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 with innovative and inspiring facilities leaders from across the country. In this episode, I chat with Tim Ivey, who is the chief technology facilities and maintenance officer at Iredell Statesville Schools. In this episode, we dive into the importance of capital planning to drive decisions. We also get into managing a school district at scale. Iredell Statesville—they're not the largest district in the country, but they're big and it's challenging. Tim is a very humble, yet powerful leader that you definitely want to hear from.

Brian Gregory [00:00:32]:
Believe me, you don't want to miss it. Let's dive in. Hey, Tim, thank you so much for joining our podcast today. I know you're a busy guy and really appreciate the time just for our audience. If you don't mind, if you could just go into a little bit of your background, kind of what you've done before and what you're doing now. Great.

Tim Ivey [00:00:47]:
Yeah, I'm glad to be here. I'm Tim Ivey. I'm the Chief Technology, Facilities and Maintenance Officer for the Iredell Statesville Schools. I've worked in the Iredell Statesville Schools for almost 30 years and started out as summer help with the maintenance department and then became a teacher, moved on to spending about half of my career in school administration as a principal. And then our superintendent came to me and said, I'd like for you to take over the facilities and technology part of our districts. He kind of combined some roles, and so that's how I got into it. I really didn't have a background in facilities management, no more than what you would have managing a large high school, so really was based in that, so just kind of got jumped into it and then had to kind of figure out my way. So I've been very fortunate to be able to have tools like FMX to help us.

Tim Ivey [00:01:42]:
And it really has helped take some of the vision from the superintendent and some of the vision that I had for the department and help us set up real key indicators and make that a reality.

Brian Gregory [00:01:52]:
That's awesome, Tim. Thanks for sharing. It's always interesting to me to hear the various paths people go through to get to where they're currently you know, I've spoken to a few leaders that came from the private sector into the public sector, and there's certainly a learning curve there. It's interesting that you came from the education side as a teacher up through administration and then jumped over to facilities and technology. I mean, were there any surprises that hit you, like, when you switched those roles or anything that was, I guess, just surprising for you?

Tim Ivey [00:02:22]:
Well, I think when you're in your own little world and you're managing that little world, you think, well, somebody could why do they do this? Or why is something this way? And then when you get 37 school sites over this pretty large county, you start to realize the magnitude of it and trying to make larger global decisions that are going to impact everybody and make sure that you're doing those with a lot of thought and that it's good for the Holistic group. That was a little more challenging than I thought. Being a principal, you had to do that, but not to this scale. I mean, you weren't impacting this many people. Like 20,000 students get impacted if you change the temperature. Those type of things were a little bit at first put me aback. But after we started really working through key processes and we set goals, we really started talking about how do we better serve our customers and what does that look like and how do we drive that through every decision we make? We really did find that it wasn't as, I don't know, alarming, I guess. It wasn't as something that really set me back that much.

Tim Ivey [00:03:28]:
It just made me a lot more comfortable with it.

Brian Gregory [00:03:31]:
That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. It's easy sometimes, I think, to take the work that others do for granted. And being a principal is a really hard job too. I don't know that it's any easier than what you're doing now. In many ways, probably harder, but I think as a principal, you probably take some of the stuff for granted that the facility team does and the technology team does and vice versa. So it's interesting, that just the change of perspective that you've had to have over the 30 plus years at the district, I guess just jumping forward a little bit. One of the things so obviously I know you through FMX, and specifically we also did a project together for facility condition assessment, went through and assessed all of the major mechanical equipment in the district.

Brian Gregory [00:04:09]:
And one of the things that really impressed me was the level of rigor that your team does around capital planning and kind of the support you had for that. Just want to see, first of all, what led you to take on kind of that big facility condition assessment project with us.

