepgoing with the question. So it's an hour and 15 minutes. And some of you will obviously have todrop it the hour, that's totally fine. But hopefully some of you can stick around. So we'll getstarted to in just a couple of quick announcements. We are launching a Nexus creator program,which we're super excited about. You might have seen it in the newsletter that went out thismorning. If you haven't take a look at the newsletter. And if you're interested, we would love to have you apply the link is in that email. James, is there anything you want to say about that? Oris it too soon to kind of share more

James Dice 02:49
I'll throw the link in the chat here. For anyone that wants to fly. We're basically creating roles foranyone to contribute to Nexus on a part time basis. People want to do that because they want toget their own brand out there. They want to establish thought leadership, some of you really liketo write and we want to provide the space to do that. And we're providing roles that areanywhere from like very entry level experience, you could do them all the way to veryexperienced, and then a little time to a lot of times. So we're trying to create like a mix of ways inwhich people can get involved. So yeah, after the application in the chat, we're kind of goingthrough those on a weekly basis and reaching out to people for different roles that we need tofill.

Rosy Khalife 03:34
Awesome, thank you for that background. The second thing that we're working on that we'reexcited about, it was also an email hits as a PS, we're launching buyer communities. And it'sthis is pretty early still. But these will be private groups where like minded people will cometogether to share lessons learned, collaborate, you know, things they wish they knew before, orthings that happened that work great, you know, all of the things and kind of meet each otherand network also. So if you are a buyer of facility management, sustainability or tech solutions,you can, you know, join that and we're doing that very soon. So you can just shoot me a DM onhere, you can private message me and give me your name or you can obviously send me anemail, and we'll we'll get you added to that. We're very excited about that. So without getting

James Dice 04:29
Thank you. I was wondering too, that was Thanks, Andrew muted you. Like who was?

Rosy Khalife 04:38
No worries. Perfect. So first things first, we'll start with a breakout room. The question for thismonth is what's one thing you're working on that you're excited about? And just as a reminder,we want everyone to speak in the breakout rooms. We've heard from a lot of you that that's yourfavorite part of this member gathering. So just be cool. It's iterative everyone else. And ofcourse, no sales. This is a collaborative space. So try to keep that in mind as you're sharingyour answer and to the question, and I'll repeat the question, What's one thing you're workingon? That's got you excited. So we'll go ahead and get that going now. And you should all beseeing a pop up on your screen, and then you could just hit accept.

James Dice 20:59
What time's the breakout rooms go all the way to the end. So 20 more seconds here.

Rosy Khalife 21:05

All right. So we're we just launched a poll. This is panels question. I want to I want to add thatyour answers are anonymous. So be honest with yourself and with us, because that's how we'llget the most out of this. And I think you'll get a kick out of it.

Thano Lambrinos 21:25
Make sure you hover over I guess the questions to see the full.

James Dice 21:29
You can change the size of the window I think to

Rosy Khalife 21:33dying. That's one first

Lee Hodgkinson 21:36
the first question. But also, it was good. That's really good. It's true.

James Dice 21:44
Because there are no change management wizards.

James Dice 21:48
It is behind. I was really happy to see the topic today. Because that is a challenge. That is amajor challenge. So thank you.

James Dice 21:56
Yeah, Dan. Okay, talk about a lot of things. And we kind of narrowed in on that one, because Ithink it's sorely needed as well.

Rosy Khalife 22:04
Yeah, we're excited about this. I think we're all going to learn something.

James Dice 22:09
All right. I see. Only 27 of you have participated in the poll.

Rosy Khalife 22:15
I think, yeah. Come on, people disappeared for me. Okay, whoever said that it should pop up atthe bottom. You should see it again. Or it went to another window like it can go somewhere else.Oh, boy. So if you go to the

22:32

sorry, I thought we were in breakout groups. I'm not I'm confused now. Oh, that's okay. Firstsession. So

Rosy Khalife 22:39

no worries. So we finished the breakout rooms. Hopefully you all answered most of your ifanyone wants to share in a second.

James Dice 22:47
And now yeah, you ended up okay. Here we go. Number two fan out.

Thano Lambrinos 22:53
That's what I figured most people would land on I like, I don't know who the one person is thatanswered on the last one. But I want to hang out with whoever that is.

Rosy Khalife 23:05
I respect whoever that was that was honest.

Lee Hodgkinson 23:09Do you really?

Thano Lambrinos 23:12
I don't know. I think they'd be interesting. And also the eight people we got a liars in the men inthe room. So that's cool. But now as well.

Rosy Khalife 23:22
That's awesome. Thank you for that question. So next up on the agenda is Thano will bespeaking shortly. He'll be giving a presentation for about 20 minutes 20 to 25 minutes, and thenwe'll do q&a. I want to just give a quick intro to Dano, who probably a lot of you know, he is avery active figure in our community. I feel like he's always doing speaking engagements andtrying to get everyone excited about all the things that he's working on. So I love that. And healways has snazzy outfits on so I also respect his sense of fashion. So we'll get started. SoThano has over 15 years of experience in the construction and building technology space. Heleverages digital transformation learnings across verticals to drive innovation and change incommercial real estate projects run across Canada, United States, Europe and the UAE. So hebrings a global perspective to all the things that he talks about and shares and will be sharingwith us today. I will hand it over to you, Dan. Oh for you to give your intro better than me. Andyou have 20 minutes starting now.

Thano Lambrinos 24:35
Okay, well just give me a second because I got to share my screen here. I appreciate the introthat that I wrote for myself that you read. It's it's very complimentary and flattering.

