24 min read

SBA 241: Ask Me Anything- Buying a BAS

By Phil Zito on Mar 8, 2021 6:00:00 AM

Topics: Podcasts

Are you feeling overwhelmed by all the noise when it comes to building automation products and buying decisions for building owners?

If so your not alone!

That's why on this week's podcast we are answering questions our listeners have related to selecting, upgrading, or buying a BAS.

We received 72 questions and in this episode, we dive into the first 14 of these questions.

In this episode we cover

What should I look for in a BAS?
What does open mean?
I’m considering upgrading our BAS, where should I start?
Do I need analytics?
Should I integrate all my systems together?
How do I know if I’m getting ripped off?
How do I avoid getting locked into one vendor?
What technologies should I consider when I reoccupy?
What is the cheapest way to modernize my building?
What is the most important things to look for in a contractor?
What’s the deal with all these “data” platforms?
What are your thoughts on digital twins?
How can we make our projects actually deliver what we want?
How much involvement should the owner have with the BAS.

Click here to download or listen to this episode now.

Resources mentioned in this episode

Guide to Building Automation Systems

How to Evaluate a BAS Guide

Retrofit Podcast

BAS for Operators Online Course

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Show notes

Phil Zito 0:00
This is the smart buildings Academy podcast with Phil Zito Episode 241. Hey folks, Phil Zito here and welcome to Episode 241 of the smart buildings Academy podcast. And in this episode we're going to be doing an Ask me anything on buying and upgrading a building automation system. So recently on LinkedIn, I've seen a lot of posts around being vendor locked around people providing data layer solutions. And also within the industry we're starting to see people reoccupy, and they need occupant tracking touchless interactions within their buildings, and a variety of different technologies. And this kind of led me to thinking, what do building owners really find themselves asking whenever they are considering upgrading or buying a building automation system? Because if you think about it, right, really, the only places you can go are to your consulting engineer or to your OEM. And you don't really have an impartial voice within that decision, whether it's upgrading, retrofitting, buying, and oftentimes people within the built environment, they may be build one building in their lifetime. And so for them, this is a major decision. So what I did was I went on LinkedIn, and I posted that I'd be willing to take any question from any owner or property manager related to upgrading buying and replacing doing whatever you want to do with the building automation system. We got 72 replies, and I posted it on Saturday of all days. And we got 72 LinkedIn messages, surprisingly, no one wanted to post to the post, which I'm not surprised by because you go and say, Hey, we're considering upgrading a building automation system. And then every salesperson in the world is going to be trying to private message you. So I will not use any of your names in this. I'll be respectful because I feel like if you private messaged me, rather than going and commenting. It's probably because you didn't want people to know you're considering a building automation system. So I won't leave your building names that you sent me. I won't do your names where you work for don't worry about that. Everything we discuss including the transcript can be found at podcast at smart buildings academy.com forward slash 241 once again, that's podcast at smart buildings academy.com forward slash 241. And this week's episode is sponsored by our VA s for operators course which is designed to teach operators and building engineers how to utilize their building automation systems that covers building automation hva see it and basic operating of the building automation system to include changing points, changing trends, alarm schedules, graphics, doing basic tasks with the building automation system. So if you're interested in that, definitely go to podcasts at smart buildings academy.com Ford slash 241. Alrighty, so let's dive into the first question, which is what should I look for in a VA s? And this is a very vague question that can be taken many different ways. Here's what I like to say, when I say look for an A, B is you have to ask yourself, how are you going to be using a building automation system, oftentimes people will say, well, OEMs, or contractors or vendor locking, building owners to a specific building automation system by not giving them access to the building automation system. I will tell you though, there's some owners out there who should not ever have access to the building automation system. And because they refuse to invest in learning how to use it. And they're never going to have that culture of using their building automation system. And because of that, if they actually had full administrative access, they would do damage to the building. So what should you look for then in a building automation system? Well, it really depends on what you are trying to do with the building automation system. I'm not going to tell you that you should look for state of the art if you're you know, a basic two story investment, commercial real estate property, really, I mean, at the end of the day there, all you probably want is an interface for whichever contractor you're calling to come work on the system to be able to log in and see why the points are not functioning. And then you flip this in like the complete opposite to you know, major hospital and you want a fully self sufficient system that your engineers can operate. You want everything needed to operate that so when I look at a building automation system and what someone needs, I first evaluate their internal structure of their facility teams. Do they even have a facility team? Do they primarily use outsourced facility teams or is

Phil Zito 4:59
sourced facility teams, if it's primarily outsourced facility teams, I usually will say that a three tier, you know, supervisory device ba s field controllers and i O, system architecture is going to be fine. what that would look like is like a basic building automation supervisory device with a laptop that's connected to it for visualization, you're not going to need any of the tools or software because you're usually not going to be doing any configuration changes, it's just setpoint changes. And then having the field controllers in the i O, on the flip side, if this is you know, a major campus, something like that a hospital, then you're going to want to have typically building automation system full blown for tear, with a server with reporting capabilities for joint commission reporting, you're going to want to be able to go and have all of the tools, you're going to want to have all of this middle documents, all the programming, you're going to want to have everything at your fingertips, including training. So let's break this down a little bit, kind of more tactically as to things. So first, we have to ask ourselves, how do you use the building automation system? If the answer is you don't use it at all, then a lot of the fancy analytics, visualization, all of that stuff goes out the window, I know, I'm going to get people who are gonna poopoo that and be like, No, no, you need to get that. But the reality is, if you're not even using it to change your temperature, the reality of you having the culture to adopt analytics is very, very low, and you're wasting money, you would be better off spending money on the interior decorations to enhance perceived square footage value for your tenants. All right, let's just be real. Now, on the flip side, if you're someone who extensively utilizes your building automation system has a very well trained FM group, then you are going to want to go and make the financial decision. Do I want to be coupled to a contractor and dependent on them for service? Or do I want to only use them for install? Or do I only want to use them for major capital projects, and we'll do all t eyes ourselves. I've seen everything in between. So based on that decision, that is going to shape kind of what you get from your VA s provider, let's say that you want to still use the service contractor but you want to be able to operate it, well, then you're going to want to have really accurate submittals, you're going to have to have a VA s that provides good visualization. And you're going to want to have the ability to have access to the tools. If you want to actually do the engineering the programming, you want to do t eyes, you want to do retrofits all yourself, then you're going to need to have a little bit more advanced capabilities. Now, notice that most of this ties back to some pretty basic things, either a three tier architecture, which is a supervisory device field controllers, and IO, or a four tier architecture, which is servers, supervisory devices, field controllers and iOS. I realized I'm talking about some terminology that some of you may not be familiar with. So I will link to our ultimate guide to building automation systems where you can read up on all of these terms. Now let's move to the next question, which is what does open mean? So I saw these people lately saying these systems are closed, they're not open? Well, it depends on what open means. So in our evaluate, or how to evaluate a building automation system Guide, which I'll also include a link to, we talked that there are four types of open. There's open tools, right? These are tools that are freely open to anyone, almost no one has this, right. The reality is, pretty much every vendor has a vendor specific tool, you have open procurement, which there are actually several OEMs surprisingly, that have open procurement models, you will hear people say that you can't go and buy parts from many OEMs. But if you call the parts numbers within these organizations, and you're a customer of theirs, oftentimes you actually can buy the parts. Now, granted, you're gonna pay list price, so I'm not saying it's the cheapest way to buy the parts, but you can buy them at most OEMs that is a misnomer and just bad competitive. marketing or advertising, deceptive marketing or advertising by some people out there who saying you can't procure materials now.

