#48 Dean Stanberry: Best Practices for Implementing FM Software

Episode #48

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Introduction:

Welcome to another episode of the modern facilities management podcast brought to you by flowpath. I'm your host, Griffin Hamilton. This is the show where I interview industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights into modern day facilities management, from hospitality, to commercial real estate, and everything in between, we'll learn what it really takes to succeed as a facilities manager. 

Griffin Hamilton  

Welcome to another episode of the modern facilities management podcast. Today's guest is coming live from Denver, Colorado. That is Dean Stanberry, Dean, how you doing?

Dean Stanberry   

Very good. It's good for a Monday, they say Monday is a lousy way to spend one seventh of your life, but it's not too bad.

Griffin Hamilton  

Love that. Well, Dean, before we jump into what we're going to be discussing in depth here today about software implementations and that purchasing process, want you to tell the audience who you are and how you got into facilities, and really what you've done throughout your career.

Dean Stanberry   

Okay. Well, I've actually had two careers, I really started out in IT and I spent about 20 years in working for one of the large telecom companies running data centers and working in their advanced technologies division. And towards the end of that I was working for the CIO, chief information officer and one day, the real estate group came around to all the business unit leaders and said, we’re going to give you back responsibility for the space that your department occupies. And so you need to get somebody to run that. And so he kind of looked over at me and goes used to run data centers that's kind of like facilities here. And so that was my accidental professional story of, that's how I first got into full time facility management. I asked him, I said, well, what do we got? And he goes, I don't know, go ask the real estate guys. And come to find out in that moment, I inherited 5 million square feet of administrative space, a million and a half square feet of data centers, and a bunch of people spread across 14 states.

Griffin Hamilton  

Easy first facilities gig, huh? 

Dean Stanberry   

Yeah. I knew critical infrastructure the data center side of it, but I've not really managed administrative space and so I decided that I needed to learn a little bit more about that. And that's where I came across the International Facility Management Association or IFMA. When I joined IFMA, I started learning a little bit more taking some of the classes getting some certifications and one day somebody asked me if I wanted to join a committee in with a local chapter, and I raised my hand and said yes, and that started me down a path of, I chaired some committees, I was chapter president of the Denver chapter, I've been on the IFMA Foundation Board of Trustees, I’m now the second vice chair of IFMA’s global board of directors. So on my way to being chairman of the board, and I chair IFMA’s government affairs committee, and I've also been very involved in our sustainability initiative. So chaired the environmental stewardship community, and I’ve done a lot of writing around climate change and the impact on facility management. So that kind of brings you up to date. Technically, I retired from a pay cheque last year but part of that was because when you're in the chairman's role, as I'm moving into, it's kind of a full time job, and I really didn't want to.

Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah, and it seems like you just from raise your hand once you've worked away, and now you're quite involved, to say the least, and just about everything surrounding IFMA’s, incredible story there. And I guess with that, you mentioned that you're next year taking over. When does that start?

Dean Stanberry   

Well, it'll be actually July of 2023. So in this July, I'll become first vice chair, and mid-year is when all of the turnover happens so next year, July of 2023 I will become chairman of the board and that's also in 2023, in September, we will have IFMA’s world workplace conference in Denver. So I get to be chairman of the board in my home city when we have our premier real workplace conference here in Denver. So that'll be unique. It's not unusual, though, because we've had at least one other chairman who was chairman of the board when they had world workplace in his city and that was Philadelphia.

Griffin Hamilton  

Very cool. Just curious. So in 2023, how long will that have made your involvement with IFMA?

Dean Stanberry   

Well, I joined in the last century, if that tells you anything. I think it was 1999 when I got involved, so it was close but I'll be about 24 years into it, I guess.

Griffin Hamilton  

Got it. Almost 25 years at IFMA, that's incredible. Well, like I've said, I appreciate the context there. And so what we're really going to be diving into is, like I mentioned earlier, purchasing different software and the process of implementing software. And so you mentioned, starting out in your career, you were more IT focused, and I imagine that's had a huge impact on the purchasing process you've been involved with, and just having that different perspective.