James Dice 24:50
Just give me one moment

Rosy Khalife 24:52
he wrote most of it himself except the fashion comment was really from me. So everyone knowsthat wasn't something that he He came up with himself. Fair enough. Fair enough. All right.

James Dice 25:09
Okay, and if anyone has questions, well, then I was going, please throw them in the chat and I'llmanage those as we go. Then if it makes sense to interrupt you, I will otherwise I'll just let you.Perfect. Yeah,

James Dice 25:23
feel free. Let's just make sure so let's see. We're gonna make sure we're good here. Looksgood. Okay, perfect.

Thano Lambrinos 25:32
Yes, thank you. Hi, everyone. My name is Thano Lambrinos. First of all, thanks to James andRosie for inviting me, I'm actually really excited to speak to you guys today, on some of thethings that we are doing here, I run our quadrilles digital buildings customer experience, andinnovation team. And effectively what that means is we are responsible for all the technologythat's deployed and infrastructure that's deployed in the built environment, both in our net newdevelopments, new construction projects, as well as in our existing portfolio that we managehere in Canada, in the US and the UK, Australia and all over the world. So infrastructure in thebuilt environment, we've recently expanded, we're now responsible for all mechanical andelectrical infrastructure we've deployed but traditionally have been responsible for connectivity,specifically, the way our buildings connect with each other the way that the people within ourbuildings connect to their environments. And the way that the systems within those buildingsconnect systems like building automation, lighting, control, CCTV access, control, energymetering, parking elevators, AV systems, IoT sensors, you name it, all of that falls under ourpurview. And the integration of those systems to realize the topic of conversation today, thefuture of operations, and, and what we do with all of that information and data and how wemanage it to get there. In addition to that, we also manage our customer experienceenvironment, where we bridge the physical and digital divide, and ensure that people interactwith their spaces in a unique way, whether they live in our buildings, work at our buildings, shopat our buildings, or visiting our buildings across the country. So what I'm going to do today is I'llgo through a bit of a high level of our strategic objectives in the way that we're approaching ourdigital transformation strategy. And then I'll talk a little bit about what we're doing and what thefuture of operations means to us. And some of the change management challenges and issuesand transformation that we've gotten into.

Thano Lambrinos 27:35
So for those who aren't terribly familiar with quadreal, we're a reasonably large firm, we've gotjust under $72 billion of assets under management split between Canada and internationally, asyou see on the screen there. When we say International, we mean the US, the UK, Australia,Asia, etc, as I said earlier, and as you can see, in that green box, we cover quite a significantfootprint of real estate, hundreds of millions of square foot of commercial space, we're intoalternatives, like data centers on the technology side, life sciences, self storage, almost 50,000residential units, several student housing beds, and we're also in the manufactured housing bidhard me business with almost 30,000 land lease sites, while 200 employees in those 23 global cities and 17 countries that you see listed at the top. So you can imagine, with a firm of this size,digital transformation transfer, transforming the operating model, around operations and otherelements is not exactly an easy task.

Thano Lambrinos 28:38
So when we took this on, we thought that the first and most important thing would be definewhat digital buildings even mean to us. And so this is a definition that I came up with by stealinga number of other definitions and smashing them together to create this. So when we talk aboutdigital buildings, we talk about modernized systems and services that enhance outcomes thathelp us realize outcomes. Focusing on the user, whether that user as mentioned lives in thebuilding works in the building as a contractor in the building is one of our staff managing thebuilding is visiting the building. And only at the end, do we talk about technologies andunderpinning those outcomes with advanced technologies.

Thano Lambrinos 29:20
So when we look at the definition and expanding on that definition to identify what our keybusiness drivers are, these are some of the outcomes that we decided on with the entirebusiness. So I spent a lot of time engaging with stakeholders across the company, whether theywere in leasing in development and construction and property operations and propertymanagement in sustainability and investment management, asset management. We broughteverybody to the table to talk about what was important to them. And none of these seven itemsshould cause epiphany, but it was important that we document them and that we use them Todefine the use cases that we're looking to realize, and the technologies that we select to supportthose use cases. So whether we're focusing on the reduction of cost, the enhancement ofsustainability, enhancing the health and wellness of the people in our buildings, mitigating cyberrisk, identify new revenue, net primary revenue opportunities, enhancing experience orimproving efficiency, we don't implement any use cases unless they satisfy one, if not several ofthese outcomes. And as mentioned, we'll focus a bit today on the operational efficiency andproductivity and how we're trying to transform the operating model.

Thano Lambrinos 30:40
So these, there's actually one pillar of our three pillar strategy that would be to the left of thisslide. And that is our involvement in the design and development of new assets and thestandardization that we've put in place. But if you consider a stabilized operating assets, theseare the pillars in which we focus on with respect to digital transformation. The first of course, isdigitizing our operational processes and model. And that talks about taking all of the DIStypically disparate systems that you're all familiar with, and integrating them to realize a set ofoutcomes to be able to overlay analytics and machine learning algorithms in AI to be able tostart to autonomy or create a more autonomous working environment on the operational side.But also seamlessly integrating that with our customer support team, which also falls under me,just for some background, to give you a sense of the team that we've built, we've got a numberof individuals, that and I and I felt that it was most prudent for them to understand buildings andbuilding technology and not just technology for technology's sake. So the makeup of the team,our IT infrastructure specialists, people that have worked in controls people that have worked for the sub trades, and people that have designed software. So we've built up quite a team to beable to support this strategy. Adjacent to the digital, the digitized operations side, where we'vedone a lot of work is that is enabling the spaces deploying IoT in the spaces to enhance thegranularity of the data that's going back to the operational platforms, things like we've deployed,ubiquitous people counting and indoor environmental quality, and leak detection, and wastesensors and things of that nature that contribute to the operational platform, but also to thedigital customer experience platform, which really is that bridge between the physical and thedigital worlds. And if you've heard me speak before, I talk a lot about the platforms that we'vedeveloped so that we can control the customer experience. But as mentioned, today, we'regoing to be focusing primarily on operations in the digitization of said operations. So those arethe various pillars that we've focused on to transform and really to build that as set on thebottom a curb to suite experience regardless of of asset class.