Phil Zito 9:27
In the defense of people who say you can't procure materials, there are certain contractor only and distributor model products that you have to be a contractor or you have to be a authorized installer to purchase. That being said, I've seen multiple times in the past that if you are a large enough customer and you contact the OEM directly, they will often make an avenue for you to purchase material. At the end of the day. They really wants you to be going through their dealers and contractors because it takes the logistics supporting head out headache off of them. But they also want you as a customer. So they, if it comes push to shove, whether they lose you as a customer or they get you access to products, they're usually going to give you access to products. So that's open procurement. Now, we also have open protocol, this is not an issue for pretty much any system being installed these days. Just because people are incompetent when it comes to BACnet. They don't understand how it works, despite it being out for 2030 years now. And I know that's a strong statement. But there are so many seasoned to people who really don't understand how back networks, how to set up BB MDS bdts, how to work within back net. And because of that, they'll claim the system's not open, when it's really just there in competence and actually integrating the BACnet system, I've pretty much pulled in every system that's out there, even the old proprietary protocols from the 90s. I will tell you, it's not that hard if you know what you're doing. And then finally, there's open API's. These are data feeds. Now this may be API's, this may be WebSockets. This may be a variety of different methodologies to consume data, it may even be exporting data into SQL, and then pulling a data feed, right. But at the end of the day, it's having open access to data. So to recap, right, we have open tools, almost no one has us. We have our open procurement models, right? We have our open protocols, and we have our open API's. So I'm considering upgrading our VA s, where should I start, we did an entire podcast episode on how to upgrade our VA s. And I think it was like 40 minutes long. So I'm not going to belabor the point, I will put a link to this podcast episode in this post at podcast dot smart buildings academy.com forward slash 241. That being said, whenever I'm considering upgrading a VA s and where do I start, I typically like to start at the head end and then do a parallel upgrade if I can, as long as there's not peer to peer dependencies. So if you have like a lot of VA v boxes that are feeding into air handlers to do like DHT, reset, stuff like that, then you've got peer to peer dependencies. And if you break that peer to peer dependency, you can shut things down, as I've learned a couple times going and doing retrofits and breaking stuff. That being said, What I like to do typically is work on the visualization layer first, because that's usually the biggest issue for people, you can install the most amazing performing building automation system in the world. And if the graphics look bad, or do not flow, well, then you're going to get callbacks and you're gonna have people having issues. The reality is the visualization layer with you like it or not, is the most important aspect of a building automation system. Because it's what people see. It's what they brag to their friends about. Right? They go and they show it off. And they're like, Oh, look at this, look at how cool this looks is 3d realistic. Cool. So at the end of the day, upgrading the visualization side first is usually your best bet. And then as controllers fail, as supervisory devices fail, you roll them over solid, typically to a new visualization layer. And then I will pull in the you could do two schools of thought, right? The easiest is to just do a separate visualization layer and slowly bring supervisory devices and field controllers over into that graphic, doing them like floors at a time or buildings at a time. The other is to integrate the legacy system into the new system and then go and gradually cut it over, that's going to be significantly more expensive. So it really just depends. Do I need analytics? Yes, no, maybe. So analytics is a broad sweeping term. It's something that is poorly defined and poorly utilized due to the culture that's present in a lot of buildings. So when you say Do I need analytics, my question to you and person who asked this didn't really explain this very well. But hey, that's okay.

Phil Zito 14:12
Do I need analytics? What would you need analytics to do? What would they do for you? Who is selling you on analytics? What are they selling you on? Most likely, they're selling you on one of three things. They're selling you on fault detection and the ability to increase your maintenance efficiency. They're selling you on energy analytics, or they're selling you on just data trend visualization for like space planning and utilization purposes. So figure out what the reason is behind analytics figure out does it align with a business need an use case that you can attribute dollars to? And if it does, you have to ask yourself, honestly, do you have the culture to adopt analytics? This is gonna sound really bad, but you got to win. Just 70 year olds who barely understand how to operate an iPhone, not saying all 70 year olds are technically competent, just, you know, applying stereotypes, which we probably shouldn't do. But stereotypes kind of exist for a reason. That being said, analytics, you know, if you've got an older population who want to run things in hand, then you're probably not going to get adoption of analytics, I'm just going to be honest with you, do you got a much younger population that once again, using stereotypes, wants to work on the computer and not go look at the equipment, then you're gonna probably benefit with analytics with that group. That being said, obviously, there's exceptions to the rule. I know, some older folks who are really, really freaking sharp with technology. And I know a fair bit of younger folks who really want to get their hands dirty and don't want to work on computers. So it's not always the case. But just evaluate your culture. And really understand are the folks who are going to actually be using this going to be using this? Should I integrate all my systems together? This is interesting, because I actually saw a post that Jim Stice did have an operation center. And it was a picture of each individual computer for the different systems. And it was talking about, imagine, like how difficult this is. And it got me thinking, right, I was working with a large healthcare Consortium, and they had a operation center, I worked with a large contractor, and they had a operation center. And so I've seen where, you know, the single pane, a single pane of glass concept can go, Well, I've seen where it can go bad. my thought process on integrating systems is chunking. Should you integrate all systems together, not unless it ties to a use case that delivers value, you shouldn't integrate all your systems together. For visualization purposes, that's like the worst reason you can do it. Because at the end of the day, the subject matter expert who is visualizing one system may not be a subject matter expert on another system. And you can actually create all sorts of headaches, I've seen it time and time again, where you've got video surveillance, access, control, lighting, AV ba is all on the same single pane of glass system. And the person who's operating it is maybe a building engineer. And then the next shift comes along, and it's an H HVAC guy, and the next shift comes along, and it's an electrician. And the folks who are looking at these systems, they don't understand them. And because they don't understand them, they are actually going to potentially Miss interpret data. And this misinterpretation is going to cause issues it, it will cause issues. And you're going and potentially integrating all things together. Because it sounds sexy, and you're being sold on this image, where in reality, you should go and focus on just the use case. How do I know if I'm getting ripped off? Oh, my goodness. Well, that is a loaded question. If I ever saw it, how do you know if you're getting ripped off, but well ripped off? by what? You know that therein lies the rub? And maybe I'll do this as a webinar? Because I feel like this might be even better if it was more interactive. But how do I know if I'm getting ripped off? Well, let me tell you a story. I remember I was doing some work for Dallas Baptist University. And they were building a new It was a dorm or it was or is a school building. And we came in at like 1/12 I think we did all the work at Dallas Baptist, the mechanical brought in their own contractor.

