Beyond Buildings: Exploring Facilities Management

Brian Gregory [00:00:01]:
Hi everybody, this is your host Brian for the Beyond Buildings podcast, where we meet innovative and inspiring facilities leaders from across the country. In this episode, I chat with John Carrillo, who is the chairman of the global FM organization. You can find out more about Global FM globalfm.org. John's career has spanned over 45 years with many different experiences, just to name a few. He's managed the construction of a missile factory, decommissioned a nuclear power plant, and developed a preventative maintenance program for a portfolio of over 20,000 buildings. In this episode, so John discusses the impact and importance of digitization and technology in the FM industry. We dive into the transition that he experienced from corrective to preventative and ultimately to predictive maintenance at several Fortune 500 companies. John brings a wealth of experience and a perspective that will be valuable for facilities leaders of any scale.

Brian Gregory [00:00:50]:
You definitely don't want to miss this one. Let's dive in. Hi John. Good morning. Thank you so much for taking the time to meet with me today. Just to get things started and for our audience's benefit, just give us a little bit of your background.

John Carillo [00:01:03]:
Thank you, Brian, for inviting me. While I'm a frustrated architect going back to the seventies, actually, that found my way into facility management. And so that seems to, for the last, certainly the last 40 to 50 years without formal training, facility management, that seems to be a lot of engineers and architects have found their way into facility management just in that way.

Brian Gregory [00:01:30]:
Yeah. What kind of, over the course of your career, so you went from being an architect to being a facilities leader. What kind of, what companies did you work for? What scale were you managing? That sort of thing?

John Carillo [00:01:40]:
Yes, I was fortunate. When I got out of school, I worked for an architect, electrical engineer for a very short time frame. And back in the seventies, that didn't quite pay the bills. So I looked into get into a larger corporation here in California. I worked for General Dynamics, which is aerospace that built missiles and other kinds of weaponry that's used in the military. And I started off as an industrial engineer and then plant engineering. Facility management evolved over the next decade or two into facilities management, and I was kind of there on the forefront working with a variety of different organizations, procurement, land management, maintenance, construction, and bringing that together to create the facility management platform. From there, I went on to go work for Northshore Corporation, did that for eleven years, and then ultimately ended up with 27 years with at and t.

John Carillo [00:02:41]:
So I've had the opportunity to progress within large operations, but to really understand the focus of facility management and what facility management and the bottom line can bring to your company. And so it was very important for me to get involved with some of the larger associations like BoMA or IFMA. There's others that are out there. I was heavily involved with IFMA and right now I'm currently, though I just recently retired from at and t, I'm a global chair which is an association of member centric associations where we collaborate with each other, share knowledge and provide FM awareness of the future of FM and where it needs to go. So in that regard, yes, I've spent probably a good 45 years strictly in facility management and wearing quite a variety of different hats.

Brian Gregory [00:03:41]:
Yeah, that's great. Uh, to ask, you mentioned IFMA and uh, kind of the value that, I'm just curious the value that it added to you as a leader, like looking back on your career, what's, what's the importance of, of joining something like IFMA?

John Carillo [00:03:56]:
There is absolute value. As I had mentioned, even though I had a technical degree, I really needed to understand the different core competencies of facility management. Facility management's broken into, you know, doing real estate. It's strategic planning, it's operations planning, it's property management, it's preventative maintenance programs, it's energy conservation. And now sustainability and resilience is huge on the radar scale. So you can go and get some education, get some courses, get certifications, you can also network within like type of industry groups. IFMA has the ability where if you wanted to work with a group of people from that are utilities companies or aerospace companies or manufacturing people that operate stadiums and things like that, you can get in within those groups, do benchmarking and learn. So it's a learning process that continues.

John Carillo [00:05:00]:
And the reason you need to continually take your people to bolster up their education and retool them is to understand what's ahead in the world of technology, digitization, sustainability. And now the news buzzword is resilience in your facility management organizations.

Brian Gregory [00:05:20]:
Thinking back over your career and then I guess looking forward, im sure youve seen trends come and go in facilities management and also im sure youve probably seen times where technology has really changed the game, changed the job. Can you maybe speak to that like maybe some things looking back that you kind of changed the way that you approach facilities management and then maybe what your, if you had a crystal ball, what your predictions are looking forward that things that might change the way we do it in the future?