Thano Lambrinos 32:58Okay,And I saved the single pane of glass comment to the verylast bullet. And you notice that I put with an actual purpose, because I know that you all love the idea of a single pane of glass, and how useless many of them can be. But when I talk aboutsome of the bullets above, you'll see that there's actual value there. so operations of the future, what does that look like? And what have we actually done so far, I like to talk about things that we've actually done, obviously, and I'm sure this group appreciates that, and not just theory.operations in the future, we know that a lot of our buildings are siloed, that siloed. And they run and technologies that we're deploying are to optimize the teams themselves, optimize the FTAs So when we think about in silos, our asset classes run in silos or regions run in silos. So the opportunity with the tools centralize our folks, whether regionally or across a country, but also at the same time enabling them to be mobile, so that we can distribute across asset classes and empower these operators with granular data and control. The outcomes that we're looking for and that this whole program was built on is less dependence on third party contractors. Were there was there's obviously been a massive swing of the pendulum over the past 20 some odd years that I've been playing around in the space from entirely INSOURCE services and onsite mechanics and electricians and everybody that knows the building to completely outsourcing everything. And now I feel we're finding an equilibrium somewhere in the middle where there is certainly a role for service providers and integrators. But we have to start looking at these assets as very technical assets, which they are and employing people that can deliver the services and requirements to get us where we need to go.

34:45

We talkabout data driven maintenance but also capital planning, often we replace equipment because of an arbitrary age number, we're starting now to look at the data to say, yes, we need to replacethis five horsepower motor because of the data that's coming back. And it's only eight years old,as well as the fact that we need to replace this 30 year old motor, but the 25 year old motorsseems to be running just fine. And then on top of that, leveraging the information so that we canstart looking at bulk purchases across the country across the continent, and maybe in the globe, So that lowering dependence on contractors and looking at triaging ourselves and disrupting contract service so that it's driven on data and not just on schedule is important to us. considering the scale that we have. You know, the next major step is I'm sure you guys talkedabout a lot is start starting to leverage real tools to analyze the building to work towardsautonomous operations, we're actively doing that with things like functional testing, where we'recommissioning the building and running. For example, fan coils through sequence of operation,looking at the discharge air temperature and ensuring that it hits the cooling temperature orheating temperature, in the timeframe that it's supposed to, we can commission now ourbuildings every day if we really want to, and constantly retro commission them fault detectionthis group knows a lot about so I don't need to go into it in detail. But with root cause is critical.And we're starting to do some AI and ML equipment optimizations where we're taking weatherdata, equipment data, as well as real time occupancy data to determine and predict start andstart times as the building and and ramp down times of the building. And we've saved 1000s Ifnot 10s of 1000s of hours and equipment runtime doing this future proofing the workforce,pardon me And then yes, so thatleads us to our single pane of glass, but with an actual purpose and not just a dashboard for adashboard sake. So what have we actually done across the portfolio mostly domestically, here in Canada 55 different buildings, a couple in the US some new developments, a number ofexisting assets, 3 million square feet, we've done 30 integrated plant add system integrationswith 250,000 devices and over 4 million points. So that sounds pretty impressive.

Thano Lambrinos 37:20
And what I'm going to say next is hopefully also sounds pretty impressive. And then we're gonnaget to the not so impressive stuff. So here's a couple examples of us creating value. This isoffice, but of course we're doing it across the portfolio. We looked at this asset was just ratedBOMA best smart building platinum, which we're really excited about. We did an entire businesscase for the asset management team, the capital that was required to deploy the sensors todeploy the platform to do the integrations ultimately ended up being a cost neutral investmentover when we amortize it over five years. And then beyond that five years 25 cent per squarefoot savings that we modeled a lot around quantifiable energy reduction, things like that wedidn't even really look at the optimizations that we realize from capital deferrals becauseequipment will last longer from changing service and maintenance agreements, which we'restarting to see additional benefit on. So this business case may even improve will likely evenimprove. So we're very excited about that. That is to say, retrofitting is entirely possible andreasonable. And on the right you'll see River South and Austin, which I've talked about quite abit if you've heard me speak before, where we got involved, a little late, the entire job wasbought out. But because of the construction background that I have in the group has and themethodologies and standardizations that we've put in place, we were able to impact the designwith a very minimal cost increase. And we're realizing significant savings. That versus what wasmodeled to run the building based on all the technology and and things that we put in place.