Tim Ivey [00:04:22]:
So as we kind of talked about when we were working on that, we had had a new superintendent, a lot of new changes were coming about in our school district and the board had really wanted to be able to ensure that the funding that they had for capital was being spent wisely. In other words, they didn't want us to be building an addition onto a school and then on the other side of the county, leaving a school with a leaking roof. So they needed something to tell where they were. And even though we had kept good records, we really didn't know an overall Holistic viewpoint of where we were as a district. And so spending our capital money literally was reactionary. It was not proactive at all. You fix the roof because it was leaking, instead of knowing that the lifecycle of the roof is going to end and then we need to go ahead and replace it. And not only replace this section, but three other sections because they're also anticipated to fail or close to the end of their lifecycle.

Tim Ivey [00:05:24]:
So being able to do the facilities condition assessment essentially took a lot of guesswork out of it. There was no more lobbying or jockeying for improvements at a school. It became more data driven and allowed us to look back into it and say, okay, we need to make this decision now and budget for it this way and plan out essentially a ten year map of where we were going as a district.

Brian Gregory [00:05:48]:
Yeah, that's huge. Would you say? So now fast forward. I think it's been a little over a year, maybe 18 months. Now you have this data. Have you made any decisions that maybe historically you would have not made based on the data?

Tim Ivey [00:05:59]:
Oh, absolutely. We just had our board approved to replace all the flat roof sections on a whole entire high school. What we had previously done before the facility's condition assessment was we would replace the section that was leaking. What we decided to do was take all that data and say, okay, this school is up for a roof, we need to replace it. Let's put it in one cycle. So now we know. And since we replaced the entire flat roof section, which was all scheduled to be chilling wear, signs of wear, time to do it, but the water wasn't pouring into the building everywhere, but we did it all at one time. So now we know that we'll have that set on a repetitive cycle and we have a warranty on it.

Tim Ivey [00:06:45]:
So it allows us to say we're being better stewards of taxpayer dollars than we were before when we were just kind of, I don't know, guessing. It felt like you were guessing along. And this has given us the ability to have a roadmap.

Brian Gregory [00:06:58]:
Well when making that change. Right. Because obviously budget is limited no matter where you're at, and to be proactive about replacing something that isn't on fire is challenging. But that's awesome to hear you guys able to do that. One question I have for you too. This is kind of something I've heard from others, but do you find yourself having to make the connection between building condition and student outcomes, like when buying for dollars?

Tim Ivey [00:07:22]:
I think sometimes we certainly do have to deal with that. It's not been a major issue for us yet. But I do think that there are times when we have to look at making sure that the conditions of the buildings are set up. Especially in if we have schools. That are considered to be lower performing. And then the building also happens to be excessively old. A lot of people will contribute those two things together and they'll look at a newer school, which sometimes happens to be in a more prevalent area of the county because of growth and think that we're leaving one group out. So what the facility's condition assessment has allowed us to do is actually to say, well, sure, that building is maybe 30 years old, but it has up to date air conditioned units, it has up to date these things.

Tim Ivey [00:08:14]:
I mean, the building itself, age doesn't necessarily represent the quality of the building if it's been well maintained. So having a lot of that information also helped capture the work that was done previously. Before I took over in this role, there was a lot of good things that had been done to keep some of our buildings in service and then kind of squashed some of those comparisons that people like to try to make with that.

Brian Gregory [00:08:40]:
That's great. Yeah. And the point about an old building isn't necessarily a bad building. That's really great. And really some of the highest performing schools out there can be older as long as they're maintained in a conducive environment. So one of the things I was going to ask too, it's great that you're able to utilize data to advocate, for example, for the replacement of that entire high school roof. Do you find yourself selling the results afterwards too? Like because we did this, here's a reduction in reactive maintenance or tell me a little bit about that. We've got the capital plan side of things, but we also have the day to day maintenance and operations side.

