Janelle Penny: Hello, and welcome to a special episode of the Buildings Podcast, sponsored by Schneider Electric and produced by Endeavor Business Media, a division of EndeavorB2B. I'm Janelle Penny, Head of Content for Buildings, and today I'm here with Tyler Haak. Tyler is the Global Digital Energy Solutions Service League Leader for Schneider Electric, and he has over 15 years of experience in the digital building sector. Today, we're going to talk about the true value of uptime. Tyler, thanks for joining me.

Tyler Haak: Thank you for having me, Janelle. Excited to talk about uptime.

Janelle Penny: So, why is uptime more difficult to measure than energy efficiency?

Tyler Haak: It is more difficult to measure than energy efficiency, and it's probably why I'm so excited to talk about the topic. It requires some intellectual curiosity and some personal investment into this industry that we're a part of, and it's more important now than ever before because of the critical nature of the facilities that we run.

But it's more difficult to measure because the full cost of disruption extends beyond an initial outage or an initial issue, and it's a lot more complicated in how it weaves. Disruption can lead to perceptions in the market. It can lead to reputational issues. It can lead to distrust with customers or dissatisfaction with folks that work in the organization. There's more to it than, 'Hey, our building went down for three hours, and we weren't able to produce what we wanted to'. It creates some haziness within an organization about quality. All these things have major ripple effects, which make it harder to measure. How do you measure those things? What are the overall implications and impacts on your corporation when that type of thing goes down?

It's a lot easier to measure energy efficiency. I can multiply my kilowatt-hours by the new efficiencies that I gained by some new sequences of operations that I put in place, and I can know pretty well what the result was there. Not so much the case when it comes to downtime and outages. And so, I think it creates a scenario where sometimes we're more interested in looking at things like efficiency when really the major things that we can influence wind up being resiliency, uptime, and consistency.

Janelle Penny: How do the consequences differ across data centers, life sciences, healthcare, and other critical facilities?

Tyler Haak: The consequences are the same but different. You know, these facilities, they're called critical facilities for a reason, right? They're critical because these are not places where you can mess around with downtime. The stakes are higher, and the consequences are painful, regardless of which segment it is that we're talking about. But of course, there's a different flavor to that. So the consequences for data centers right now is, this is a world and a segment where speed to market is critical, where maintaining the ability to run data centers and grow data centers, scale data centers — the modularity of what's being built — is critical.

And so, the downtime there winds up being issues that you might have with contracts of folks that you're working with that are hyperscalers doing things that we hadn't thought of before, and it's a huge market, a huge opportunity. Really, in many ways, once-in-a-generation-type opportunity in this space where you don't want to mess around with reliability of whether or not you can provide what customers are looking for. So, major opportunity there and a fascinating segment with high stakes, high consequences right now. Uptime, reliability, resiliency, are all key there.

Life sciences is another one of these critical spaces where there are major investments. A lot of times, these are joint ventures or government-sponsored — huge contracts that are associated with major things that are happening in society right now, but where there's not a lot of tolerance for imperfections or loss of quality in what it is that's being produced. And I mentioned towards the beginning of the program, this is a place where you could really look at reputational issues. You could really look at some of the knock-on effects of what might happen if a batch of pharmaceuticals has some type of quality issue or concern that goes well beyond the issue of that day. It winds up leading into research projects that need to happen in the organization, of what else might have issues, where else there might be lack of quality or imperfection. It's really not something that the big players in that space are able to look at.

And then healthcare, of course, you have the sometimes — or often — life-or-death scenarios of being able to make sure ventilators are online, or the conditions for high-stakes operating procedures are in place to prevent infection or illness, or really anything along those lines.

These are three high-stakes segments where there's different consequences, but I go back to what I said at the beginning — they're the same but different. And so, when you're looking at working with a technology provider, or a service partner, or you're thinking about how your building should be viewed as an asset for you, the answer at the end of the day for each of those is the same. This is a critical asset for us and it's something that we need to be invested in, and we need to be confident in the expertise of the service partners that we're working with — that they are on board, they're on the same team, and they're helping us progress so that our facility is giving us what we need as we pursue what we need to pursue.

Janelle Penny: What is the relationship between redundancy, visibility, and serviceability?

Tyler Haak: The relationship between the three is that they're all strategies that are predicated on resiliency and uptime. Redundancy is in place, meaning, 'Hey, if something goes down, this'll back me up.' Visibility is in place so that we can see ahead if there's anything that we need to be concerned about, or if there's something that we need to be investing in. Serviceability is there to assure that the decisions that we've made in our facilities, and the infrastructure that we have in place, can produce for us what we intended it to do.