38:55

Okay, so that's, that's you, we've talked a little bit about our strategy. We've talked a bit aboutwhat operations of the future means to us, and we what we're actually doing. And so you look at the workforce is important, the average age of our operators 55 years old. So they know these buildings like the back of their hands, I need to figure out how to get the back of their hands into the cloud, which is part of what this entire program is.me, and you say, Okay, well, that's great technology, and really cool examples. But what aboutthe people? And what about the people? This slide seems to be mocking me, even though Icreated it, look, so we're not perfect, and I'm certainly not perfect. This is something my fiancereminds me about on a daily basis. And but we do our best and I had a vision that my vision andmy team's vision and our executive vision made a lot of sense and people would just jump onboard. I wasn't exactly accurate in that assumption. We all know what they say about whathappens when you assume. So let me just talk a little bit about what we did well, and what wecertainly didn't do well, and then where we're going from an executive sponsorship perspective,I think we did a fantastic job. Our CEO, our president, our executive vice president, T am mypeer group at the senior management level all buys in and agrees that this is the way to go,where we maybe didn't do the best job is appropriately selling and getting the same buy in fromour front lines. So while we thought we sold the benefits, we needed to do a little more work onengagement and buy in. And we still do, we've deployed this, as you've seen pretty, prettyextensively. But now we're kind of going back, and I'll talk about some of the rework we've done,we've done listening tours, so that we can really get feedback from the teams and make themfeel that they are included, because they certainly are. And they are the key piece to realizingthe value that we've hypothesized on and realized in, in some isolated environments. So weneed to ensure that while we have the senior level sponsorship, and something important foryou that the layers beneath are also sponsors, because as we all know, you're most likely totrust your direct manager. So if the chief engineer looks at all the ops folks and says, You knowwhat, this is another flavor of the week, don't worry about it, it's gonna, it's gonna be gone soon,then you're dead. So we've worked on this, and I'll talk a bit about the group that we'vedeveloped on the digital building lead side. To help with that sponsorship, program scope androadmap, we did a good job of selling the end state. But as you guys all know, buildings are ahard place to integrate technologies in because of the the cacophony of, of different systemsthat are deployed in any given building. And the the nuance that requires that is required inintegrating. So while we did a really good job on selling the end state, we really needed toimprove. And we are improving on talking about the scope and iterative process to get to thatend state and that transitionary period, as well as implementing a multi year implementationroadmap, I talked a little bit about relationships and Byun. And while I think we did a pretty goodjob, we could have done a better job fostering relationships between us, the vendor that weselected in the property teams, so that they didn't look at us. And when I say they, I mean theproperty team saying, oh, that's the digital building teams initiative, if there's issues, we're alongfor the ride, we needed them to buy in. And that's what we're working on now. And then from aresourcing perspective, we had a lead on the rollout, but he was doing a ton of other things. Andso I'll talk about in the next slide, how we're looking at a dedicated product program manager tohelp us take this to the next level and complete the deployment and adoption across theportfolio.

Thano Lambrinos 42:44
So as you guys all know, we're managing change in an industry that's resistant to change. Onthe left, you'll see our enhanced and improved program to start to implement not only theplatform that I'm talking about, that's going to be the foundation of the future of operations andhow we change things, but also how we're going to start to deploy anything across the portfolio in the built environment. And you look at a lot of this and may say, Well, you know, we've beenimplementing ERP systems and sets, things like that for years, this is a different environment.And this is a different game. And so we need to look at it differently and uniquely, but a lot of theprinciples are the same. So I'll go through some of the bullets of things that we've learned. Andthen I'll stop talking and we'll hand it over to the to the room for questions. The key thing thatyou need to do when you're trying to disrupt an entire off operating model, and what I thoughtwe did well was craft the narrative. And we told the story, but we didn't tell it over and overenough. And we needed to repeat ourselves until the business told us to shut up, we get it andcould repeat it back to us in the same language that we use and actually believed in it. So that'sone thing that we're aggressively working on is continually trying to evangelize the message.standardizing the scope and process and how we engage the end users, it was a bit differenteverywhere. And so we need to create more consistency there, which is where the programmanager on the left comes into play, and really defining what that clear roadmap looks likeacross the portfolio across the different asset classes. And when we're hoping to realizedifferent milestones around centralization, for example, we're building a centralized operationcenter right now, where we expect all of our folks to come together and manage an entireportfolio regardless of asset class. We need to better define how we're going to get there andwhat the outcomes of that are going to look like both for people at a personal level and for thebusiness.

Thano Lambrinos 44:42
I talked about creating sponsors and change champions up and down the chain. I've alreadytalked about that. But what we have done is formed what we call our digital building lead groupto drive the organization folks that we've selected and folks that have risen their hands andreally bought into this entire approach. I will say Is that we've got folks that really get it out of thegate and understand that this is the way things are going and believe in it and embrace it, wehave a larger group of folks that are on the fence. And we've got folks that, you know, think thatwe're absolutely insane for even trying this. So, you know, the, the the importance of this digitalbuilding lead group is to get those middle folks over, and then have the people on the far otherend of the spectrum decide, are they on the bus? Or is one of my colleagues likes to say, areyou on the bus, or are you under the bus. And so we're getting there soon. But it's a matter ofgetting all of these folks really believing in what we're doing first, before we start running peopleover communications and stakeholder engagement, I talked about that regularly and gettingfeedback. Feedback isn't a bad thing. Criticism isn't a bad thing, as long as it comes from theright place, which for the most part with our group, it does fulsome training and support is agiven both internally at our organization, but from the vendors that are supporting us. And ameasurement plan is critical. So again, the program manager defines all of this and helps to runit and measure it with the site teams and with our teams and management, not just adoption,and how folks are using various platforms and engaging with technology, but the performance ofthe platform itself. And then sustainment plan and putting governance in place that's led by theprogram manager. So we I like to move super fast. And sometimes I just go and don't really lookaround me and think and that gets us so far. But you know, in this case, we're not completelydoubling back. But I've had to throw it in reverse and back up a little bit and take some lumpsand reimagine the process so that we can really accelerate into the future. So again, I'm not perfect, I'm certainly certainly not perfect, and probably not even near the best in this industry ofwhat I do. There's folks that are way better than what I do. And I'm constantly learning like youare and I hope that I know, it's only been 20 minutes, but some of the things that I yelled at youover the last 20 minutes have resonated and can help you as you try to implementorganizational change, especially when it comes to implementing technology in the builtenvironment. So thanks for listening to me ramble.