Tim Ivey [00:09:13]:
We are using and not necessarily the facilities condition assessment, but it does help us as far as quantifying why we're doing certain capital things. And kind of on a side note, when we plan out our budget out and say this is what our county typically gives us, and I kind of spread out it over years and I say we're going to need to have X number of dollars each year allocated for HVAC. Well, I pulled all of that out of the facility's condition assessment and then looked at what it was telling me was going to need to be replaced in this year and the next year and so on. And that's how we kind of came up with an ongoing budget. So we know that we're going to have to make choices. Some we have to make earlier and some we have to make later. As far as operational cost, we've really been utilizing some of the processes in FMX to help us. Like for example, the inventory request, making everybody go through the inventory request for custodial supplies and things like that has really helped us capture the usage of it.

Tim Ivey [00:10:11]:
And then is that usage actually valid? Before you had a tracking mechanism of it, you always had schools who may order an excessively large amount of supplies or one school's onsite maintenance guy likes to change the filters, for example, more frequently than they're supposed to be. Well, those are additional expenses that don't always equal out to lower operational cost. We've really utilized FMX as a way for us to gather data and then change, if needed, a process to better affect our schools and our cost. We're currently getting ready to go through a process where we're going to look at trying to do energy savings kind of dialing back from COVID So we've been in conversations about FMX connect and how that can help us. But we are using the scheduling portion of FMX right now and making everybody put every event that they have in the school in the scheduler so that we can see this is when the school really needs to be. Running when it doesn't and be able to kind of dial back if we need to try to save on those consumables utilities and put some money back into our budget in another place.

Brian Gregory [00:11:25]:
Yeah, that's huge. And my background prior to FMX was on the energy side, so it's near and dear to my heart. And certainly no matter what piece of equipment that you have, nothing is more efficient than off. But it's oftentimes hard to know when you can turn something off if you don't have a handle on the schedules and everything else. That's really interesting. And then you're also talking about dialing back some of the changes from COVID. Are you referring to outside air ventilation rates? Tell me a little bit more about that.

Tim Ivey [00:11:53]:
So when we went into, I guess, the pandemic, the shutdown time frame, we had to allow our buildings to be open and accessible at different times because people couldn't be around each other. So sometimes you had to have that building running a lot more open so it's on, so it runs longer than it normally would. Also, we had to pump in more fresh air because that was a recommendation. So when you kind of open up all those things and you're running your buildings almost 24/7 full blast, they consume a massive amount of utilities. And so what we're looking at is, when can we essentially, like you said, turn things off? When can we turn them off? And then is it really optimal to turn it off? Because is it costing me more to turn it back on or do I just dial it back? If I dial it back at certain times, can we do that and then essentially bring that savings back to the school district?

Brian Gregory [00:12:49]:
Right. Yeah, and you're right. I mean, it's certainly its own game, right? Like turning things off, but then maybe paying more in peak demand charges if the building gets out of whack. It's a fine balance, but it's interesting that you guys are kind of pushing back that direction and hopefully we can help any way we can to get you guys back on that track, I guess, moving forward from there. So during your time and your current role, the technology that you guys use to operate the district has advanced tremendously. I mean, obviously FMX is part of that. But other I'm sure you brought other things to the table. What do you see as kind of the next big breakthrough that you would like to see? You mentioned FMX Connect, which is our building automation integration, but maybe FMX aside, are there any things if you had a magic wand you'd love to see a system that can do XYZ?

Tim Ivey [00:13:29]:
I think the biggest thing is because I also deal with technology as far as security side, like how do you make your security system work. So we just upgraded our security system so everything works together with it now. So from your access controls to your cameras to your guest check in system, I think as we start to see facilities management and this idea of environmental sensors and how they also work with your security system and your alarm system and your monitoring of your building, we're going to start to see more and more schools. At least my belief is with the way it tends to be going to become more like smart homes, except smart homes extreme to the case. Because some of the things that I'm really starting to see as I live between those two worlds is that the security companies are starting to push out things that seem more like ways you manage your facility and the facilities management software companies are starting to have some of those similar things at some point. I can see them merging together. Like I said, creating more like a smart school where you have everything under one envelope. And for us that is what we try to do.