Now, redundancy is the first opportunity that you have in this. It's often originally meant to be built into a project, but it doesn't always exist at the end of the decision for the capital project. It's something that could be value-engineered out. Decisions can be made to reduce redundancy in what's built from a systems-level capital project. If it's there, great. You still want serviceability, you still want visibility, but it's sort of the first line of defense in what we're putting together for uptime and resiliency. An existing facility, once it's in place — redundancy or not — needs better visibility before making any new capital investment because these are decisions to make. They really need to be viewed as investments, plugging into the improvement of the asset itself. Because again, you'll hear me talk about this a lot, buildings are assets that help us achieve what it is that we set out to do with the help of a service partner. And that's where serviceability comes in at the end.

Serviceability with the investments that we made into redundancy, or not — what we can see, whether in the field or through dashboards and through data and analytics or not — serviceability is in place to make sure that we have that expertise there to use this information, to optimize the investments that we've made to help us stay competitive as an organization and implement the strategies, the policies, and the service interventions that assure that we can keep that uptime that we need to produce the things that we need to produce.

Janelle Penny: How can organizations identify the assets or conditions that pose the greatest risk to their mission?

Tyler Haak: This one requires more than just visibility. If you think about that question I was talking about before, visibility is the word that pops out. If I have visibility into my infrastructure, that should do the trick for me. But it's not as simple as you might think. And that's because we're talking about systems here. These critical facilities — again, data centers, life science, healthcare, and the like — they're comprised of assets that are really key. You could say, 'This asset is super important to me, and I need to make sure it's running,' and that's true but because we're talking about systems, there are interdependencies.

There are things that happen in one part of the facility, or one part of the system, that have knock-on effects, or trade-off effects, that wind up impacting some of these things that we might initially identify as the critical asset. And so, it's not something that’s as simple as saying, 'Hey, this is the one thing we need to worry about, and everything else is lesser.' As facility managers, we need partners that provide expertise that can help us get a feel for some of the things that might be happening that could affect those most critical assets. And really, I talk about this a lot. It's that expertise. It's that additional layer of being able to parse through the data and information and analytics, to have a view into the system nature of critical facilities that protects the very high-end, most critical assets. The default answer to this is, 'What was the most expensive thing that's producing the most stuff for us?' And that's true, but there's a lot that goes into protecting that. And it's a systems approach, and it's servicing that system.

So if I'm an organization, how do I identify that? I have open and candid regular conversations with my service provider. I'm having regular service visits and interventions, and I'm ensuring that we're looking at data and insights together that allow me to feel protected for the things that I need to keep my critical facility up and running.

Janelle Penny: What questions should leaders ask when they're determining what their organization can't afford to lose?

Tyler Haak: They should be asking themselves my favorite question here, which is, 'Is my building a strategic asset?' If the answer to that is agreed upon across leaders in an organization, and the answer to that is yes, then they should be asking themselves, 'What is in place to help me accomplish that? I understand that my building is a strategic asset for me. Am I treating it that way? Do we have redundancy? Do we have visibility? Do we have serviceability? Are our service providers using software and technology that allow them to feel confident in the guidance they're giving us as we pursue our roadmap to achieve what we're out to achieve?'

If the organization asks themselves, 'Is my building a strategic asset?', and the answer is no, then what is the biggest risk for the company? Because that is now on the table. If the answer is no, what's the biggest risk for our company accomplishing what we set out to do? And can I accept that? Can I accept living with that risk? So really, what it comes down to is the number-one question, 'Is my building a strategic asset?' I can speak for myself: The strategic assets that I have in my life, I'm not leaving that to me. I'm leaving that to smart, expert advisors that can help me with the things that are not my expertise, so I can go set out to the things that I need to do. So that's where I start.

You asked me what questions leaders should ask when determining what they can't lose. It's level-setting on the fact that buildings play a huge role in what we're all out to accomplish, regardless of segment — but in particular, in what we call critical segments.

Janelle Penny: Tyler, thanks so much for joining me today.

Tyler Haak: Janelle, thanks for having me. Always a pleasure. And I look forward to the next opportunity.

Janelle Penny: And thanks to all of you for listening to this special episode of the Buildings Podcast, sponsored by Schneider Electric and produced by Endeavor Business Media, a division of EndeavorB2B. We'll see you next time.