John Carillo [00:05:48]:
Yeah, that's a big question. Let me chunk that down a little bit. Going back four or five decades, I think what was important at that time, as facility management was evolving in smaller companies and large corporations, there was the big push on the environment. And so we've seen a lot of things going on with clean air and waste management. And so we did incorporate a lot of that into our practices of facility management. And then getting into the eighties, it was about green and recycling and energy conservation, renewable energy. So that seemed to be a focus. And then regeneration having to do with recycling of power and urbanization and renewable energy buildings and carbon, reducing your carbon footprint.

John Carillo [00:06:43]:
And now the big push, probably for the last ten years in digitization, has helped push the edge of this as well as sustainability goals that has been developed by the United nations in a variety of ways, is resilience. And we know that because of climate change and global warming, we're starting to see quite an uptake of weather patterns that can be very disruptive or destructive to our facilities. So from an infrastructure standpoint, we create infrastructure redundancy. We have the ability to move, work around, or even just to clearly harden your facility. Also, just from the reliance of utilization of utilities, whether it be communications or water and power, we have to be able to continue to operate in the event there is an emergency. So many companies are making that investment, and that really is what we call infrastructure redundancy, but resilience. So is your facility, your operation, resilient in the future to these upcoming challenges? So that's kind of a walk through the park here from decade to decade. And then I think the big push, and you may have some questions around technology and home has technology transition, because I think that's really where companies and retooling of your facility managers need to focus on the available tools that are out there and your ability to work with your companies to create these environmental management goals that will allow you to be more productive, reduce operational costs, continue with energy conservation and savings, but at the same time helping to make the world a better place to live.

Brian Gregory [00:08:40]:
Just double, I guess, double tapping on resiliency. It's an interesting future trend. And in the context, I guess there's probably two use case or at least two scenarios, right? If you're building a new facility or if you have an existing facility, are there any low hanging fruit items to increase resiliency, whether it's for building a new facility or if somebody already has one, are there easier things to do to increase that?

John Carillo [00:09:06]:
Well, I think resiliency is not only what's going on with climate change or global warming, but it's really disruption to service. It could be communications disruption. There could be a disruption, like with the pandemic. Can people work from home? That's all part of resiliency. But I think we need to take kind of a walk through the park. We talked about what the overarching changes have been in the last 40, 50 years environmentally, but there has been real digital transformation that has taken place. And again, if we go back to the eighties, where the introduction of fiber optics was coming along in terms of being able to provide communications, and at that time, we had CAD and capram systems. And then from a property management standpoint, here comes CMS.

John Carillo [00:09:56]:
And as we transition into the digital transformation in the nineties, we've seen 2G go to now four g and five g. Believe it or not, there'll be a six g out there in the 2030 timeframe. But CMMS has kind of broken apart to BIMS and IWMS systems, which is primarily asset project management. We've seen property management, CMMS transition to BMS and BAS systems, and now it's the building management system and also sustainability. Environmental has spun off from which is called EMS, which is the integration of green buildings. So the technology has changed with digitization really rolling out just in the last ten years, the impact of how you do business with those type of tools. And as an example for connectivity, you're now looking to integrate your communication systems to five g's. So as technology is growing, you have to have the capability to transition fiber optics and five g's.

John Carillo [00:11:09]:
Asset protection or project management, I should say the name of the game is you have BIM systems or IWMS systems, and you use that data to build new facilities. But the term digital twin technology, modular construction, 345 D, that type of technology will allow you to build faster and better and quicker with the capability to have more technology. So it's important for you to make that investment and with your people to understand where we've come from, from CAD to Capham to BIM to iwms. And now we take that knowledge. And when we do greenfield site construction, digital technology is digital. Twin technology is important. Same thing with property management. The transition is now the integration of enterprise building management system is now incorporating machine to machine learning.