James Dice 47:22
All right, thank you, Thano. It's awesome. There's lots of people in the in the chat saying howmuch they love some of these quotables like Thano quotable love that quote, especially theback of the hand, one, get the back of the hand and the cloud. I love that. So I'm going to startus off with questions that I'm going to take we have a lot of them in the chat that I'm going tokind of prioritize according to which ones are sort of about this topic versus general fan ofthoughts. First question I have is the way we teach use cases in our foundations course. There'sa lot of students here and I want to ask one question for them. Before we go into the membersquestions. The way we teach use cases is to define a user persona, and then define that userpersonas workflow. And then how will technology improve that workflow? Right? So can you talkabout how you've kind of taken the use cases that you've defined for this program and sort ofthought about how to start integrating them into their the people's workflows?

48:23

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that the way that you described is exactly what we did some fouryears ago, almost now when we started building out our digital building playbook. And that is toidentify the various different personas across the different asset classes and use types and andlook at their daily journey and different elements of their journeys. So we created personasaround the person that lives in the building, the person that's visiting that person that lives in thebuilding, the contractor that's coming in to do work, the property manager, the security person,you know, so on and so forth. And all of the different user journeys and environments thatpeople would find themselves in. And then from there, we created use cases, not necessarilyagainst the persona, but within categories within each of those personas, because there aresome crossover use cases. Security's a great one, that helping people easily gain access isrelevant both to somebody who lives in the building, both to somebody who's visiting thebuilding, and contractors that are working there, etc, etc. And, and have n defined all of thosedifferent use cases in those different categories, customer experience, security, maintenance,visitor management, parking all of those different elements, and then align them back to theoverall business drivers that you saw on that second or third slide that I shared, that talkedabout what value would it bring to the business? Is it savings? Is it customer experience? Is itsustainability? Is it more than that? And use that to prioritize our use cases to figure out whatwas what was most valuable to the org and then started to identifying started to identify whereto technologies would come into play to streamline those, those user journeys and contribute tothose use cases.

James Dice 50:06

Awesome. So when you think about the lumps you've taken, or did you say thumps, they saidone of the two what sort of workflows have been most difficult to get people that are used todoing things one way, get them to change how they're doing things?

Thano Lambrinos 50:23
You know, exactly what we were talking about was probably the biggest is starting to get folks tocentralize the way that they work in in one platform and do command and control and createsequences and do things in a platform that may not be entirely familiar to them, or may not workentirely the way that they're used to when they've been working with ABC building automationsystem for the past 15 years and seen at every iteration of it. So that's been a big one. Andagain, that goes back to change management and people and training and buy in. There havebeen, you know, there's been a lot of difficulty around access and access control. That's been avery fluid space with companies coming in and failing. And we've taken some lumps onselecting some of the players that ended up being the wrong players. But thankfully, our verymodular approach to technology to our technology stack allowed us to rip and replace some ofthese vendors as they failed. So yeah, so those are two that kind of really come top of mindthat, that, you know, anything that has to do with your operations team, or your property teamsthat disrupt the way that they're used to doing things, especially when they've been used tothem for the past 20 years is a tough go, even if it's better. And that's, that's one of the lumpsthat I dumped some lumps that I took is that even though it's, it's undeniably better, what we'relooking at accomplishing and deploying, it doesn't mean people want to do it. Right.

James Dice 51:56
Right. That gets it the fourth category in the poll. I know it's best, just listen to me, follow mealong. So Matt, again, I'm kind of skipping, I think there's a lot of great questions in here. Butdue to time, I'm going to focus on the change management sort of questions. So Matt White'sasking curious how you would approach the stakeholder engagement piece differently for earlieradoption in the program? In other words, would you involve them in the use case definition KPIdefinition up front? Rather than, you know, trying to engage them later? After all that's alreadydefined?

Thano Lambrinos 52:33
Yeah. And I, so we did. But I think the problem that we had is that when we engage the team,we selected, you know, we can't have the entire company participate in use case development.So we selected folks across the country and across the platform, that were leaders that werealso critics so that we would have some MCs in the room to help us define what the use casesand the KPIs look like. And I think what we did wrong is that continuous stakeholderengagement. So we did that a while ago, and we started implementing it on a lot of projects.And when it came time to really start rolling out the platforms that were going to support thisoperations of the future idea. We just assumed that everybody remembered what we did a whileago, and that everyone was still on the same page. And off we go, which was kind of dumb onmy part, but it happens. So what we really could have done was reiterate, done morestakeholder engagement. And as much as I like to drive with my foot on the gas all the way untilI drive into something and the car explodes. Or the engine overheats, and dies, I could have, you know, feathered the pedal a little bit with respect to how fast we moved and focused moreon getting buy in from the stakeholders and spending as much time with the carrot before westarted to move to the stick. And we're not even necessarily at the stick yet, though. There'selements of it coming out. I would just say that, you know, the approach, I think was still sound itwas the repetitiveness of that approach the the evangelizing of the messages and repeating ofthe narratives and continually engaging the stakeholders.