Phil Zito 18:57
They paired up with a VA s contractor because they were like, we had a hostile relationship with this mechanical, they did the mechanical work we did the controls work, but they didn't like that they wanted the controls work. I'll be honest, I probably threw the mechanical under the bus a couple times because they did stupid shit like going and designing a fan coil for an all wood room and then having it be cooling only and figuring out that they would bring in the outside air to dehumidify when if you know anything about Texas bringing in outside air in the middle of the summer to dehumidifies like it's like not even psychometrically possible. If you look at a psych chart, it's there's no possible way that the math could work. But so I I may or may not have thrown them under the bus and been like, hey, these geniuses didn't think to do this. Which probably in my youth was not the best idea but hey, it is what it is. So that being said, they brought in this other contractor and they were like 32,000 Like 112, if I remember, and the one guy there at the time said, Why is your cost so much more, I don't know how to justify this, I said, You know what? blackout their their name, blackout their numbers, and just show me their scope of work. And as we dug into their scope of work, they were doing like terminal equipment controllers for everything, like t C's for the roof tops, basically intelligent thermostats, whereas we were doing a full blown control solution, right? We were doing field controllers, supervisory devices, everything. And so naturally, of course, there would be a cost difference. And once I explained this, and I said, You know what, we'll quote TCS too, and we quoted t C's, and even with a healthy profit margin, I was still at the exact same price as them. So whenever you're getting ripped off, the first thing you need to do is make sure that whatever you're comparing it to his apples to apples, because you may not be getting ripped off, someone may be going and providing a better system. And so you need to know that it's apples to apples, right? That you're actually making fair comparisons. The second thing you need to understand is what is the relationship you have and what is the construction vehicle you're using. Because if the customer is going owner direct, or sorry, the contractor is going owner direct, that price is usually going to be higher than if they are going through a contracting tear. And here's why. As the VA s contractor is under the mechanical, there is margin put on top of the VA s contractors price, then it goes to the general and there's margin placed on top of that. So by the time that the total cost gets to the owner, it actually has several points of margin added on top of it. So when you're owner direct, you may see a higher price because you're not shielded from that margin stacking. And you may be like, yo, why is this different? Okay, so that's one aspect. Now, you could argue that, okay, well, why can't they give me the same price as the mechanical? Well, usually, when you're doing owner direct work, there is the fact that that contractor who's doing owner direct work, the VA s contractor is now acting as a general contractor, they all have paid to have the liability associated with that they now have additional duties. So you have to really understand, am I getting like for like scenario. And then finally, sometimes you are getting ripped off? Sometimes people are recommending things that aren't valuable for you, or aren't important for you. And you have to ask yourself, what is the value that is going to be added by this technology? And if your contractor can't explain that and show the business value associated with the technology that's being added? Then you're probably I don't want to see you're not? Because some some don't have that capability. They just don't know how to explain that. But it would raise some red flags for me, how do I avoid getting locked into one vendor, it's not necessarily a bad thing to get locked into one vendor. Honestly, some of the biggest mistakes I've seen, especially in campus environments are that they use too many vendors. Because here's the deal, here's what you have to decide,

Phil Zito 23:14
you have to decide, am I self executer? Or am I not? If you're not a self executer and you just want competitive pressure, then have a single visualization layer, and then go and have multiple vendors bid the projects and pick whichever one's the lowest price and have have a married day as not what I would do personally, I pick contractors based on I evaluate their install team, evaluate their service team, evaluate their sales team and I talked to their past customers because I'm buying a 20 year relationship when I buy from a vendor. That being said, I mean, as long as you put in the spec language, that the vendor needs to provide all tools, administrative level access to the system, as well as copies of all final software backups and programs, you should be pretty solid, you should be able to hand that off to anyone and have them work on that system. That being said, if you are self executer if you're an organization that has a facilities team that does a lot of work themselves, then you may want to consider sticking with one vendor because one vendor one product means that especially if you have a naming standard and a sequence standard, you only have to train your people once and they can go from building to building and work on any system. What technology should I consider when I reoccupy so there's a lot of noise on this. I'd be lying to you if I told you I was 100% sure. I don't see any regulation in the US yet around this. I do know that. Last I checked, there's 50 billion allocated to h fac upgrades for K through 12. So that's going to be very interesting. But if I'm thinking about it, what do the occupants want, they probably want to know they're in a safe building. So reporting would probably be good with some digital signage, you know, talking about air changes communicating the environmental index of the building and what you're doing touchless. Although I don't like the technology, and I've seen very, quite a few arguments for why it could be bad. touchless is a very attractive technology for occupants. Additionally, I think you should consider occupant interface into their environment, being able to control temperature, being able to control lights, being able to go and interface with those systems, that will make occupants feel like they have control and feel like they actually own their system. So you, because you're Now unlike any time before in history, you are now directly competing with people's houses, people are going to leave their house and the main reason they're going to go and re occupy a building is either it's mandated by their company, or they want that social interaction, but is that social interaction or that company mandate going to be enough to overcome that direct comparison to their home environment because that's what you're competing with now. So the technologies when they reoccupy visualization and data dashboarding of IQ and environmental index, touchless experience, as well as technologies that allow the occupant to at least change their temperature and light levels. What's the cheapest way to modernize my building? What is modernize your building mean? Most people I think, when they say modernize their building, they're talking about stuff that isn't even related to building automation. You know, some of the cheapest ways to modernize your building, probably be like changing out lighting, changing the paint scheme, going and changing potentially the layout, I remember walking into an at&t office building in one of their headquarters buildings. And it was like orange inside, it was dreary, and like, had a cubicle up to like my chin, the cubicle height was up to my chin, I'm short, but I'm not that short. And so it was something that it was just demoralizing to be in that building. So modernization, usually from tenant improvements related to changing out the interior are going to be your greatest hits, I'd love to tell you, it's building automation technology. But one of the cheapest ways is paint, windows, lights, all these things that increase the odds, then from there, then you can move into the technology stack, which is going to be Do you have the ability to provide data, it's