Dean Stanberry   

Yeah, it has. So when you look at systems, one of the downsides, I think, in facility management is that it's been more of a bricks and mortar profession. And only recently, and I mean within the last five to 10 years, have we seen really that transition to a digital facilities environment. So really, commercial real estate is the last industry to go digital, quite frankly. So it's kind of taken everybody based by surprise and people that have been in the profession for a while, really don't have a strong, technical underpinning of their skills and knowledge, it's not been necessary until now. So there's a lot of learning to be done to kind of bring people up to a baseline level of skills and knowledge. Because we're throwing some pretty sophisticated and advanced tools at him these days in terms of IOT, and sensors, and fault detection and diagnostics, and all of the interactions with other systems. So there's a lot to be learned there and certainly, if you want to take advantage of what these systems can do for you in terms of data analytics, how do you take raw data and turn it into information and then turn that information into insight? And so that's also part of my mission is, how do we bring up an entire industry, raise the bar in terms of that knowledge level?

Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah. I guess, looking at the entire purchasing process, and it can be overwhelming and to your point, there's a lot of folks in the industry that just haven't either made the purchase, or even use the technology before. So it can be overwhelming and almost to the point where you just don't want to embrace the capabilities of these different tools coming out. So what have you found to be best practices to start out the process? As you're doing the evaluation, because, like I said, it can be overwhelming look at all the different tools available, where do you begin and what are some best practices there?

Dean Stanberry   

Well, this really starts at the organizational level. So any business function doesn't matter facilities, anything must start with the process that that function will follow to accomplish its objectives. So once you have defined that process, then you determine do you have the right people in terms of skills and knowledge to execute the process and then lastly, you need to implement tools that will support the process and the people. Now many organizations attack this in exactly the wrong order, they start with the shiny new object, convinced that this tool is going to solve their organizational problems. But often what it means is you have a tool and now you're trying to force fit your process around the tool instead of the other way around and that's where a lot of people get sideways right off the bat. So understanding, do you have the right process and do you have the right people, then worry about getting a tool that supports them. Now, assuming that you have your process and your people sorted out, the next step would be really to draft a set of functional requirements to drive your tool evaluation. So as you're looking at tools, what are you looking at? How are you checking the boxes to see whether or not this meets your needs? This can be an issue for facility organizations because many of them really don't have business analysts skill set to develop those functional requirements. So most large corporations will have general business analyst positions to support the effort. And I kind of foresee that in facilities there's a need for a new position and just call it a facilities analyst for lack of a better term. Who needs to know about the facility management function and has knowledge of related business functions that they can actually fulfill this functional requirements role in helping define what those are. And in any event, the functional requirements really attempt to define what you will need the tool to do in terms of features, scope, scale and interoperability. So when drafting the requirements, you really look at what the ultimate organizational objectives are. The tool may, in fact, probably should be implemented in phases, because you're not going to go from zero to this full feature interoperable set of capabilities in one giant step, that that's a recipe for disaster too. What you do is to keep in mind that very few tools operate in an isolated silo today, they talked to other tools, you'll need to interoperate with finance and HR and fault detection systems, building automation system pick your other favorites that somehow come into play. But chances are, they're going to need to talk to other things. So part of those functional requirements is understanding what those needs are and it's not just what is the tool need to do, I need to track my assets, I need to know about my locations, I need to do work orders and maintenance scheduling. It's all of the above but what else does it need to do? Does it need to talk to the finance system? Are you tracking your maintenance costs and are you talking back and forth? What about people; do you need to know who your occupants are in your buildings? You get that typically out of an HR system. All of those kinds of things, working with procurement. Are you using procurement systems to acquire spare parts, supplies, those kinds of things? Can you automate those processes? So, that's what your functional requirements are intended to do is, lay out what are all of your aspirational needs of the tool? And then you can figure out well, where do I need to start? What are the two or three key functions that I want to start off with, and then build on it from there over time?

Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah, and I think that's a great point to make where you can't just, with one button, automate your entire processes, it is going to be a very slow, methodical process to having a tool and using it to its fullest capabilities there. And we'd like to use the crawl, walk run mentality where you have to start somewhere, but you can't be coming out of the womb just sprinting. And so you have to be very intentional with each and every step along the way.