James Dice 54:13
Brilliant. Okay, next question is around the trust and is asking from a local vendor perspective.So local contractors, mostly integrators, that some of them fail as you sort of made this transitionin terms of meeting your expectations for this new model. You can imagine the local contractorsare used to a certain way of doing things want to be in control want to have more scope thanyou? You know, maybe they were taken away from them from what they had before. Can youtalk about that and whether that's an opportunity for them, or is it just always painful?

Thano Lambrinos 54:48
I think it's often an opportunity for them if they change their way of thinking. So we as part of theearly development process and continually iterate on this create Well, what is our preferredvendors list from a manufacturer perspective where we often and regularly evaluatemanufacturers in all different categories, building automation, security, lighting, etc, to align withthe tech stack that we've built to ensure that their platforms are built on principles of openness,open API's, open licensing, open maintenance, etc, etc. And we booted out a lot of folks. Sowhat we're challenged with is legacy, that's infrastructure that still remains from a manufacturerperspective. And yes, to your point, certain system integrators that still don't get it. But what Ithink we've done a good job of is say, Look, this is the new way that we're working. And if youwant to work with us, this is what we're doing. And if you want to fight, we'll throw you out. Right,and it's, it sounds very harsh, but it's the only way that we can do things and the the SI is thatreally get it go, Okay, if I work with quadreal, in this fashion, that actually opens up opportunitiesfor me, because, and I can say this from experience, because this is what we're doing when wesee system integrators, controls, contractors, etc, that really understand what we're doing andwant to help serve us, we bring them into all kinds of projects and projects that they may nothave been in before, and maybe not even in regions that they've been in before and see if wecan stretch their boundaries, because we know that they'll deliver for us. So I think, you know, itis a challenge with some that are set in their ways. But there is big opportunity for those that areinterested in thinking differently and really want to serve the customer in a different way. Yes,you're on a shorter leash, and no, you can't lock us in. But if you deliver service, you're notgoing anywhere. So I think it's an opportunity.

James Dice 56:48
Okay, Bobby's asking how you're doing device management. So before it would be done, youknow, on the system of record of what it used to be building automation system, access controlsystem, whatever. Now you're putting this platform on top. So how are you managing devicesnow.

‍Thano Lambrinos 57:04
So what we've effectively done, and we may be even evolving beyond this, at some point is thetraditional systems still remain, but in a very, very skinny format. So think building automation,no graphics, you know, list of devices in kind of a very rudimentary format, you know, think dosbefore Windows, if you will, is kind of the approach that we're taking with the core systems, justin case we move or lose, for some reason, the overlay and the command and control layer,where we're doing most of the work now, we still have some way to control centrally withoutgoing to the controller level. So we're managing so the device management is still technicallydone through the base platform, but it's validated through the overlay or the what we call theintegrated building management platform, or IBMP layer. So when we deploy, we have a certainset of requirements. And in our playbooks, there's an entire data management strategy thattalks about nomenclature and metadata. That I'm actually is a very bit of a bit of a tangent, I'mconsidering open sourcing, because there still doesn't exist, anything that satisfies our needs,we created something, we spent a lot of money creating it. But I think it may serve the greatercommunity and help serve us better even in the long run as more contractors and integratorsstart to adopt. But you know, so there's still some layer of tradition in the way that we'remanaging devices. But we're moving into a more central supervisory layer. But that is certainlythe validation layer when it comes to adding new devices and managing devices as we goforward.

James Dice 58:46
So Isaac says, I love the quote about getting institutional knowledge from back of the hand ofthe cloud, how have you guys engaged in the broader succession planning, like determining astaffing plan after after the operators retire?

Thano Lambrinos 58:59
Yeah, it's a great question. And, you know, what we've really done is ramp up our internprogram, we have to start at the source folks coming out of school, young operators that aremanaging buildings that are not yet tainted by the status quo and not yet tainted by the theforeman, journeyman type of met approach where they teach you everything and then you getstuck with the old ways. So we're identifying so we're going across the existing platform andbelieve it or not, some of the some of the quote unquote old guys are some of the mostinnovative folks in the organization and actually more interested in pushing the platforms theintegration in this new way of thinking. And I think a lot of it has to do with them wanting to leavea bit of a legacy to say, Hey, I was part of this and I pass down all of my knowledge and Ienabled the folks in the future as I rode off into the sunset, but what we're looking at from apardon me succession perspective is multi pronged interns as I mentioned ident To find folks inthe organization that are young and up and coming, that can take leadership roles in the future.And then also, as mentioned, identifying some of those older guard folks that buy in and believein what we're doing that will communicate it down and help to spread the message across

Lee Hodgkinson 1:00:15the org. Very cool.

James Dice 1:00:18
Next question is from Hannah, Hannah. I'm not quite grasping what you're trying to say. I'mwondering if you could unmute and just ask it live.

1:00:26

Yeah. So Thano, you basically said about repeating your message to your stakeholders untilthey're able to repeat it back to you in the language that you wanted to talk to them about. And Iwas just wondering if you ever considered using that language to try and communicate it tothem?