John Carillo [00:12:08]:
That's another fancy term for artificial intelligence. But artificial intelligence really is more the movement of people within the facilities. But when you take a building management system and you're trying to justify why we need to continue to save energy, why we need to continue to reduce operational costs, the machine to machine learning, when you talk about major pieces of infrastructure, equipment, again, we're talking about chillers, we're talking about air management systems, et cetera. We're now able to, with that type of capability of analytics, to extend the useful life of buying a chiller, of buying a compressor from 20 years, and we're looking to now extend it another five, seven, eight years. Many of the big manufacturers of that mechanical equipment aren't real excited about it, but they're now making the transition to put bells and whistles on their equipment, other than you relying on bringing someone in to provide that automation. And of course, if you're able to extend the useful life of that equipment just on how you operate from a capital standpoint, from capex, you'll be able to save quite a bit of money. And of course that substantially adds to the bottom line. And then of course, supply chain.

John Carillo [00:13:35]:
You're working very closely with supply chain and what's going on with edge computing, big data dump and many third party vendors, contractors are now having to do big data dump. Make the investments so you can understand how things are being put together, making sure you have the capability to get the best quality, the best cost in a timely fashion, or whether you're doing minor rearrangements to major rearrangements or even to new construction. Greenfield construction. So digitization technology is really the key. And it's very important that whatever technical degree that we may have, or the 20 or 30 years experience that we might have, we all need to go back and understand this transformation. Digitization, and it's in any industry that you're involved with, that's important for you to, to really bolster up that kind of capability within your workforce.

Brian Gregory [00:14:34]:
Yeah, I have to think too, from a resiliency standpoint back to that topic. And when you look at digitization, getting that deep knowledge and wisdom from maybe teammates that have been part of an organization for a long time out of their head and into a system, whether that's a CMMS platform or updating drawings with as built, that sort of thing, it's probably also part of it, right? So that, you know, an organization, especially a smaller organization, where a handful of individuals could walk away with almost all the knowledge that has to be part of, part of the strategy for resilience. I would imagine just documenting, documenting, documenting. Knowing where things are, knowing history, knowing what the plan is for the future.

John Carillo [00:15:16]:
Yeah, no, it's very important, I think just from a strategy standpoint, whether in the private or public sector. Take schools as an example. There are many smart city platforms. When you start to think about that I think there's some similarity, maybe to the school systems where they're understanding what are some of the smart programs that are out there to help us manage something that's very, very large, locally or regional or even across the country. And as we develop these sustainability goals, using the digitization platform will help us to conserve water and gas and issues around public safety and traffic control, air pollution, waste management, you know, car charging stations, fleet management. Your whole carbon footprint is very important when you're talking about the public and private sector. I had mentioned supply chains, how you work with your supply chain to extend your workforce and to be very, very productive. Again, like I said, if you're one other thing other than just a property management or maintenance management or project management is security.

John Carillo [00:16:26]:
Cybersecurity, there's been a big push for many companies now when we had the pandemic working remotely. So cybersecurity is really now a big issue. So when people work remotely, they have that type of capability and information is protected. That's also been a big change in corporate America, where at one point, you know, we bring people to work. Now you bring work to people and you can, they can work anywheres across the world. And that seems to be a big change in the workforce going forward.

Brian Gregory [00:17:03]:
That's huge. Switching topics a little bit. I know we had a chance to chat kind of before we started recording here, and you mentioned one point in your career, you did kind of a groundbreaking project with Google. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

John Carillo [00:17:15]:
Yeah, no, I will. You know, before I get to that, just in terms of I want to promote facility management, there's a real shortage of facility managers, and there are various programs that some of the associations are doing globally, as well as IFMA and Boma and some of the other associations cornet to educate and promote, but I've had a lot of opportunity to talk to students, graduate students as well. And the basic question of facility management is it's an exciting field. And so, you know, what is it that you do other than provide preventative maintenance, other than various programs to take care of building systems and infrastructure? And I usually get their attention when, you know, I ask, I'll tell them that, you know, well, I've had the opportunity to seismically retrofit, you know, buildings, high rises, and, you know, that gets their interest. Or I've had the opportunity to build a missile factory and they go, wow, facility managers do that. Yeah, well, you hire cadre of the workforce to help you do that. Or in my particular case in aerospace I had the opportunity to decommission a nuclear reactor.

Brian Gregory [00:18:30]:
Oh, wow.