Phil Zito 27:58
going to be much more data centric, since most building, since a good chunk of building owners do not want to fully operate their building, they want to outsource that or do it in the least cost possible. We're gonna shy away from doing heavy upgrades on the building automation system, unless it's a legacy system that can't be purchased anymore. Most of what you should want to focus in on is the tenants interaction with the technology, the environment itself and the visualization of data. What is the most important thing or things to look for in a contractor? I like to look at their team, how long has their team been around? What is their team's utilization rate? Are they like heavily overbooked on projects? Is there a huge delay in them being able to actually go out and execute work? If so, I mean, that could be a good sign, and it could be a bad sign at the same time, it could be a good sign that they've had rapid growth, it could be a bad sign, and that they don't have effective processes. And they're just winging it. So you really got to look at what is your process for executing a project? How do you structure your team to execute projects? Who on your team is going to work on my project? How are you going to go and design my project? How are you going to collaborate with me on the construction of my systems? And then how are you going to support me after this? How are you going to train my team? Those are all questions and then you want to ask about experiences with existing customers. Why did you use them? What was your experience? What do you wish you knew when you first started working with them? would you use them again? Why would you use them again? How long have you been using them, etc? Alright, what's the deal with all these data platforms? Money, money's cheap. You're going to see a ridiculous amount of Prop tech coming out. You're going to be seeing so much prop tech that you can be looking at prop tech turn around, and prop tech is going to be right behind you as far as Mark Getting goes. There's just so much analytics, visualization. Everything has technology, garbage has technology now, right? They have IoT garbage cans. And all of this stuff is going to be feeding into data platforms, whether that's data ingestion, whether that's data visualization, whether that's data analytics. And you have to understand people have to have somewhere to put their money right now, at least in the United States, the cost of money is extremely low. And because of that investors are looking for areas that have potential growth. And Software as a Service has been a proven model for growth from a risk perspective versus, you know, physical devices that you have to go out. So people are looking at, how can we gather this data? And then how can we invest in these data platforms? So you see that? What are my thoughts on digital twins? I don't feel like I know enough about digital twins to effectively answer that. And I think there's a lot of confusion as to what digital twins are, I think, probably in the April, maybe the May timeframe, we'll dig into digital twins. Right now we're daily digging into real estate and stuff like that. But I think we'll start to dig into digital twins, basically, the concept of a digital twin is to digitize all of the defining information of your buildings, design and operation, so that you can run scenarios on it. You can do space planning, you can do analytics and all sorts of stuff, right? It's basically a model that then you can run scenarios against. So that being said, I don't think it's for everyone. I've heard it's rather costly. I think that, additionally, the fact that we don't have a consistent data schema, and that's one thing we're going to be talking about on an upcoming podcast with the haystack folks and the brick schema folks, is data schemas and how to data schemas work, why do we need them? How do we work with them? So that's something that I just, I don't know enough to give you a full comment on. Everything I am relaying is secondhand. I've heard they're expensive. I've heard they're difficult. I've heard they're valuable. I've heard my customers, our customers at smart buildings Academy who are owners who are deploying them in their portfolios. You know what, as a matter of fact, I've got a couple customers who are deploying them, maybe I'll bring them on, and have them talk about their experience, and why they decided to use a digital twin and what they're seeing from it. Alright, how can we make our projects actually deliver what we want?

Phil Zito 32:48
Well, one of the biggest gaps I see in project delivery and project construction, first is a lack of standards, not having any expectation as to what should be deployed. If you have more than three buildings, you should have a standard. They're so easy to create, literally, you can go Google building automation standards, it's all in the public domain, just copy what you like and make your own standard. I mean, seriously, just do it. Like I see these people fretting over creating naming standards for building automation systems. They're like, Oh, we got to create one, it's so hard. But then the reality is, is that the naming standards, there's so many of them just sitting out there that you can copy to your heart's delight. I mean, just go find what you like with a simple Google search, and then start compiling it into a Google Doc, or OneDrive, Doc, whatever. And then, once you've got a standard, drive to that standard, and then engage your FM team, if you have an FM team, if you have a facility maintenance team, engage them in the process. keep them engaged, please, for the love of Pete, have your FM people engaged in the capital process? I mean, you sit there and expect these people to operate it, but they have no feedback at all in the construction process. Alright, how much involvement should the owner have with the VA s? So I'm kind of torn right? I run smart buildings academies. So obviously, I think the VA S is important. But at the same time, I realize it's not that tremendous of business value. So you know, for a hospital, it's important, but it's not going and having the same importance as an EMR or things like that, right. So how much involvement should the owner have, they should understand their use cases. And they should have a standard that they drive it here. It's too if they have a standard that they drive adherence to and they spend the time upfront creating that standard, they should have very little involvement other than having their owner's rep in forcing adherence to that standard. That's really the simplest way rather than having them make every single decision. Come up with the use cases spent. The time upfront, go through a couple planning sessions, create a standard, create the use cases that are important for you. Make sure you have a data standard and then have an owner's rep who enforces that standard in the project. All right, so I just went through I think that's 12 of the 72 questions and we're already at 35 minutes, so we're gonna call it a day for today. I may do another in Episode 243 have asked me anything buying a VA s because we still have 60 more questions to go. You all tell me Did you enjoy this? Did you find it valuable? I hope you did. Leave a comment. Let me know what you would like to hear about. Once again, if you don't feel comfortable leaving comments I totally understand you don't want salespeople reaching out to you and being like, Oh, I saw you're looking for a newbie, I guess you could just email me or send us a message request. That being said, thanks so much. Be sure to go check out all the notes and links at podcasts at smart buildings Academy comm Ford slash two for one. Once again, this podcast at smart buildings academy.com Ford slash 241. Thanks, Todd. And take care