Thano Lambrinos 1:00:40
I don't think it's the length that I may have misspoke. It's not necessarily a language problem. It'smore a what's the word I'm looking for? Like unaligned messaging? No, you know it? No, it'smore, you know, when you're told something a million times, eventually, you can say it back tothem. But if you're told it once, it just kind of goes away, I think about it in the same way youthink as a, think of a company's values, right? If I asked most people around the call, I couldprobably bet that most don't wouldn't be able to repeat the company's values, because it's notconstantly delivered to them on a daily basis. Whereas, you know, we did some training, this isa bit of an aside, but we did some training with the four seasons, they carry all of their the folksthat work at those hotels carry the company values and a card in their breast pocket. So at anytime, they can pull it out and refer to it and they are often asked what are the company's values,and they can repeat it instantly. And so I think that's what I meant by that not so much the styleof language or the way that we deliver the messaging, but just to ingraining. That's what I was.That's the word I was looking for having it ingrained in the way that they think and work everyday.

Lee Hodgkinson 1:01:49Okay, thank you. Okay,

James Dice 1:01:54
Rubens asking, can you share how you see the workflow of a central operating center? whooperates it? What do they do? What do they deliver? And did you say that? Are you guys doingthat? Or is this we're building,

Thano Lambrinos 1:02:08
we're building one out right now. And to be honest, and open, we're basing a lot of that workflowaround what our friends at bedrock are doing in Detroit, and I'm sure many of you are familiarwith, they built out a central operating center, where a number of folks go at the beginning of theday, give them the opportunity to see what's going on across the portfolio across the variousdifferent buildings across asset classes, and then troubleshoot from that central location ordispatch is required. I think that you know, with everything going mobile, a lot of this stuff can bedone mobile, but the idea of the central operation centers borrowed from them, but also fromutilities, where I've been in a number of utility operators where they have massive, centralizedoperating centers and can see and can see their portfolio, I guess, have electrical assets or what have you, across the region and can troubleshoot. And, and I think that the the opportunitywith the centralization is to physically and as much as I know, we've been going remote and allthis stuff. I'm here in the office today, I come every day, because there's a lot of value inphysically getting together. So if we have a centralized, whether it's regional, or multiple,regional, and, and national, get folks together to really help each other out as they troubleshootthrough issues, do as much as we can remotely leveraging the tools and technologies we've putin place. And dispatching go to sites or get folks to go to sites as need be. That's kind of the waythat we've envisioned it. And we've modeled it after others before us that have done it better. Soit's not an idea that we have that's at all unique, most of my ideas aren't unique, I usually juststeal stuff from people that are smarter than I am. And this is one example of that, where, wherewe've taken those ideas and those workflows and are working on implementing themappropriate to the organization in the way that we're set

James Dice 1:04:01
up. Awesome. All right, Adams looking for a specific example of a case when your objectiveswere accepted by the stakeholders, but met with resistance from the frontline and how you wereable to overcome that resistance and get everyone to buy in.

Thano Lambrinos 1:04:20
Yeah, that's a great question. And I've got a pretty good story around that. It's actually one of thetowers that I showed you. There was an old guard type fella, I was about to call himcurmudgeonly, but I'm not gonna say that. So anyway, he was an old guard type felt very, verysmart cat ran that building like his house, and knew everything about it and everything that webrought to him where he was like this. Like there's I don't need this. This is junk. I don't needthis. It's not going to help me this is the way I do this. We and this is where we were successfuland what we should have done a little more. I'll take One step back, when we succeeded withthis person that I'm talking about, we just imagine that telling the story would make everyonejump on board. But we actually have to take the time in the same fashion that we took with himto get him where we wanted him to be on his own volition, we need to do that with everybody.So what effectively we did is just spend time with the person in respect and understand thestatus quo that he was operating in and respect and understand the fact that he was actuallydoing a really good job operating the building, and start to, you know, work with him, and helphim to understand how the things that we were trying to do, would actually improve his life on adaily basis. And little by little chipping away, we got him to come around to the point where hewas probably our biggest one of the biggest critics of everything we did. He now uses all theplatforms and the data from the platforms on a daily basis. He retro Commission's has beenbuilding us using the functional testing, we have tools we have weekly, if not more frequently, hegets such a kick out of all of this and is managing the building better is creating theseefficiencies and driving the savings. And we did in this this is one of the feathers not in my cap. Iwasn't the one who was leading it. It's the team that I have working with me that is absolutelyfantastic at what they do. But to the point where he presented to the entire company. And hepresented the fact that I was skeptical, and this is what I thought coming in. And the teamworked with me and I worked with the vendor. And now this is what it allows me to do, I can dothis, I can do that. It saves me time here, it saves me time there, I would never been able to do this before. Now I can do all of these tasks and run all of these tests that I was never able to dobefore I can do it in minutes. It used to take me weeks. And and he's one of our if not ourbiggest supporter. So I think at the end of the day, it's about, it's really about people, right? It'sabout respecting people in the roles that they have. It's about respecting the fact that, you know,you'd hope that you've put them in a position that they're in because they do a really good joband working with them and spending time with them and showing them how what we're trying todo is meant to improve their lives and not just add additional tasks. So we're really excited aboutthat. And that's one that we absolutely took from from zero to hero. So that was that one's thatone we really enjoy talking about. Yeah, that's awesome. It's an awesome story.

Rosy Khalife 1:07:20
question for you Thano. So I use, I'm just trying to from the perspective of the audience, there'sso many things you're saying everything sounds like it takes a lot of time. And it sounds like a lotof effort time like money, you know, investment. And I think for some of these folks like it feels alittle bit overwhelming. So I'm curious, is there one thing that you feel contributed the most out ofall the things you said like listening tours and like meeting with them in person? And like, isthere? Is there one thing that you would say like this had a lot of ROI for us it had a big impact?Because you're saying a lot of things, and it's great, but it's a lot?