Dean Stanberry   

Yeah. You got to remember, you're still running the business as you're going through these. And we use the analogy changing the wing on the 747 in flight. How do you do that, because you still have to perform your maintenance every day, you still have to keep track of all those things, you still have construction and projects going on all those things. So how do you do that when you're in the middle of trying to maybe either install or switch out a tool? So there's a bubble in there of resource requirements. So that's part of your implementation planning. And I think that's really where you want it to go next. What’s the importance of implementation planning, right? So implementing a new tool covers kind of a wide range of possible scenarios. For example, you may be operating two tools in parallel for some period of time until you can transition fully over to a new tool, or you may be implementing it from the ground up and all you're doing is taking data that you've only had in spreadsheets, and now putting it into a (inaudible 13:58) tool. Any of those scenarios can work, but it really takes careful planning and preparation of that workforce. What do you have going on and these are not 30 day projects. More like 18 to 24 months, if you do it, when you think about from the start to the actual habit stood up and running and you're now functioning on it. Because there's a lot of things that you need to look at. So there are several elements. The first one that I would advise people to look at is what standards will you have, so before implementing anything, you got to establish your data and procedural standards that you will enforce within the tool. That goes back to the first discussion of do you have a process that you're operating from? Now you need to reflect that into your tools. There's no real magic here. They're a container. They're a tin can that you're dumping all of your data in and you need to do it in a consistent, concise way, if you expect to get any business intelligence out of that data. And some people try to put too much on the tool as if there's some magic about it. They can give you a lot of good intelligence but what many will not tell you is all of the work that goes into setting that up, you got to set it up. So what data items must you track for example, in an asset record? And what are the list of assets you want to tack? Are you tracking carpet and flooring? Maybe not. Do you track the paint color on the walls? Probably not. Do you track light fixtures? Good idea in this day of energy efficiency. Do you track individual electrical outlets? Probably not. There's no real business benefit to that. So you have to kind of figure out what is the level of detail that you're going to be tracking and that should be documented when it comes up, actually write it down. What is your naming convention for your location records? So that when I'm looking at a set of records does it make any sense? Can I look at it and see a logical hierarchy to it, buildings, floors, rooms, spaces within rooms, those kinds of things. And what is your work order information requirement? What do you want to know about work orders? I want to know who did the work. I want some notes, how was it completed? I want to know what assets were involved. If you don't track what asset you were working on, how do you know what that history is on that asset? And so there's a lot of things that people tend to overlook when it gets to the work order level. Even down to how much labor time did you put in on it? What materials did you use? What was the cost of your parts and spare parts or third party services that you had to bring in? When do you do an asset condition assessment? And how will that be tracked? Quite often, that's part of your annual preventive maintenance schedules, I'm going to go work on this particular air handling unit, and I need to do a condition assessment on it so that I can track, where is it in its lifecycle? Is it doing better or worse than it should be at this point in its life? So all of those things are part of those standards. And those should be really finalized before you touch any of your data or start any data collection activities. Because otherwise, you're going to find yourself going out and you come back and you say, oh, I missed some stuff, I got to go back out again. It never happens. One of my favorite sayings is always we didn't have time to do it right but we always find time to do it over. And that's what you find in a lot of cases. Somebody rushes through an implementation, they didn't do it right and now you have to spend more money and time and effort to go back and do it again. And nobody likes that scenario and nobody wants to admit it was their fault. And another example is thinking about what data do you store about your assets? There's obvious things like the manufacturer in the model and the serial number, but what about installation date and the expected life in years? That's how you know how long what your lifecycle dates are on those assets is? What about warranty information? So, if you're getting work order on a something broke, is it still under warranty? Should be calling the installation company to come out and fix it instead of violating your warranty? What about asset criticality? Is this asset mission critical to your business? If this goes down, does it shut your business down? And specifications, things like motor sizes, amperages, volumes, voltages, fuel tank capacities, things like that. Those are all pieces of information that when you have a maintenance technician out in the field, and if they've got to try to figure out, do we have this part available, or I've got to go order something, that's information they need in order to make those decisions and make things happen. So it’s stuff that you got to do kind of right away.

Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah, and a quick note on that because that is something where, you just listed out a handful of different items that your data points that you can be collecting and reporting on eventually. But it's important to note that each and every organization is going to be different on what is important to them. But it is vital to have that understanding of what you're going to be using that data for. And that dictating what you're going to be collecting in real time and staying true to that and making sure as you mentioned earlier, having that standardized across the business,

Dean Stanberry   

Well, and most people, there are several roles that are involved in these tools. And the guys that do the maintenance in the fields will often say, well, this doesn't help me at all, I'm going well, it's not really about you, this is about how we're using that data later to be able to do an annual budget plan that says, how many assets do I have that are at end of life, and that I need to replace within the next budget cycle? That's where you get some of that data. Now as we're getting more and more concerned about energy efficiency, climate change, all of all of those types of things, understanding, what pieces of equipment do we have that are not the most energy efficient? And that we should be looking at changing out. Do we accelerate the replacement of that equipment? And what's the business benefit to that? Doing some work for the government, I use the example I said, what if you were able to look across the entire portfolio and say, I've got 2700 training rooftop units that are going to be reaching end of life in the next 18 to 24 months. Being able to go to train and say, I've got all this equipment that's reaching end of life, let's make a deal. That goes back to your purchasing. You have good facts and data. You know for a fact that it's going to be reaching end of life. Is it all 2700? Probably not. But you can go in and say, this is the numbers I'm working with. Let's talk about availability. Let's talk about what sort of models we're going to replace them with, so that you're doing in a planned not a reactive fashion.

Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah, absolutely. And it enables you to make these decisions and not on that gut feeling but having clean and just pure data is something that any executive is going to come to you and say this is one much appreciate it, but to require it for me as an executive do my job and for the business and the health of the business. So you mentioned earlier, the technician, and their vantage point on different tools that they're using and so beyond the choosing and the processes that the data that you're looking to collect, it goes into implementation training as well and having that being user based as well. What have you seen to be successful from a training and onboarding perspective with different stakeholders?

Dean Stanberry   

Well, before we go there, we didn't touch on the data migration piece. And that's…

Griffin Hamilton  

I'm jumping ahead. I'm getting antsy over here. 

Dean Stanberry   

Yeah, you're moving ahead. Well, let's talk about that because that's actually in my mind, one of the most critical components. It's not only the most critical element of the process, it's perhaps the most lengthy and time consuming. So primarily, this involves looking at your asset and location data, but people data's involved. But in my experience, I've never found an organization where their existing asset data was in good condition. You got to plan to perform field verification of your asset data to ensure that the data you're putting into the new tool is complete and accurate. So your first attempt would be to understand how complete your current asset data is, and what level of impairment do you have. What items are missing? Maybe you don't have installation dates, maybe you don't have the specifications. In the most recent project I worked on, they didn't have make-model or serial number. They just had that it was a pump. Pretty vague. You should attempt to understand that then this will help scope out the data collection effort that's required. If you plan on using mobile devices, it's a good idea to put barcodes and QR codes, that's a good time to go out and do that as well, because most modern tools are going to take advantage of the digital codes and really improve the productivity of your field operations. This is one of those planning and upfront activities, it's expensive, but it pays such dividends down the road. Because if you start off with bad data, you're producing bad reports, and you're giving your executives bad advice. So think about that, you can't produce good reports with bad data. 

Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah, absolutely. And that could be the, like you said, it's a very time consuming action item up front. But it is something that you can't really skip over as I tried to. The importance of that clean data going in and just starting out with that foundation is something to not take lightly, by any means.

Dean Stanberry   

Yeah. And you can try it, you can do it yourself, if you think you've got the right people to go out and do that, there are companies that you can bring in, there's lots of options. But the key point is that you cannot shortchange it or shortcut it. If you try to do just the quick and dirty job, you're going to be very disappointed in your ultimate results. And so you're investing a lot of time and effort in putting in a tool, often, which doesn't ever get changed out. It’s very difficult to move off of one platform to another, there's got to be a really compelling reason to do that. Because if you're a CFO, you're going to your CFO and saying, I want to change out to this new tool, and they're going to go, oh, okay, what's the benefit? Oh, you're giving me the same thing that the current tool does, it's just new. No. The answer is no, I'm not going to give you any money for that.

Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah. And I guess with that, going into that difficulty, and that transition, you mentioned that there are vendors out there that you can certainly rely on but that is something that you have to take the initiative there on what you put into the system, because it's difficult to just task that on someone else. But making sure that you have that clean data in from the get go is imperative.

Dean Stanberry   

Well, and that goes back to what I said that, facility management, as a profession doesn't necessarily have a strong technology background, they don't necessarily understand enterprise level systems and what it takes to put them in place. And so bringing the IT organization into the conversation along with procurement and everybody else, that helps but don't depend too much on, IT is not the one that's going to make your tool successful, they just make sure that it gets installed, and that the right security protocols are in place. But they don't understand facility management, they're not going to be able to produce reports that tell you what you need to know, for your portion of the business. And many people are under a misconception that that's a “IT’s” job, and it's really not. So dispel that myth right now.