John Carillo [00:18:30]:
So there's no two days alike. It's very interesting and, you know, depending on the occupation that you get into. But I think one of the most fascinating things, and toward the end of my career, that's happened since 2015, the emergence of technology and some of the software programs that have evolved in Silicon Valley. And I was very fortunate to actually live next door there with working for at and t is to collaborate and to expand the building management program systems to what we would call an enterprise building management system. And what that does is, I think in the past, if you look at the seventies and eighties, the productivity tools that existed and that was proprietary for various manufacturers, for the trains and some of the other cranes and some of the other manufacturers, they protected their equipment. And then I think we had some specialists come out with programs like Johnson controls and a few others, Schneider Electrics, and they came out to say, you know what, we can measure and monitor the performance of your equipment, but it's proprietary to the manufacturer that you bought equipment from. So what's now have change is that's no longer feasible, because anytime you want to make your efficient, your equipment more efficient, it's not a matter of going out and buying all new equipment. So many of the larger corporations, the fortune companies, we have every make and model.

John Carillo [00:20:05]:
And so you take a building management system and you incorporate it into what we would call an enterprise building management system, and you utilize the tools and software to connect all of that together into a common dashboard. When you're creating a building management system, and pretty much you'll incorporate your existing controls and monitors for whatever you might have incorporated bms. And basically you incorporate all the critical data of your infrastructure, equipment, air handlers, chillers, lighting, power systems, et cetera. You create a software program. And I know that we at and t in the past have created an iconic software by Microsoft. And I know that when we were working with Google to try to take this to the next step, because they have a very similar program with artificial intelligence that they've incorporated into their mechanical equipment, is how do we get to that next step of artificial intelligence? But again, as you create this building management system, you take into consideration other than all the information of that piece of equipment, but you enter live data points, external data points, what's going on in the market with utility rates and the use of smart meters. And you incorporate weather patterns so you can make changes within a 24 hours basis to modify the operations of your equipment. Also with you know, machine to machine learning through a variety of additional sensors that you will install.

John Carillo [00:21:46]:
And I know for some of the larger corporations that, you know, there's millions of data points where they install additional sensors and Microsoft Microsensors and things like that. It allows you to watch the operation of your infrastructure equipment. And if you have a good program, which you will with BMS and BAs, you create a good preventative maintenance program. But what this default diagnostic capability does by using machine to machine learning, it allows you to take preventative maintenance and go from corrective to predictive maintenance and to right size, the type of equipment. And it also allows you to extend the useful life of equipment. So again, as I mentioned, there's a whole series of sensors and controllers, and it's really Internet of Things. We've heard about the use of Internet of things. And so it's nothing really sophisticated that has to be tied into the mother controller board, but it's something that you can do heat recovery, you do vibration analysis, you look for water leaks, fresh air intake, maximizing the delta t factor, variable controlled dampers and actuators and so on and so forth, and minimize the start stops of your equipment and compressors.

John Carillo [00:23:12]:
So it's very sophisticated in that it goes beyond what the spec sheet says and what's the proper way to operate. And so I think it's pretty interesting technology that will continue to evolve, and I think programs like that will in the future become more available to companies of any size. It's just not the big companies working with Silicon Valley that had the wherewithal to do that. But I think technology, as we know, smart digitization technology. There was a survey because I'm involved with it from a global perspective of how that is integrated across the world. We do know at this point, 85% of all building operations is computer aided for companies. And so as such, it should be extended through the facility management operation within those companies, and soon to be 100%, because I think that's just the way to survive for companies going forward.

Brian Gregory [00:24:13]:
Right? Yeah. I was going to ask you. What you described certainly makes a lot of sense. It isn't a compelling case, right, to move from corrective to preventative to predictive maintenance. Would you say, like at, at and T or Google or others that you've been around that that's actually a reality now that people are doing predictive maintenance? Because sometimes we hear about these things, but they're still kind of pie in the sky. So is it? Is it actually, have you seen this deployed firsthand?

John Carillo [00:24:42]:
It's it's an absolute reality. The measure is in your operation costs. The measure is in is, you know, reducing your operational cost, but utility costs and conservation. So, but at the same time you're reducing your carbon footprint, which is a really another good compelling story. So when you put together a facility environmental plan, you can, there's tools that are out there that will allow you to identify the return on investment. So when you're up for each year for capital investment, you can provide a return on investment based on programs that have been developed for. That.

