What to Do When Your Best Operators Retire

Commercial real estate portfolios are struggling with the fact that as their experienced operators reach retirement age, it is getting increasingly difficult to find replacements. In this video, Client Success Manager, Subhan Mansoor, explains how technology can empower new operators to familiarize themselves faster and more effectively with their properties.

Video Transcription

Hi, my name is Subhan Mansoor and I’m a Client Success Manager at Enertiv. Today, in this video, we’ll be talking about what to do when your best building operators retire.

This is a problem that the entire industry is facing these days. When your best building operators retire, they take with them a lot of hands-on experience and institutional knowledge that they’ve acquired over the years that they’ve been working at this site.

What we mean by this is institutional knowledge such as building layouts and tenant needs, such as a law firm that requires more operational hours when it comes to HVAC. You could be talking about hands-on experience, how to prioritize and repair certain pieces of equipment, and how to evaluate the impact of those repairs on a day to day basis.

When a new person comes in, he doesn’t have all this information, he’s basically starting off with a blank sheet. This person is going to take a lot of time in order to get up to speed and to a point where the experienced person was already at.

Now, this is a problem that can be solved by a solution called a “digital twin.” A digital twin is essentially a digital replica of your physical asset that houses a digital repository of information. The knowledge that the experienced person has can be cloned and stored within the digital twin to be accessed in real time.

This person would leverage the digital twin and his or her learning curve would be accelerated a huge amount. This saves a lot of the time spent before this person can start adding value to your organization.

We’ve talked about all of this on a conceptual level and seen how it fits together. But let’s apply this to an actual situation that we experienced with a client.

A fire alarm at a building went off and along with it, certain associated pieces of equipment such as HVAC air handler units shut down. If the experienced operator were on site, then he would’ve known exactly which fire alarm went off and what pieces of equipment needed to be brought back online. But if a new person were on site, he would have to go locate the building layouts, open them up and see what pieces of equipment were associated with what fire alarm. This process would take a much longer time as compared to someone who was already experienced in this regard.

With a digital twin, this person knew exactly which fire alarm went off and which pieces of equipment were associated with that fire alarm and went off as well. The digital twin also empowered this person to see exactly where the controls of the equipment were and how to bring them back online. So, what we’re essentially talking about is, the response time that an experienced operator would’ve taken if he were in this position would’ve been the exact same as a new person empowered with a digital twin.

This is one of the ways we can alleviate the problem of what to do when your most experience and best building operators retire. Again, my name is Subhan Mansoor and I hope you learned something interesting today, have a nice day.