Griffin Hamilton  

Well, real quick, going back into the point I was making earlier as far as the training and onboarding, because I did want to get your insight into that, because that is something else, that you can't just do a uniform training across the board, because there are different stakeholders that are using the tools in different manners. So walk through what that in an ideal world looks like.

Dean Stanberry   

Training is something that you will always see in an implementation plan but are often shortchanged at the end of the project. And in the crunch, to finish getting the tool implemented and move on, training gets cut short and generally incomplete. So what you end up with is you got a great new tool, new shiny tool and nobody knows how to drive. So you're left with an organization that's really unable to even use the basic feature of the tool, no less reaping the true business intelligence benefits out of it. So training needs to be sort of like put a shell around it and say, this is a must do we must do this in order to get those benefits out of it. And training really needs to be role based. So each role within the organization is trained in the features and the level appropriate for their job. They don't need to know everything about the tool maintenance technicians have very different set of meanings than a facility manager or a systems administrator. So we've got to remember too that no software system maintains itself. You need knowledgeable administrators to ensure that that system and its data are kept to up to date, audits must be performed to ensure that the ongoing completeness and accuracy of information being fit into the system from all of the organizational sources. Because as you probably well know, data really comes from a variety of places, it originates from a variety of places, new construction is happening, where does that new asset and location data come from and how does it get into the system? The guys in the field doing maintenance, they have to change out a motor, okay, who knows how to retire or decommission the old asset and put the new asset in, make sure that all of that asset information has been collected and put into that asset record. Same things like people, people come and go. How do you make sure that those people records are being updated so that now you have the most current technician data with that technician, you have their assigned craft, so that you know that this is an HVAC technician at this labor rate. So when you assign them work, that their hours now are being calculated so that you get the appropriate labor cost for that person. So all of those things play into that training, who's doing that? So someone from the facilities organization also needs to own this, it's got to have that organizational responsibility. And like I said before, it’s not IT. Someone within the facility organization needs to own that responsibility. We talked about it in terms of data governance, but this is another piece of it. It's that training that also ensures that your data governance or data compliance requirements are being met. Because if you don't train somebody on how to put records into the system, we all know where that goes. Tools don't make errors, humans make errors. So when everybody complains about the tool isn't working, tools working just fine. It's the human errors that caused all the problems every time. Occasionally, maybe something will go wrong when a system upgrade goes but those are easily fixed. It's the human errors that cause the long lasting problems.

Griffin Hamilton  

You mentioned the onboarding in the training process. I would be curious, because with technology evolving so quickly, that's something where it's not just alright, you're good, it's been a month and you've been “trained”. What is the ongoing training look like with these really technical tools that are coming out?

Dean Stanberry   

Well, training is something that's evolving, I think, in the industry. More and more, we see more video based training trying to do shorter, like I need to learn this particular task, and it's a three minute video. So you may go through a longer training where you kind of learn the basics of the tool, the navigation, how do I get around, where do I find things and more and more too it's also incorporating a lot of that self-help within the tool. So when I get to a function that maybe I haven't done before, I learned six months ago, and I forgot what I'm supposed to be doing, is there any embedded help in there that tells me, here's the steps you follow? Here's the data standard that you must comply with, and incorporating that stuff into the tool. So it's really a combination of the initial basic training and then as people move along and learn more about it, what else do they need to know in sorts, its incremental learning as they go along. And also that those reminders, how do I remember something that I hadn’t done for six months because I haven't needed to, but now I need to and I don't quite remember what I'm supposed to do next. Where do I find that? So in any event, there's lots of new ways of training and part of that is looking at the organization, how many different roles do you have to train on? Who needs to know what and when do they need to know it? A Facility Manager may need to know how to navigate the tool initially, what work orders are out there? They may not be need to worry about reporting for six months down the road till you've got enough data in there to actually do some reporting on. So again, do you bake that into the initial training or do you wait until there's a point in time when now they need to know about it, because they actually have some needs to start doing some reporting, some trending analysis and those kinds of things. And at the end of the day, still these are containers with a lot of raw data. So what individuals in the organization need to understand data analytics, being able to take raw data and do some of their own analysis on it, taking it outside of the tool, and looking for those insights. Because not any tool that I've ever seen does that all for you. You have to be able to do some self-service, you have to say, okay, give me the raw data, now, let me go in and start looking through it and looking for those anomalies or those, those aha moments that, so that we can start to take some action on. And again, a lot of people believe that somehow software magically does that. You can build functions into a piece of software to do just about anything, as long as the data is there. But for the most part, it's going to provide you with some of the basics. It's going to tell you well, how many work orders did you do last month, how many of them met their service level agreement dates, those are all really basic things. But now, if you want to say, okay, well, I got a pretty high rate of missing service level agreements, well, who missed them? Now you got to start digging in to say, who was the one that missed them? And is it the same person or is it everybody? That's where the analytics part comes in. And somebody has to own that, somebody has to take the initiative to go through and do those kinds of things. The tool isn't going to pick that out for you, and say, yeah, here's all your problems, go fix your organizational problems. There's no magic. When I worked in IT, we used to have a joke that said we had a parameter called RPM, which was read programmers mind. Doesn't exist.