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Phil Zito 0:00
This is the smart buildings Academy podcast with Phil Zito Episode 241. Hey folks, Phil Zito here and welcome to Episode 241 of the smart buildings Academy podcast. And in this episode we're going to be doing an Ask me anything on buying and upgrading a building automation system. So recently on LinkedIn, I've seen a lot of posts around being vendor locked around people providing data layer solutions. And also within the industry we're starting to see people reoccupy, and they need occupant tracking touchless interactions within their buildings, and a variety of different technologies. And this kind of led me to thinking, what do building owners really find themselves asking whenever they are considering upgrading or buying a building automation system? Because if you think about it, right, really, the only places you can go are to your consulting engineer or to your OEM. And you don't really have an impartial voice within that decision, whether it's upgrading, retrofitting, buying, and oftentimes people within the built environment, they may be build one building in their lifetime. And so for them, this is a major decision. So what I did was I went on LinkedIn, and I posted that I'd be willing to take any question from any owner or property manager related to upgrading buying and replacing doing whatever you want to do with the building automation system. We got 72 replies, and I posted it on Saturday of all days. And we got 72 LinkedIn messages, surprisingly, no one wanted to post to the post, which I'm not surprised by because you go and say, Hey, we're considering upgrading a building automation system. And then every salesperson in the world is going to be trying to private message you. So I will not use any of your names in this. I'll be respectful because I feel like if you private messaged me, rather than going and commenting. It's probably because you didn't want people to know you're considering a building automation system. So I won't leave your building names that you sent me. I won't do your names where you work for don't worry about that. Everything we discuss including the transcript can be found at podcast at smart buildings academy.com forward slash 241 once again, that's podcast at smart buildings academy.com forward slash 241. And this week's episode is sponsored by our VA s for operators course which is designed to teach operators and building engineers how to utilize their building automation systems that covers building automation hva see it and basic operating of the building automation system to include changing points, changing trends, alarm schedules, graphics, doing basic tasks with the building automation system. So if you're interested in that, definitely go to podcasts at smart buildings academy.com Ford slash 241. Alrighty, so let's dive into the first question, which is what should I look for in a VA s? And this is a very vague question that can be taken many different ways. Here's what I like to say, when I say look for an A, B is you have to ask yourself, how are you going to be using a building automation system, oftentimes people will say, well, OEMs, or contractors or vendor locking, building owners to a specific building automation system by not giving them access to the building automation system. I will tell you though, there's some owners out there who should not ever have access to the building automation system. And because they refuse to invest in learning how to use it. And they're never going to have that culture of using their building automation system. And because of that, if they actually had full administrative access, they would do damage to the building. So what should you look for then in a building automation system? Well, it really depends on what you are trying to do with the building automation system. I'm not going to tell you that you should look for state of the art if you're you know, a basic two story investment, commercial real estate property, really, I mean, at the end of the day there, all you probably want is an interface for whichever contractor you're calling to come work on the system to be able to log in and see why the points are not functioning. And then you flip this in like the complete opposite to you know, major hospital and you want a fully self sufficient system that your engineers can operate. You want everything needed to operate that so when I look at a building automation system and what someone needs, I first evaluate their internal structure of their facility teams. Do they even have a facility team? Do they primarily use outsourced facility teams or is

Phil Zito 4:59
sourced facility teams, if it's primarily outsourced facility teams, I usually will say that a three tier, you know, supervisory device ba s field controllers and i O, system architecture is going to be fine. what that would look like is like a basic building automation supervisory device with a laptop that's connected to it for visualization, you're not going to need any of the tools or software because you're usually not going to be doing any configuration changes, it's just setpoint changes. And then having the field controllers in the i O, on the flip side, if this is you know, a major campus, something like that a hospital, then you're going to want to have typically building automation system full blown for tear, with a server with reporting capabilities for joint commission reporting, you're going to want to be able to go and have all of the tools, you're going to want to have all of this middle documents, all the programming, you're going to want to have everything at your fingertips, including training. So let's break this down a little bit, kind of more tactically as to things. So first, we have to ask ourselves, how do you use the building automation system? If the answer is you don't use it at all, then a lot of the fancy analytics, visualization, all of that stuff goes out the window, I know, I'm going to get people who are gonna poopoo that and be like, No, no, you need to get that. But the reality is, if you're not even using it to change your temperature, the reality of you having the culture to adopt analytics is very, very low, and you're wasting money, you would be better off spending money on the interior decorations to enhance perceived square footage value for your tenants. All right, let's just be real. Now, on the flip side, if you're someone who extensively utilizes your building automation system has a very well trained FM group, then you are going to want to go and make the financial decision. Do I want to be coupled to a contractor and dependent on them for service? Or do I want to only use them for install? Or do I only want to use them for major capital projects, and we'll do all t eyes ourselves. I've seen everything in between. So based on that decision, that is going to shape kind of what you get from your VA s provider, let's say that you want to still use the service contractor but you want to be able to operate it, well, then you're going to want to have really accurate submittals, you're going to have to have a VA s that provides good visualization. And you're going to want to have the ability to have access to the tools. If you want to actually do the engineering the programming, you want to do t eyes, you want to do retrofits all yourself, then you're going to need to have a little bit more advanced capabilities. Now, notice that most of this ties back to some pretty basic things, either a three tier architecture, which is a supervisory device field controllers, and IO, or a four tier architecture, which is servers, supervisory devices, field controllers and iOS. I realized I'm talking about some terminology that some of you may not be familiar with. So I will link to our ultimate guide to building automation systems where you can read up on all of these terms. Now let's move to the next question, which is what does open mean? So I saw these people lately saying these systems are closed, they're not open? Well, it depends on what open means. So in our evaluate, or how to evaluate a building automation system Guide, which I'll also include a link to, we talked that there are four types of open. There's open tools, right? These are tools that are freely open to anyone, almost no one has this, right. The reality is, pretty much every vendor has a vendor specific tool, you have open procurement, which there are actually several OEMs surprisingly, that have open procurement models, you will hear people say that you can't go and buy parts from many OEMs. But if you call the parts numbers within these organizations, and you're a customer of theirs, oftentimes you actually can buy the parts. Now, granted, you're gonna pay list price, so I'm not saying it's the cheapest way to buy the parts, but you can buy them at most OEMs that is a misnomer and just bad competitive. marketing or advertising, deceptive marketing or advertising by some people out there who saying you can't procure materials now.