Lee Hodgkinson 1:07:55Yeah, I

Thano Lambrinos 1:07:57
mean, so I think the biggest thing, which is kind of contradictory to a lot of things that I'm saying,the biggest thing is getting senior management support. If you're sea level and president andexecutive management team don't believe in what you're doing that push back from thefrontlines will kill everything you're doing immediately because you don't have support up ordown. Thankfully, we had a lot of top down support. So there was a lot of patience and interestin overcoming the objections and spending the time and money to work on stakeholderengagement to get them to come around. But I think that was one of our biggest enablers. Soand then I guess the second part to that is I'll go back to talking about engagement, the biggestpart of of the success at the frontline level is engaging them in and then you know, reaching intothe bag to grab the stick with it says CEO on it, when they really really don't want to comearound. But we try to use that as as as little as we can. So it's really been about top unanimoustop down support, executive management, senior management and below to support us toenable us and then stakeholder engagement on the front line and then having the stick in thebag if you need to.

Lee Hodgkinson 1:09:18Thank you. Yeah, great question.

James Dice 1:09:22

There was a question around finding a vendor for a single pane of glass. They don't talkedabout that on the podcast with me about a year and a half ago. So go back and take that up andlisten to how he talked about selecting a vendor

Thano Lambrinos 1:09:35
in five seconds, write your specification, send it out to the world and don't accept anything lessthan what you want. And sometimes it'll work and sometimes it won't, but in this case it did.

James Dice 1:09:49
Can you talk about translating the benefits of this program into commercial models? This is fromthe VEC from JLL. I think he means the business case and sort of mapping missed twooutcomes, financial outcomes.

Thano Lambrinos 1:10:03
Yeah, for sure. So, as mentioned on the one of the earlier slides, where we put the businesscase, together with the asset management team, we looked at, it's tough to look at anythingother than the the things that are easy to quantify things like energy, things like maintenance,cost reduction, and things of that nature. So we looked at kind of what the buildings profile was.And this made it even more difficult, actually, because when we were doing these businesscases, we were in, you know, the middle of COVID, which was not a reasonable operatingenvironment. So we had to go back quite a few years, or a couple of years, at least before to getkind of more realistic operating numbers. And then, and then looked at what the opportunitieswere with, whether it was FTE optimization, things like energy, which everybody talks about, butit's an easy one. Things like looking at all the service contracts, and how we can optimize theservice contracts, and then look at some of the softer things like, what does it mean, when wesave 1000 hours of runtime a year on a given piece of equipment, to when it's capital upgradeshould be if we can defer by 234 years that has material value. So we looked at all the differentfacet facets, worked with our with worked with our property teams and our asset managementteams to map all this stuff out to build the business case. So we took you know, real informationin real operating environments and, and what what the opportunities and benefits we werestarting to see where and map them out long term to create the business case. But the last thingI'll add is there is some element of faith. Right? The example I like to use is, you know, when theBlackBerry first came out, did any of your companies actually do like a business case on howmuch more productive you'd be? If you had your email in your hand? My guess would beabsolutely not. They just believed and looked and said, you know, if we have everythingavailable to us at the tip of our fingers, it'll make us a more efficient and more productivecompany. And then it works out at the end. And I think that there's some element of that thatneeds to be taken when you're looking at these operational model changes, some, but thereneeds to be some bits rooted in reality,

Lee Hodgkinson 1:12:14
where you just decide and do it. Yeah. Awesome.

James Dice 1:12:17

Well, I think that's all the time we have been i You have to be worn out by these questions. Whatyou're doing every day, thanks for letting us fire questions that you almost. And thanks forcoming on and telling us what you're working on.

Thano Lambrinos 1:12:34
Now, thank you guys for having me, always happy, James to join, you guys are really leadersand helping to move the industry forward. So selfishly, anything that I can do to contribute tothat. So I can point to others who are, you know, leveraging and implementing similar strategies.So I can tell our C suite that I told you so that I knew I knew this would work. I will happily takeso. So thanks a lot.

James Dice 1:13:01
I want to feel alone. That's right.

James Dice 1:13:03
All right. See you all next month. And we'll, we'll throw the recording up on this. And we'vestarted to add transcripts and summary notes. So if you take a look at those and give us somefeedback, we'd be much appreciated, because it does take some time to do for you.

Rosy Khalife 1:13:20
Alright, time to get together is at our subject matter expert, which is on May 16. And cry who ishere somewhere he wants to wave ICU, he will be presenting on how to leverage buildinginformation modeling to improve smart buildings. So that's happening may 16, you should havegotten an invite. So I hope you can join us.

James Dice 1:13:39
Thanks, Rosie. James. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Thanks, everybody. So yeah,

Rosy Khalife 1:13:52
I know you did great. You killed it. Everyone loved your presentation. So

Thano Lambrinos 1:13:57
just sticking around and scroll through some of these comments here.

Rosy Khalife 1:14:00
I'll send them to you. I saved the chat for you. So

Thano Lambrinos 1:14:04
yeah, if there's any questions that we didn't get to, I'm happy to share offline. So yeah, if youcan send that to me and I'll go through them.

Rosy Khalife 1:14:10
Okay, I will thank you again. This was really great. I hope you got something out of it as well.

Thano Lambrinos 1:14:14
I did. I did. Thank you very much. All right. Bye.

Rosy Khalife 1:14:17 Bye, everyone. Thank you.