What Building Owners Really Want From a CMMS

Hey Friends,

The Buyer<>Vendor Symposium was, according to many, the highlight of NexusCon 2024. We wanted to bring the transformative nature of that symposium into our online events, so last week, we tried something new: the Category Roundup.

In a Category Roundup event, we select a technology category from The Nexus Marketplace that building owners want to purchase. We set the ground rules for the discussion by defining the category and what capabilities a product must have to fit into that category of The Nexus Marketplace. 

Then, we create intimate breakout rooms where building owners chat exclusively with other building owners, vendors with vendors, and service providers with service providers. These peer-to-peer conversations let us cut the bullshit and try to spur technology adoption by crowdsourcing requirements and obstacles. Finally, we bring the group back together and do a moderated report out — so each group can hear a concise breakdown of the challenges and opportunities the other roles see within the category.

For our first Category Roundup, we focused the conversation on Maintenance Management (CMMS) and Digital Asset Registers (click those links for our definitions). We heard from dozens of building owners at NexusCon who were interested in purchasing these technologies to support their operational efficiency. We’re currently gathering requirements from multiple building owners (for free) and turning that into an RFI that we’ll send to all vendors who sell these technologies. We’ll share the results with the building owners (so they can make more informed purchasing decisions) and host a free buyers guide webinar in January to cap off the deep dive into the technology category.

Enough about the process… the peer-to-peer conversations during the Roundup between building owners, vendors, and service providers trying to use these technologies for good were inspiring, energizing, and transformative. Let’s dive into the key themes we heard from each role.

What are Building Owners Saying About CMMS?

We had a breakout room full of over a dozen building owners, including organizations like Amazon, Lockheed Martin, Morgan Stanley, Woodbourne, The RMR Group, and several prominent universities. Here are the common themes:

Outsourced Maintenance Adds Complexity

Nearly all building owners hire service providers for at least a portion, if not all, of their facility maintenance. That means there may be competing CMMS applications — the one the service provider uses and the one the building owner uses. Suddenly, critical data about your building and its maintenance is stored in your service provider's CMMS. Building owners expressed the risk of being captured by vendor lock-in because they don’t have access to, for example, the results of the last preventive maintenance visits to their portfolio of 1,000 air handling units. Service providers may claim that the data belongs to the building owner, but how will the building owner gain access to it if they fire the service provider?

A Vision of Tying Asset and Maintenance Information Together

One building owner summarized this point best: “The enhancement in CMMS that you see today is moving from just managing maintenance to also managing assets. That’s the connection of the digital asset register to maintenance scheduling. This means connecting maintenance tasks to a physical asset that somebody went out and serviced so you can learn how efficient your technicians are and how efficient your assets are. This is the link that isn’t always happening when the building owner isn’t responsible for maintenance.”

A CMMS Should Be a CMMS, Not Everything Else

There was a shared sentiment of frustration that every application tries to be the single-pane-of-glass (SPoG) for these building owners. Vendors that lean into the breadth of their offering instead of the depth of their offering become a jack of all trades, master of none. These building owners said they want best-in-class maintenance management, not maintenance management as an afterthought to your 25 other application offerings. 

Here’s how one building owner put it: “We prefer to use point solutions that are best-in-class and lean on our technology team to do the integrations and aggregate the data into executive-level views and operations views. So we don’t want to use a work order system to see work order volumes across our 3,000 assets; we’ll pull that into a data layer and build a Power BI dashboard.”

For the more sophisticated building owners, APIs have simplified moving data from one place to another, and with that, ownership of the task has moved to an in-house role. Still, plenty of other building owners seek support in getting their data into one place. Vendors need to look in the mirror and determine if their focus is to sell best-in-class applications or act as integration experts for their customers.

What are Service Providers Saying About CMMS?

Service providers like McKinstry, MacDonald Miller, LONG, and EllisDon were among many who joined the conversation about CMMS. Here is what they had to say.

Stuck in the Middle of the Mess

With a shrinking workforce of control technicians and mechanical technicians, the job of responding to the operational needs of buildings is becoming more hybridized. Buildings are serviced by a complex combination of service providers, their own subcontractors, and the facilities management team employed by the building owner. Yet everyone uses different CMMS applications, so service contractors have to untangle data between their own CMMS and the customer's CMMS.

There is so little maturity in the integration between a service provider’s CMMS and a building owner’s CMMS that many building owners are avoiding any sort of integration or data sharing between CMMS platforms. 

Why can’t we bridge the gap? One reason that was brought up in both the service provider and the vendor breakout rooms is the enterprise level of many CMMS applications that building owners use. Sometimes, these systems aren’t even owned by the facility management team because they do so much more than just building maintenance and operation. They act as the system of record for thousands (or millions) of assets, so having external service providers work with the system can be a headache. One vendor mentioned this experience: "I think a lot of CMMS falls apart at big organizations because they’re tracking things that don’t provide data, like windows and doors and desks, things that just don’t matter to the service provider from an operational perspective.”

Understanding the Assets is Crucial to the Service Contract

Some service providers mentioned service contracts they have with their customers for up to 30 years. At that long timeframe, some of the burden of capital management falls on the shoulders of the service provider. For example, when do warranties end? When does refrigerant expire? What is the life expectancy of all the motors and pumps? The success of contracts of this size depends on the service provider having accurate access to a digital asset register: a place they can find all the information they need on the physical assets associated with building operations. 