Phil Zito 9:27
In the defense of people who say you can't procure materials, there are certain contractor only and distributor model products that you have to be a contractor or you have to be a authorized installer to purchase. That being said, I've seen multiple times in the past that if you are a large enough customer and you contact the OEM directly, they will often make an avenue for you to purchase material. At the end of the day. They really wants you to be going through their dealers and contractors because it takes the logistics supporting head out headache off of them. But they also want you as a customer. So they, if it comes push to shove, whether they lose you as a customer or they get you access to products, they're usually going to give you access to products. So that's open procurement. Now, we also have open protocol, this is not an issue for pretty much any system being installed these days. Just because people are incompetent when it comes to BACnet. They don't understand how it works, despite it being out for 2030 years now. And I know that's a strong statement. But there are so many seasoned to people who really don't understand how back networks, how to set up BB MDS bdts, how to work within back net. And because of that, they'll claim the system's not open, when it's really just there in competence and actually integrating the BACnet system, I've pretty much pulled in every system that's out there, even the old proprietary protocols from the 90s. I will tell you, it's not that hard if you know what you're doing. And then finally, there's open API's. These are data feeds. Now this may be API's, this may be WebSockets. This may be a variety of different methodologies to consume data, it may even be exporting data into SQL, and then pulling a data feed, right. But at the end of the day, it's having open access to data. So to recap, right, we have open tools, almost no one has us. We have our open procurement models, right? We have our open protocols, and we have our open API's. So I'm considering upgrading our VA s, where should I start, we did an entire podcast episode on how to upgrade our VA s. And I think it was like 40 minutes long. So I'm not going to belabor the point, I will put a link to this podcast episode in this post at podcast dot smart buildings academy.com forward slash 241. That being said, whenever I'm considering upgrading a VA s and where do I start, I typically like to start at the head end and then do a parallel upgrade if I can, as long as there's not peer to peer dependencies. So if you have like a lot of VA v boxes that are feeding into air handlers to do like DHT, reset, stuff like that, then you've got peer to peer dependencies. And if you break that peer to peer dependency, you can shut things down, as I've learned a couple times going and doing retrofits and breaking stuff. That being said, What I like to do typically is work on the visualization layer first, because that's usually the biggest issue for people, you can install the most amazing performing building automation system in the world. And if the graphics look bad, or do not flow, well, then you're going to get callbacks and you're gonna have people having issues. The reality is the visualization layer with you like it or not, is the most important aspect of a building automation system. Because it's what people see. It's what they brag to their friends about. Right? They go and they show it off. And they're like, Oh, look at this, look at how cool this looks is 3d realistic. Cool. So at the end of the day, upgrading the visualization side first is usually your best bet. And then as controllers fail, as supervisory devices fail, you roll them over solid, typically to a new visualization layer. And then I will pull in the you could do two schools of thought, right? The easiest is to just do a separate visualization layer and slowly bring supervisory devices and field controllers over into that graphic, doing them like floors at a time or buildings at a time. The other is to integrate the legacy system into the new system and then go and gradually cut it over, that's going to be significantly more expensive. So it really just depends. Do I need analytics? Yes, no, maybe. So analytics is a broad sweeping term. It's something that is poorly defined and poorly utilized due to the culture that's present in a lot of buildings. So when you say Do I need analytics, my question to you and person who asked this didn't really explain this very well. But hey, that's okay.

Phil Zito 14:12
Do I need analytics? What would you need analytics to do? What would they do for you? Who is selling you on analytics? What are they selling you on? Most likely, they're selling you on one of three things. They're selling you on fault detection and the ability to increase your maintenance efficiency. They're selling you on energy analytics, or they're selling you on just data trend visualization for like space planning and utilization purposes. So figure out what the reason is behind analytics figure out does it align with a business need an use case that you can attribute dollars to? And if it does, you have to ask yourself, honestly, do you have the culture to adopt analytics? This is gonna sound really bad, but you got to win. Just 70 year olds who barely understand how to operate an iPhone, not saying all 70 year olds are technically competent, just, you know, applying stereotypes, which we probably shouldn't do. But stereotypes kind of exist for a reason. That being said, analytics, you know, if you've got an older population who want to run things in hand, then you're probably not going to get adoption of analytics, I'm just going to be honest with you, do you got a much younger population that once again, using stereotypes, wants to work on the computer and not go look at the equipment, then you're gonna probably benefit with analytics with that group. That being said, obviously, there's exceptions to the rule. I know, some older folks who are really, really freaking sharp with technology. And I know a fair bit of younger folks who really want to get their hands dirty and don't want to work on computers. So it's not always the case. But just evaluate your culture. And really understand are the folks who are going to actually be using this going to be using this? Should I integrate all my systems together? This is interesting, because I actually saw a post that Jim Stice did have an operation center. And it was a picture of each individual computer for the different systems. And it was talking about, imagine, like how difficult this is. And it got me thinking, right, I was working with a large healthcare Consortium, and they had a operation center, I worked with a large contractor, and they had a operation center. And so I've seen where, you know, the single pane, a single pane of glass concept can go, Well, I've seen where it can go bad. my thought process on integrating systems is chunking. Should you integrate all systems together, not unless it ties to a use case that delivers value, you shouldn't integrate all your systems together. For visualization purposes, that's like the worst reason you can do it. Because at the end of the day, the subject matter expert who is visualizing one system may not be a subject matter expert on another system. And you can actually create all sorts of headaches, I've seen it time and time again, where you've got video surveillance, access, control, lighting, AV ba is all on the same single pane of glass system. And the person who's operating it is maybe a building engineer. And then the next shift comes along, and it's an H HVAC guy, and the next shift comes along, and it's an electrician. And the folks who are looking at these systems, they don't understand them. And because they don't understand them, they are actually going to potentially Miss interpret data. And this misinterpretation is going to cause issues it, it will cause issues. And you're going and potentially integrating all things together. Because it sounds sexy, and you're being sold on this image, where in reality, you should go and focus on just the use case. How do I know if I'm getting ripped off? Oh, my goodness. Well, that is a loaded question. If I ever saw it, how do you know if you're getting ripped off, but well ripped off? by what? You know that therein lies the rub? And maybe I'll do this as a webinar? Because I feel like this might be even better if it was more interactive. But how do I know if I'm getting ripped off? Well, let me tell you a story. I remember I was doing some work for Dallas Baptist University. And they were building a new It was a dorm or it was or is a school building. And we came in at like 1/12 I think we did all the work at Dallas Baptist, the mechanical brought in their own contractor.