Tim Ivey [00:14:45]:
We're trying to get everything as we can as close to under one envelope so that when we go to try to look at a building, we don't have to log out of one app to go into another app to see things. It would be really cool if you had monitors on your equipment. Your equipment starts to run off kilter a little bit and it tells you, hey, this isn't running right. But then you also have a camera that is on the same thing that you can see the equipment is not running right, smoke coming out of the machine or whatever, all those type of things. So that's kind of the example I give when you do that. And even into the classrooms where the sensors are measuring the level of air quality in the room and then can actually tell the HVAC system to open up the air damper and pump in more fresh air or if there's an emergency in the room. Those things like that I think are on the horizon and may be here a lot faster than we believe them to be or more accessible in schools than we see.

Brian Gregory [00:15:41]:
No, I think that's spot on Tim. And some of what you describe we've seen in other industries, some not to say that schools are like the last to get technology or whatever, that's certainly not the case. But sometimes if you look at commercial manufacturing or things like that, they certainly have a little bit more predictive algorithms when it comes to predictive maintenance. Tying together all those systems. Back in my engineering days, we worked at one location that had propane. It was like filling buses with propane. And they had a system where if there was a leak, first of all, it would create a work order, set off the alarms, all that sort of thing. But also their security camera would pan and zoom right to where that particular leak was.

Brian Gregory [00:16:17]:
So just coordinated response. Be really cool to see that in the K-12 environment. Often kind of the challenges we see from our side is finding a district that's really ready for that. It's kind of hard to push all the way to the right end of that sophistication spectrum if they're still not basic work orders and PMs. But you guys are certainly ahead of the curve on that and excited to see kind of what comes down the pipe going forward. One other item that comes up from time to time, certainly I'm sure you're aware of like Chat GPT and AI in general. Have you guys had any sort of investigation on how to leverage that within your departments or is that I know in the education sector, at least from a teaching standpoint, it's a big challenge know, potentially cheating and all of that sort of thing. But just curious, do you guys think about AI very much right now? No big deal if you don't, but if you do, what are you thinking about it?

Tim Ivey [00:17:03]:
Well, I think everybody's kind of getting whether you want to think about it or not, it's becoming a very big topic. So as far as utilizing AI for managing the facility, I think that we started out where we've got where we already can have our buildings so that we can set schedules on them. Where I think we will see AI help in facilities management initially is when it's able to kind of recognize the changes in the environment like we were talking about and then go back from and then be able to set the temperature and change the building envelope from that point. And then I'm sure once it starts in one area and then is effective, we will find a way to automate it. I mean, I hope that we don't see it go all the way into the teaching profession and it become like the self checkouts at the stores that we all thought were weird, but now we don't want to go check out with anybody else. But I have a feeling that it will. And I know we have students who are using AI, but fortunately for me, I'm no longer in the principal realm and have to investigate AI cheating. But I'm sure that it is happening, right?

Brian Gregory [00:18:14]:
No, I mean, it's really interesting, right? Because on the one hand, especially when you're developing, if you're a kiddo, if you don't put in the work, you're not going to build some of those skills and knowledge that you really need to build. But then as you move out of the education world into commercial world, I think anything to improve efficiency is rewarded, right? Where in high school, if you used AI to write your book report, then that's like cheating. But in the business world, if you used AI to write your marketing collateral, you should be rewarded because you found a way to leverage this faster. So it's really interesting and it's certainly something we think about a lot as well. And I think there's good and bad. I mean, it's sort of like smartphones, right? I mean, that's something that it's changed the way that we live. Sometimes for the worse, but sometimes for the better as well. And I think same thing here.

Brian Gregory [00:18:57]:
So just thank you for your take on that. It'd be interesting to see what happens there. Did want to get Tim into one other thing. This is more on the culture side of things. But one of the things that struck me, maybe it's your background as a principal and having to lead kind of large your teams, you've built a really strong performance culture within your team. Maybe you can just speak to a few ways that you've achieved that.