Another service provider mentioned building massive enterprise contracts where the asset count directly dictates the price. For example, do you want the 10-boiler service package or the 100-boiler service package? With this pricing model, accurate asset counts from a digital asset register mean accurate contracts and quicker proposals.

A Sea of Untapped Opportunity

The most common disposition among the service providers was a sense of how many opportunities could come from solving the broken system of intertwined CMMS applications and their data. The biggest obstacle is the (valid) distraction of everybody’s day-to-day job. Facility managers have larger backlogs than they know what to do with, and service providers survive by keeping technicians as utilized as possible. So, who’s got the time to stop what they’re doing and try to innovate?

All three rooms (building owners, service providers, and vendors) discussed the lack of integration of the CMMS into building automation systems (BAS) and fault detection and diagnostics (FDD) applications. Within those BAS and FDD integrations lies a massive opportunity for technician enablement: the ability for a CMMS to not only tell the technician what their next job is but also give them the tools to do it really well and really fast. 

As opposed to a technician receiving a work order that says there are warm rooms on the 10th floor, imagine if the work order instead mentioned that warm rooms on the 10th floor were probably due to a leaky chilled water valve that was installed 20 years ago and driven by a 3-year-old Belimo actuator with model number XYZ1234567, and that technician could temporarily control the valve and associated pumps remotely from their phone. Game changers.

What are Vendors Saying about CMMS?

The vendor room was packed with many vendors and consultants representing various smart building technologies. There was representation from actual CMMS vendors, like Facilio, and plenty of other players trying to tailor their offering to work best with CMMS applications, like KODE Labs, InSite Intelligence, and Brainbox AI. Here’s what they discussed:

Successful Integration is All About Change Management

Among the vendors who didn’t sell CMMS but specialized in other application-layer software, it was common for their customers to simply not ask for or be ready to integrate other application-layer software and the CMMS. Although there are exceptions to this, one energy management software provider estimated that only 10% of their customers were integrating CMMS with energy management.

When the group dug further into why integration of CMMS is so rare, the common theme was the difficulty of change management for the stakeholders. Each of these vendors strives to allow people to start and complete their jobs with the software application as a natural and helpful extension of that. As one vendor put it, “Every platform needs a close-the-loop solution. People are so busy with their day-to-day jobs that if they can’t easily close the loop with your software, it becomes a change management problem.”

Another vendor shared the story of a healthcare provider who started using CMMS to triage the facilities team's work orders. Through a basic walkthrough of the facility, the vendor could see significant mechanical and electrical maintenance issues that weren’t being addressed. When they dug into why this was happening, they found that technicians had lost the autonomy to make any judgments about what maintenance was a high priority; they were hamstrung by their inaccurate digital work order backlog. Technicians were also less likely to report on issues they observed because they knew it would add to their insurmountable workload. 

Cleaning Up the Signal-to-Noise Ratio

Just like the service providers, the vendors discussed that integration between CMMS and other applications could transform your work order backlog into a data-driven task list that could improve technician enablement through better information and insights on the work to be done.

However, the unfortunate reality is that humans just can’t process that much information. A poorly thought-out integration between a CMMS and other building systems can miss the mark and just make things more noisy for the human with a job to be done, ultimately resulting in lower adoption rates of the tool. When your adoption rates are low, the CMMS no longer becomes the system of truth, and the process begins to fall apart.

One vendor shared the story of a major organization that turned on a data-driven analytics system and ended up having to shut it down for 3-4 months to develop a more robust work order process to support all the new insights they were receiving on building issues and performance. The lesson here is that success depends on the project team creating a well-thought-out way to mitigate noise and prepare for the inevitable backlog that builds up when work orders become proactive and data-driven.

Conclusion

So many experts trying to learn from one another and make a difference gives us the chills. When we at Nexus Labs took a minute to digest all of these perspectives, we distill them down into three main takeaways to accelerate the adoption of data-driven CMMS in our buildings:

#1 Opportunity Knocks

Not many building owners have a CMMS that proactively schedules work orders based on a digital asset register, informs and enables the technicians through the integration of FDD and BAS, and effectively supports both internal and external maintenance teams. Solving this problem can save a lot of dollars for a lot of buildings, and all three of the breakout rooms believe this is possible.

#2 Stay in Your Lane and Be Good at It

All groups agreed that hardly any building owner or service provider is looking for a CMMS that tries to own everything and be the single pane of glass. The best CMMS platform is the one that does CMMS really well. Although important, data integrations in and out of the system are not the primary requirement.

#3 - KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid)

The trap door waiting at the front of your “ideal” CMMS solution is data overload, which overwhelms humans, and no one uses it. Simply put, a good CMMS is the one technicians will actually use and can actually close the loop with.

Want to Get Involved?

• If you are a vendor or a buyer who is interested in participating in our CMMS/Digital Asset Register RFI, hit reply here and we’ll make sure you’re a part of the process. The RFI will be sent out to vendors on December 9th, 2024.

• If you’d like to join in on future Nexus Category Roundups, sign up to be a Nexus Pro Member. Our next category roundup will be in January 2025.

• Finally, mark your calendars for January 23rd, 2025, when we’ll wrap up our deep dive into this category with our free Buyer’s Guide Webinar. 

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