Phil Zito 18:57
They paired up with a VA s contractor because they were like, we had a hostile relationship with this mechanical, they did the mechanical work we did the controls work, but they didn't like that they wanted the controls work. I'll be honest, I probably threw the mechanical under the bus a couple times because they did stupid shit like going and designing a fan coil for an all wood room and then having it be cooling only and figuring out that they would bring in the outside air to dehumidify when if you know anything about Texas bringing in outside air in the middle of the summer to dehumidifies like it's like not even psychometrically possible. If you look at a psych chart, it's there's no possible way that the math could work. But so I I may or may not have thrown them under the bus and been like, hey, these geniuses didn't think to do this. Which probably in my youth was not the best idea but hey, it is what it is. So that being said, they brought in this other contractor and they were like 32,000 Like 112, if I remember, and the one guy there at the time said, Why is your cost so much more, I don't know how to justify this, I said, You know what? blackout their their name, blackout their numbers, and just show me their scope of work. And as we dug into their scope of work, they were doing like terminal equipment controllers for everything, like t C's for the roof tops, basically intelligent thermostats, whereas we were doing a full blown control solution, right? We were doing field controllers, supervisory devices, everything. And so naturally, of course, there would be a cost difference. And once I explained this, and I said, You know what, we'll quote TCS too, and we quoted t C's, and even with a healthy profit margin, I was still at the exact same price as them. So whenever you're getting ripped off, the first thing you need to do is make sure that whatever you're comparing it to his apples to apples, because you may not be getting ripped off, someone may be going and providing a better system. And so you need to know that it's apples to apples, right? That you're actually making fair comparisons. The second thing you need to understand is what is the relationship you have and what is the construction vehicle you're using. Because if the customer is going owner direct, or sorry, the contractor is going owner direct, that price is usually going to be higher than if they are going through a contracting tear. And here's why. As the VA s contractor is under the mechanical, there is margin put on top of the VA s contractors price, then it goes to the general and there's margin placed on top of that. So by the time that the total cost gets to the owner, it actually has several points of margin added on top of it. So when you're owner direct, you may see a higher price because you're not shielded from that margin stacking. And you may be like, yo, why is this different? Okay, so that's one aspect. Now, you could argue that, okay, well, why can't they give me the same price as the mechanical? Well, usually, when you're doing owner direct work, there is the fact that that contractor who's doing owner direct work, the VA s contractor is now acting as a general contractor, they all have paid to have the liability associated with that they now have additional duties. So you have to really understand, am I getting like for like scenario. And then finally, sometimes you are getting ripped off? Sometimes people are recommending things that aren't valuable for you, or aren't important for you. And you have to ask yourself, what is the value that is going to be added by this technology? And if your contractor can't explain that and show the business value associated with the technology that's being added? Then you're probably I don't want to see you're not? Because some some don't have that capability. They just don't know how to explain that. But it would raise some red flags for me, how do I avoid getting locked into one vendor, it's not necessarily a bad thing to get locked into one vendor. Honestly, some of the biggest mistakes I've seen, especially in campus environments are that they use too many vendors. Because here's the deal, here's what you have to decide,

Phil Zito 23:14
you have to decide, am I self executer? Or am I not? If you're not a self executer and you just want competitive pressure, then have a single visualization layer, and then go and have multiple vendors bid the projects and pick whichever one's the lowest price and have have a married day as not what I would do personally, I pick contractors based on I evaluate their install team, evaluate their service team, evaluate their sales team and I talked to their past customers because I'm buying a 20 year relationship when I buy from a vendor. That being said, I mean, as long as you put in the spec language, that the vendor needs to provide all tools, administrative level access to the system, as well as copies of all final software backups and programs, you should be pretty solid, you should be able to hand that off to anyone and have them work on that system. That being said, if you are self executer if you're an organization that has a facilities team that does a lot of work themselves, then you may want to consider sticking with one vendor because one vendor one product means that especially if you have a naming standard and a sequence standard, you only have to train your people once and they can go from building to building and work on any system. What technology should I consider when I reoccupy so there's a lot of noise on this. I'd be lying to you if I told you I was 100% sure. I don't see any regulation in the US yet around this. I do know that. Last I checked, there's 50 billion allocated to h fac upgrades for K through 12. So that's going to be very interesting. But if I'm thinking about it, what do the occupants want, they probably want to know they're in a safe building. So reporting would probably be good with some digital signage, you know, talking about air changes communicating the environmental index of the building and what you're doing touchless. Although I don't like the technology, and I've seen very, quite a few arguments for why it could be bad. touchless is a very attractive technology for occupants. Additionally, I think you should consider occupant interface into their environment, being able to control temperature, being able to control lights, being able to go and interface with those systems, that will make occupants feel like they have control and feel like they actually own their system. So you, because you're Now unlike any time before in history, you are now directly competing with people's houses, people are going to leave their house and the main reason they're going to go and re occupy a building is either it's mandated by their company, or they want that social interaction, but is that social interaction or that company mandate going to be enough to overcome that direct comparison to their home environment because that's what you're competing with now. So the technologies when they reoccupy visualization and data dashboarding of IQ and environmental index, touchless experience, as well as technologies that allow the occupant to at least change their temperature and light levels. What's the cheapest way to modernize my building? What is modernize your building mean? Most people I think, when they say modernize their building, they're talking about stuff that isn't even related to building automation. You know, some of the cheapest ways to modernize your building, probably be like changing out lighting, changing the paint scheme, going and changing potentially the layout, I remember walking into an at&t office building in one of their headquarters buildings. And it was like orange inside, it was dreary, and like, had a cubicle up to like my chin, the cubicle height was up to my chin, I'm short, but I'm not that short. And so it was something that it was just demoralizing to be in that building. So modernization, usually from tenant improvements related to changing out the interior are going to be your greatest hits, I'd love to tell you, it's building automation technology. But one of the cheapest ways is paint, windows, lights, all these things that increase the odds, then from there, then you can move into the technology stack, which is going to be Do you have the ability to provide data, it's