Griffin Hamilton  

Great. Yeah. Unfortunately, that doesn't exist just yet but one of these days, maybe we'll see something that can come out and just solve all of our problems with a single click.

Dean Stanberry   

Oh, yeah, artificial intelligence is going to fix all of our problems.

, right?

Griffin Hamilton  

Exactly. Overnight too. Alright, Dean. So moving on from the training after you've implemented any sort of software here, software solution. Tell me a little bit more about the impact of where facilities management organization is just from a maturity level?

Dean Stanberry   

It's an interesting topic. It really relates to organizational culture and change management. But for the purpose of this discussion we’ll focus on maintenance maturity. So most organizations look at new tools in the hopes of improving their operations and maintenance performance. But however, the tool only reflects the organization's policies, strategies, standards and processes. So what do we mean when by maintenance maturity. There are several levels that you can look at, but it's actually fairly easy to determine where you are as an organization. And so I'll kind of run through them from lowest to most complete. The first level is really run to fail. Some organizations really don't have a formal strategy or a defined maintenance practices. So in most cases, they practice a run to fail strategy where things are just simply repaired or replaced when they break. And it's a strategy, not a good one, but it's a strategy. When you get into the more formal, the first place you hit is preventive maintenance. This is the most basic defined strategy where maintenance is really performed based on manufacturer's recommended schedule. It's not a bad strategy, but in some cases, you may be spending more time and money on maintenance that really doesn't necessarily need to be performed. Just because you're doing it by rote, it's Pavlov's dog, the bell rang and I went and changed the filter. That from there, you move into predictive maintenance. So predictive is really sort of adding a predictive element on top of your preventive maintenance capabilities. You move to a strategy where it's more of a proactive mode, you're performing tasks like vibration analysis or oil analysis that can provide some early warning for critical infrastructure that may be in decline. From there, you can move into condition based maintenance. This is a more advanced form of a maintenance strategy where you're using more telemetry to detect the need for maintenance or service. For example, a fuel tank monitor can tell you that a fuel level is dropped below the threshold where you want to be in that tank. And a well configured system can automatically generate a request to the fuel supplier to come and refill the tank. And there's many other options available when you start coupling it with a fault detection and diagnostics tool. Now, you really start getting some of those benefits of looking at conditions and sending or dispatching somebody out when you detect something that starts moving outside of its defined parameters. This also gets into what's now called monitor based commissioning. So when you detect a piece of equipment is starting to drift outside of its defined operational parameters, you can send somebody out or go make some adjustments to bring it back in track. So now you're basically operating at the commissioning level. What was the original design intent for this piece of equipment and are you keeping it operating at that level? The last one is reliability centered maintenance or RCM. And this is really the kind of pinnacle of maintenance strategies. But RCM is really labor intensive and require specialized personnel like reliability engineers and process engineers. This strategy is nearly not for every organization or every facility, but it's most suitable for really mission critical systems like nuclear power plants, hydroelectric dams, pharmaceutical manufacturing, hospitals. The focus is on analyzing any failure in a mission critical component, and determining how to eliminate or minimize the probability of it ever failing again. There's a lot of people that think they want to get to RCM but they really don't. For a standard office building, it's overkill. It's a point of diminishing return in terms of what benefit do you get out of it. But for certain operations, or critical manufacturing, where it's literally hundreds of 1000s of dollars a minute for downtime, you definitely want to make sure that assembly line or that manufacturing process does not halt, mid process and that it keeps running. So that's where you apply the RCM strategies, and there's a payback for that you can actually calculate it.