Brian Gregory [00:25:28]:
Makes a lot of sense. Well, and I think there's an inspiring message there too, where kind of see early adopters and it's like something that's a table stake maybe in the Fortune 500 industry, large corporations is a differentiator for a smaller organization or for maybe a public k twelve school, but eventually will be kind of a table stake for them too. Like it's almost, it's almost looking into the future in some ways. So I think when we think about our listener base, some of them are still trying to get their hands around just putting out the fires of corrective maintenance. But with advancement in technology, reduction of cost, manufacturers of equipment beginning to bake some of this stuff in from the factory, I think the future is very different sounds, if I'm hearing you correctly, it's already occurring in certain organizations and it's going to be very different for others as we move forward.

John Carillo [00:26:16]:
Yeah, no, absolutely. It's. If I had the 40 years to do over again, or 45 years, I'd certainly do it in corporate real estate and facility management. So it's been an exciting trip for me to see the evolution. And I'm still involved with leading Global FM association. The Global FM association is really. It was founded by a handful of some of the larger associations across the world, like IFMA, which is the International Facility Management Association, FMA, which is a facility management association of Australia, and IWFM, which is the facility management Great Britain association. And we founded this organization, Global FM, in 2006.

John Carillo [00:27:12]:
And the participation is clearly. It's a federation of associations similar to the ones I just mentioned, member centric, that provide education and training. And we work to help to collaborate, share best practices and benchmarking that's out in the world. And of course promote other things that are going on with the external factors of. Like I had mentioned, things that are going on with sustainability and the United nations. We also partner up with the international organization Standardization of ISIL and ISIL. There's a 41,000 series of standards in facilities management and sustainability that will help organizations understand and be more efficient or effective with how they operate by incorporating these standards as well. So, you know, we're all for the betterment and the improvement and the future of FM.

Brian Gregory [00:28:11]:
Well, I know our time's kind of coming to a close here, but like to end each episode with advice for our listeners. So you think about our listener base. Many of them are facilities leaders that are maybe midway through their career. We have some that are looking to enter the facilities management realm. But what advice would you give to somebody that's going to be entering or leading facilities for, let's say, the next ten years?

John Carillo [00:28:35]:
Yeah, that's a really good question. And I was asked that question. You know, there's just a handful of universities that are, I think there's probably 20 universities that have a formal FM degree from doctorate to graduate to undergraduate. We also know that there's hundreds of universities that incorporate facility management into their programs, whether it be architecture, engineering or construction. And so when I would speak to these universities and speak to the, and I know a few of the professors, someone who's getting ready to graduate with a master's degree would say, you know what, there's, I don't know a lot about, you're talking about this digitization technology. We didn't really learn a lot of that in college. I mean, we understand the basic programs with BMS and but, and BIMs and so forth. But you know, how do you, how do you go about getting that type of education? My answer was, well, up until, you know, this is five years ago.

John Carillo [00:29:39]:
Well, up until five years ago, I didn't know anything about it either. So I taught myself. I went to webinars, I went to programs and across the aisle outside of facility management where not that you want to get so much technology from the Microsofts and whatnot on what some of these programs are, but you have to understand the basics of how these Internet think programs work, how they're applicable to what you're doing. And the whole issue is you can bring in subject matter experts to say, hey, I want to be digitized, I want to save a lot of money and I want to do all these great things and I want to do optimization with sustainability and forth. But they're going to say, and this is the conversation we had with Google talking about artificial intelligence. You can't measure all the dots until you find the dots. And how you find the dots is you really need to understand what it is that you want to accomplish. And you learn by other examples, case studies, and so forth, and working with other corporations on what programs that they've done and how you can incorporate.

John Carillo [00:30:48]:
So my message is it's a continual learning process you need to retool not just for yourself, but your upcoming workforce as well. And so formal education makes you very qualified to be a facility manager. But to lead the way in the future of FM really is about sustainability, resilience, and technology digitization technology.

Brian Gregory [00:31:13]:
Thank you, John. Thanks again for your time and I look forward to releasing this episode to the Wild. Thanks again.