Phil Zito 27:58
going to be much more data centric, since most building, since a good chunk of building owners do not want to fully operate their building, they want to outsource that or do it in the least cost possible. We're gonna shy away from doing heavy upgrades on the building automation system, unless it's a legacy system that can't be purchased anymore. Most of what you should want to focus in on is the tenants interaction with the technology, the environment itself and the visualization of data. What is the most important thing or things to look for in a contractor? I like to look at their team, how long has their team been around? What is their team's utilization rate? Are they like heavily overbooked on projects? Is there a huge delay in them being able to actually go out and execute work? If so, I mean, that could be a good sign, and it could be a bad sign at the same time, it could be a good sign that they've had rapid growth, it could be a bad sign, and that they don't have effective processes. And they're just winging it. So you really got to look at what is your process for executing a project? How do you structure your team to execute projects? Who on your team is going to work on my project? How are you going to go and design my project? How are you going to collaborate with me on the construction of my systems? And then how are you going to support me after this? How are you going to train my team? Those are all questions and then you want to ask about experiences with existing customers. Why did you use them? What was your experience? What do you wish you knew when you first started working with them? would you use them again? Why would you use them again? How long have you been using them, etc? Alright, what's the deal with all these data platforms? Money, money's cheap. You're going to see a ridiculous amount of Prop tech coming out. You're going to be seeing so much prop tech that you can be looking at prop tech turn around, and prop tech is going to be right behind you as far as Mark Getting goes. There's just so much analytics, visualization. Everything has technology, garbage has technology now, right? They have IoT garbage cans. And all of this stuff is going to be feeding into data platforms, whether that's data ingestion, whether that's data visualization, whether that's data analytics. And you have to understand people have to have somewhere to put their money right now, at least in the United States, the cost of money is extremely low. And because of that investors are looking for areas that have potential growth. And Software as a Service has been a proven model for growth from a risk perspective versus, you know, physical devices that you have to go out. So people are looking at, how can we gather this data? And then how can we invest in these data platforms? So you see that? What are my thoughts on digital twins? I don't feel like I know enough about digital twins to effectively answer that. And I think there's a lot of confusion as to what digital twins are, I think, probably in the April, maybe the May timeframe, we'll dig into digital twins. Right now we're daily digging into real estate and stuff like that. But I think we'll start to dig into digital twins, basically, the concept of a digital twin is to digitize all of the defining information of your buildings, design and operation, so that you can run scenarios on it. You can do space planning, you can do analytics and all sorts of stuff, right? It's basically a model that then you can run scenarios against. So that being said, I don't think it's for everyone. I've heard it's rather costly. I think that, additionally, the fact that we don't have a consistent data schema, and that's one thing we're going to be talking about on an upcoming podcast with the haystack folks and the brick schema folks, is data schemas and how to data schemas work, why do we need them? How do we work with them? So that's something that I just, I don't know enough to give you a full comment on. Everything I am relaying is secondhand. I've heard they're expensive. I've heard they're difficult. I've heard they're valuable. I've heard my customers, our customers at smart buildings Academy who are owners who are deploying them in their portfolios. You know what, as a matter of fact, I've got a couple customers who are deploying them, maybe I'll bring them on, and have them talk about their experience, and why they decided to use a digital twin and what they're seeing from it. Alright, how can we make our projects actually deliver what we want?

Phil Zito 32:48
Well, one of the biggest gaps I see in project delivery and project construction, first is a lack of standards, not having any expectation as to what should be deployed. If you have more than three buildings, you should have a standard. They're so easy to create, literally, you can go Google building automation standards, it's all in the public domain, just copy what you like and make your own standard. I mean, seriously, just do it. Like I see these people fretting over creating naming standards for building automation systems. They're like, Oh, we got to create one, it's so hard. But then the reality is, is that the naming standards, there's so many of them just sitting out there that you can copy to your heart's delight. I mean, just go find what you like with a simple Google search, and then start compiling it into a Google Doc, or OneDrive, Doc, whatever. And then, once you've got a standard, drive to that standard, and then engage your FM team, if you have an FM team, if you have a facility maintenance team, engage them in the process. keep them engaged, please, for the love of Pete, have your FM people engaged in the capital process? I mean, you sit there and expect these people to operate it, but they have no feedback at all in the construction process. Alright, how much involvement should the owner have with the VA s? So I'm kind of torn right? I run smart buildings academies. So obviously, I think the VA S is important. But at the same time, I realize it's not that tremendous of business value. So you know, for a hospital, it's important, but it's not going and having the same importance as an EMR or things like that, right. So how much involvement should the owner have, they should understand their use cases. And they should have a standard that they drive it here. It's too if they have a standard that they drive adherence to and they spend the time upfront creating that standard, they should have very little involvement other than having their owner's rep in forcing adherence to that standard. That's really the simplest way rather than having them make every single decision. Come up with the use cases spent. The time upfront, go through a couple planning sessions, create a standard, create the use cases that are important for you. Make sure you have a data standard and then have an owner's rep who enforces that standard in the project. All right, so I just went through I think that's 12 of the 72 questions and we're already at 35 minutes, so we're gonna call it a day for today. I may do another in Episode 243 have asked me anything buying a VA s because we still have 60 more questions to go. You all tell me Did you enjoy this? Did you find it valuable? I hope you did. Leave a comment. Let me know what you would like to hear about. Once again, if you don't feel comfortable leaving comments I totally understand you don't want salespeople reaching out to you and being like, Oh, I saw you're looking for a newbie, I guess you could just email me or send us a message request. That being said, thanks so much. Be sure to go check out all the notes and links at podcasts at smart buildings Academy comm Ford slash two for one. Once again, this podcast at smart buildings academy.com Ford slash 241. Thanks, Todd. And take care

Phil Zito

Written by Phil Zito

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