What Flexibility Looks Like in Modern Building Operations

We recently conducted a poll on social media that asked when people expected the vaccine to return life to normal.

In reality, the exact answer isn’t as important as how varied the answers are.

The great ‘work from home’ experiment has opened up the range of possibilities and made room for individual preferences, with implications for every asset type.

Some people have returned to the office full time as soon as they were allowed. Many are looking forward to having a more staggered schedule, with two or three days a week in the office. Others have renounced the office forever and have moved out of urban centers permanently.

The question is how large each contingent is, and how long their current preferences are sustained when pandemic-era restrictions are dropped.

As we stated in our latest white paper, Reopening Buildings in a More Dynamic World, we are not going to pretend to know the answers to these questions. There is no one in the world who can do so today.

What we do know for sure is that the best thing to do in the face of extreme uncertainty is to become more flexible. To gain the ability to respond to whatever situation presents itself and to be able to make adjustments when that situation changes, however quickly or gradually it does.

The problem is, while this is conceptually very clear, it’s hard to see how it would be put into practice, especially when it comes to the variability of buildings across a portfolio.

Flexibility in Labor Resources

Say you’re the National Director of Operations for a portfolio of around 150 buildings spread across 6 different markets.

In each market, you have “floaters” that aren’t assigned to a specific building but are able to fill in where they are needed.

Each time a floater is dispatched, there are expenses associated with the “truck roll:”

• Labor: Technician wages, unbillable travel time, administration
• Vehicle: Fuel, maintenance, insurance, depreciation
• Opportunity-cost: Technicians unavailable for higher value activities

Many portfolios manage their preventative maintenance schedules in their work-order system and, at the building-level, it works.

Sure, the software might be getting a bit dated within the context of newer, more complex buildings, but generally people and equipment are well utilized under it.

The problem comes in when preventative maintenance schedules are no longer valid due to significant changes in operations that cascade down from the individual preferences mentioned before.

Legacy work order systems generally do not have the analytical capabilities to aggregate the work done across a market and certainly not a portfolio.

How do you know if you’re utilizing your labor resources efficiently, especially when the occupancy rates, schedules, and needs of each of those assets are constantly in flux?

You need to be able to visualize who is doing what, where and when.

And you need to be able to do this continuously as conditions change.

Flexibility in Capital Plans

The same applies to the head of asset management for the portfolio. Each asset likely has an equipment inventory and capital plan that looks 10 years into the future.

It almost always lives in a spreadsheet based on a condition assessment like this:

But these condition assessments are snapshots in time and assume that the building will be operated the same for the next 10 years as it has for the last 10 years.

What happens to capital plans when the amount of wear and tear on these systems goes up or down depending on changes to how buildings are used?

Alternatively, what happens when you need to take a step back and allocate capital better at the regional or portfolio level? Siloing information in spreadsheets makes this an arduous and time consuming process.

Like with maintenance activities, in order to achieve flexibility, you need to be able to visualize what is expected to be replaced, when and how much it will cost.

And you need to be able to adjust numbers on the fly as information comes in daily from preventative maintenance activities, leasing decisions, occupancy patterns, and portfolio-level strategies.

Flexibility in Energy Spend

ESG is evolving. It is moving from giving credit to those that were able to report on their environmental impact, to actually measuring performance and pressure testing why certain initiatives are being prioritized over others.

Pulling down ENERGY STAR data from utility bills across a portfolio may help identify which buildings have the highest energy use intensity (EUI), but that’s about it.

Answering “the why” within those buildings takes another level of analysis.

On one hand it requires transparency into the base building systems as well as analytics to ensure that schedules are tightly aligned to occupancy (even as it changes), set points are optimized to weather patterns, there are no significant peak demand events, among other concerns.

The other side of the coin is tenant consumption. This is a tougher nut to crack because it cannot be directly controlled.

However, with the right data, the process can be the same as portfolio-level utility benchmarking.

In many cases, there are one or a few tenants that are outliers in terms of energy consumption. Focusing engagement programs on these tenants can have outsized effects.

Of course, the outliers could change at a moment’s notice. Monitoring how well tenants are doing in their own efficiency pursuits must be done continuously, but cannot be time consuming or it will never actually happen.

Conclusion

Uncertainty should be met with improved flexibility. Flexibility requires real-time analysis that can be done at the portfolio level, regional level, and within individual buildings.

Many owners and asset managers believe in their operations teams. For the most part, they  are sharp, hard-working, and very hands-on, so there’s some expectation they are at least capturing some of the benefit of a proactive approach.

But there’s no way to know.

In addition, sometimes decisions must be made at the portfolio level, something that no one could reasonably do based on their own knowledge and hard work. Resource allocation requires processes to be digitized and data visualizations to aggregate granular information at the portfolio level.

Because, at the end of the day, it's the margin of improvement that matters, not simply improvement.

Looking for a “one-stop” shop solution to bring flexibility to the entire portfolio? Watch a demo video of the Enertiv Platform today to see how it works.