Tim Ivey [00:19:17]:
Oh yeah, absolutely. So our maintenance department was just recognized by our board of education for having a two year average. Our two year average resolution time or response time is under two days. It was 1.5 days. And then our overall resolution time for a two year average was 11.6 something days. So our goal was to be under two and twelve. And so what started out was we really didn't have a way to measure a lot of this. We were measuring response time with our previous work order system, but it was not very accurate.

Tim Ivey [00:19:55]:
And then there was no way to tell if a work order just didn't get done, if it got deleted or it just disappeared. It didn't go into the data. So the data was very inaccurate and there wasn't a whole lot of assurance on the side of the people we were serving. So when we started down the process of trying to improve, we really started from that impact of how do we better serve our community, the teachers and the students in the school? And then how do we have a piece of data that we can share with them that lets them know that something's going to be done within a certain amount of time. That was really where our mindset was, was how do we do that and get that and then consistently do it so that we build back that trust? So we're not seeing this idea that the maintenance department doesn't really do their job, which is very common around that people think they come and work on it, but they don't really fix it or all those type of things go on with it. So when we started out at it, the guys in the department kind of just looked at me like, here's a new guy, what's he talking about? Type of thing. And then as we started working through it and we said, okay, if we can consistently do it for six months, then we're going to give you an incentive. And I went to superintendent, said, let's give them a little incentive.

Tim Ivey [00:21:08]:
So he agreed to it. So if their six month average is under two and twelve, then they get a little extra on their paycheck. And so every six months they can earn a little bit of extra money for being consistent with their data. What it turned into was it caused us to have a lot of really rich conversations around work orders, how they're being completed, how do we work together as a team, what do we do to continue to meet that goal? And then what's the best way for us to do things? So a lot of times they were walking into a building and somebody was saying, hey, while you're here, will you fix this? And they were fixing it. And then I was like, why didn't you put in a work order for that? You did work, put in a work order for it. So then they were like, we didn't have a way to do it, so we got them all iPads. We say, carry the iPad with you all the time, got them a bag, here's your bag. Keep your iPad, keep your tools all in it, carry it with you all the time.

Tim Ivey [00:21:59]:
So it really changed that holistic culture. And then they really bought into it. Not necessarily because of the incentive. I think what happened was they started to notice that people were complimenting them. That may have happened, but it was very sporadic when it did happen. And the community of the people in our school started to build back that trust in the department. And it helped them to tell us, like, hey, I need to change this practice. One of the biggest things that came from this was we had floating custodians that were all housed at our warehouse.

Tim Ivey [00:22:33]:
And based off of us trying to accomplish this two and twelve work order kind of KPI, they came to us and said instead of us just floating around to different schools, if you just gave us, like give me five schools and give this person five schools. And we'll go every day to those schools. We'll work with the custodians. We'll make sure that the custodian work is done. And then if they need help, I'm their designated floater. So the principal knows who I am. I'm already in their school. Once a week I can inspect the school to make sure it's staying clean.

Tim Ivey [00:23:07]:
I mean, that conversation would never have happened if we hadn't started this holistic process of trying to improve. So it really has made a huge difference. And I don't know, I've never seen our maintenance department get recognized, but they brought them up in front of the whole Board of education and gave them all certificates and it's really nice.

Brian Gregory [00:23:28]:
That's amazing. I mean, it really is. And especially in today's world where many districts are struggling with staffing shortages. Not sure if you guys are impacted by that as well, but I only think that having a strong culture like you do would help mitigate some of those problems.

Tim Ivey [00:23:42]:
Yeah, we actually have been very fortunate on the maintenance side of being able to find people that would like to come work for us. The incentive that they get is not a huge amount of money, so it's not something that somebody's going to leave another job per se for that. But I think that we have a lot of people when they get here, they realize that one they're supported. And our superintendent is very determined to make sure that people feel like they're paid kind of adequately. And he did a lot of studies where he looked at overall, what are people getting paid for this type of position and then he addressed a lot of the concerns that were there already. So that does help. But if you come from private industry into a public world in the maintenance, you're taking a pay cut, but you also have a lot of incentives that aren't necessarily there in the outside private sector. So it's helped us a lot, I think, with having an understanding of how things work and that it's a repetitive cycle.