Griffin Hamilton  

On that note, though, it does go back into your previous notes of points where it's got to align with overall business objectives. And so it's not going to be uniform across the board, it is what does the overall business need?

Dean Stanberry   

Yeah, what's the demand? If you're familiar with ISO international standards, there's now a standard for facility management, ISO 41,000, just like there is for asset management, but almost all ISO standards, when you look at the language and you learn the language of how to read the standards, they refer to the demand organization. The demand organization is typically the corporation or the executive branch, if you will. And that's where it defines what is the needs of the business? What strategies are we going to follow and any of the subordinate organizations really must align with those strategies and objectives and goals. So how do you do that? Again, if you're a pharmaceutical manufacturing, and there's a lot of regulation around that by the way, so they don't want to get shut down by the FDA for not having all of their reporting. So there's a lot of reporting that goes along. So if there's ever any kind of a problem, not only have you documented, but you've documented that you took those temperature checks every 15 minutes, and you better be able to show them. I mean, when they ask you better be able to show them that minute, not I'll get back to you in a week kind of thing. So those are the kinds of things that you have to set up in your systems and your processes to make sure not only you're collecting the data, but how do I get it back out if I need it in a moment's notice. So those are all the things that will drive some of those maintenance and operational strategies. But today, most organizations are in preventive maintenance and some of them are in the predictive maintenance modes. Even fewer air condition based maintenance and really just the most mission critical are really in reliability centered maintenance. I would say there's few organizations that truly practice RCM as it's defined. I've got a book around here someplace on maintenance best practices. It's about 700 pages. And it's truly the Bible on maintenance and operations. The guy that wrote it actually works for Jacobs Engineering has for decades but he is one of the people that originated reliability centered maintenance. So if you want to go to the source, he's still around.

Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah, no kidding. That's great there, because if you're saying that's the Bible of maintenance, then that's, I think, a good future guests here. Well, Dean, certainly appreciate you coming on and I do have one final question for you. I asked everybody. Who or what has had the biggest impact on you and your career?

Dean Stanberry   

Good question. I was fortunate that I kind of grew up in a large corporation that we still had a lot of mentoring that went on, I was fortunate to have some very, very bright people that were mentors of mine that helped me out. When we were talking about managing people, for example, you don't learn that just on your own, that should not be a trial and error, because that affects people. I had some good people that mentored me through that. And I still think back on some of those things that I learned today, that so and so taught me that 30 years ago or whatever. I was in management for 40 years, 40 plus years and I learned a lot along the way and now, I'm more in that mode of being able to mentor others. I like sharing what I know, and what I've learned and what's worked over time, and where there're pitfalls that you might avoid. So, anybody that's interested in learning, I'm more than happy to take my time to share what I know and say, maybe you can use this, maybe you can't. Times change.

Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah, well, I appreciate you making the time to come on and do just that, and really dive into a lot of depth on just different software's available out there, the implementation process and best practices to go along with it. And I know a lot of listeners out there going find a lot of value in this conversation. So I really do appreciate you coming on.

Dean Stanberry   

I'm a big fan of tools, there's a lot of good opportunities out there. But again, if you don't set it up right, it's not going to deliver, it's not going to work as it did in the demo.

Griffin Hamilton  

That's the truth.

Dean Stanberry   

So what you want to say is, okay, if I want it to do what it did in the demo, what do I got to do first to set it up and to get there. And again, not a lot of people know about that kind of thing. And also, it's a set of skills that don't necessarily exist within an organization. So maybe the first question is, do we have anybody that knows how to build this project and lead it? It's one thing to have executive sponsorship, but that executive sponsor isn't going to lead the project and make it successful. Somebody has to take it from its infancy and build a plan. Even if the leadership changes, do you have a plan that somebody can pick up and follow through to a successful conclusion?

Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah, absolutely. And like I said, this has all been extremely valuable and these are huge projects that are ongoing, and a big decision for any organization to make as you're looking to adopt new tools. And like I said, the insight here and content here has been phenomenal. I certainly appreciate you coming on and providing your expertise here, Dean. Thank you. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the modern facilities management podcast. Make sure to subscribe for future episodes and follow us on LinkedIn for more facilities management content.

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