Tim Ivey [00:24:39]:
So when new people come in, it's easier to train them and get them ready to go. We fortunately haven't seen too many problems with finding people on maintenance. Now, bus drivers, I wish we had about a bazillion of those and other areas that don't impact my immediate job.

Brian Gregory [00:24:53]:
But AI, maybe we'll get AI buses.

Tim Ivey [00:24:58]:
Maybe that's the use case, the Tesla bus that's going to drive everybody, to drive everybody by itself, drop them off.

Brian Gregory [00:25:04]:
Yeah. I've heard so many stories of people over transportation and how it's like rapidly aged them because it's just so challenging to try to try to handle that well. Cool. Well, I know we're coming up a little bit on time here. One of the ways I like to end each one of these episodes is just with some advice. If you were going to speak to maybe our audience around I'd make it like a twofold here. First of all, around the importance of capital planning and FCA is kind of taking it back to the beginning there because I think a lot of folks don't really have a whole lot of guidance around that. So part on that.

Brian Gregory [00:25:35]:
But then also for those entering the facilities management or operations industry, any advice you'd give to them because obviously you've. Made that entrance and made it with the splash. So I think you've got some good words of wisdom.

Tim Ivey [00:25:46]:
So I would say that a lot of school systems struggle with how their money is allocated from their county. And so there's never going to be enough money in the public schools to do all the capital needs. But I would suggest that anybody who's starting out, or even districts who found themselves behind, especially if they feel like they're behind in their capital needs for their schools, doing a facilities condition assessment is probably the strongest thing that you can do because it does take the guesswork out of it. And it is very difficult for county commissioners or those who allocate funding to argue with data that shows pictures, exact locations. This is the equipment, this is what's happening, this is what's failing. It allows the school to make stronger cases for why we need to do things, because there's always the cost of continuing to operate something old as opposed to putting in something that's more efficient is going to save you and allow you to change where your funding is allocated. From current expense to capital funds, et cetera. That was probably one of the hardest sales up front that we had.

Tim Ivey [00:26:58]:
But once it was done, it now really drives about everything that we do so strongly, encourage people it's money well spent, we've already saved that back. In better decisions, we would have spent that money in bad decisions easily on what we spent for the condition assessment. And then as far as moving into managing facilities, depending on what your scenario is, I always think that you need to have repetitive processes and you need to have a continuous improvement cycle with everything. So it needs to run through a cycle that tells you is it working? And if it's not working, what do we need to do better? Or if it is working, is there something that we could tweak to make it work even better? If you're in any kind of environment that people rely on your decision or your decisions make impact on them in some way, shape or form, if we don't use that cycle and we become very stagnant in what we do, we are never going to grow and get better. So I think when you start facilities management, one of the things you have to look at is everything kind of needs to go through that lens. You may discover that everything's working great by using that process, but you could find that there's something that you could do to change that is really going to make a better impact on others. And then getting people comfortable with change because they see that it's not just change to change, it's change to improve everybody's life. That's really the part of it.

Tim Ivey [00:28:30]:
So don't be afraid of that if you're starting off and don't be afraid to challenge things that have happened a certain way. I took over for somebody who had done it one way for 20 years. So changing a 20 year culture and I was given a very short timeline by my superintendent was not the most comfortable thing. But you really kind of have to kind of do some of those things sometimes if you really want to see an impact and you want to ensure that what you're doing is helping those you serve.

Brian Gregory [00:28:59]:
Wow, that's great advice, man. I really appreciate it. Tim, I think that's probably going to wrap us up for today, but thanks again for your time. I really, really do appreciate it. I know you're really busy, and, man, I just look forward to continuing the relationship going forward.

Tim Ivey [00:29:12]:
Yeah, thank you. It's nice to be here. Appreciate you having me.