Israel Ortiz with Accruent

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

industrial innovations, predictive maintenance, IoT, space intelligence, property vacancy, workplace utilization, occupancy data, AI simulations, digital twin, energy management, customer feedback, technology evolution, scenario planning, employee experience, data insights

00:00

Scott. Welcome to the industrial talk podcast with Scott. Mackenzie. Scott is a passionate industry professional dedicated to transferring cutting edge industry focused innovations and trends while highlighting the men and women who keep the world moving. So put on your hard hat, grab your work boots and let's go all right,

00:21

you didn't see the first one. This is take two of the intro We are broadcasting from Accruent insights. San Antonio, Texas is the location. It is a fabulous, fabulous event. Put it on your calendar for next year. They do a great job. I'm looking down the floor right here, and it's full of cookies and coffee. I don't think there's anything better than that. We have a platform. This platform celebrates you, industrial professional. I'm pointing at you in the camera. You are bold, brave. You dare, bravely. We celebrate you because you're solving problems and you're changing the world in the hot seat. He's so patient. He's so amazing. Israel Ortiz, that's right, see, I kind of right this time. Yeah, all right. We're just wrapping it up. How do they get a hold of you now, I don't want to go down anyway. He's on the hot seat where we're going to be talking about, what's that? Hold it. Don't touch. Don't talk. Don't come here on the next page. ASI. There you go.

01:23

ASI, yes,

01:25

let's get cracker. Let's do it. This thing's changed in your life since last year.

01:31

Yeah, well, they've changed quite a bit. I mean, there's this quick pace at a crew. And I think last time you and I were talking, we were talking about predictive maintenance we talk about, yeah, IoT, and it's a little bit of the realm of the, you know, role I'm in the what I do for accruing, which is on the other innovation side, and then this time, keeping it a mystery until we expand on it. Now, I'm now, I'm talking to you about ASI and how we're helping works, work. What's ASI again? Well, there we go. It is Accruent, space intelligence, and before you get

02:04

don't do it. Don't do it. I did it. Don't do it. Go ahead. Let

02:07

me stress space again. No, if we get too excited about that, we definitely are bold, and we want to be big and think big at a crime, but we are still grounded right now into the workplaces where people actually do their their work, right? So it could be a higher ed entity where faculty and staff comes in and works in that space, or it could be corporate workspaces for like a Bank of America, or

02:36

there's a lot of buzz going around with with just managing property vacancy, if I own an asset which is a building asset, yeah, if I own that asset, and I'm struggling to find we just got this unique time in in the real estate industry, how does that solution help with that?

02:59

No, it's great. I think. First of all, thanks for clarifying what an asset could mean to different people, right? Oh, yeah, I had spent lots of years, you know, on the maintenance means connection side, and we were doing industrial asset manufacturing, and that's a big different thing that we're talking when we say an asset. And here it is, oh, I've got a building, I got a floor space, I got something where I believe this hotel, like this hotel, and that's my asset, because it costs money, and I got to maintain it. So we're seeing a lot of change there. And I think you kind of alluded to it when COVID happened, everybody went home and worked from home. As many people as could. We got a lot of brave people staying in the workplace, but most of us corporate folk, we went back home and started working there. And so time has continued to evolve, and we're trying to re identify who we are, right? Are we a people who are going to continue to work from home, or are we going to come back into the office? And so you could imagine that that question alone is causing a lot of consternation. It's causing a lot of you know, self analysis of, do I have the right portfolio of properties? Do I have the right building spaces? So a lot of companies are trying to figure out the spaces that I have now. So again, when I say spaces, I mean the workplace right now, right? They're being used by the people. Are they staying home? There's people who are hybrid, and so for them, if it's not utilized, it's costly. Just because that space is there and people aren't coming in doesn't mean I don't have to pay rent for it doesn't mean I don't have to pay maintenance for it doesn't mean I don't have to pay my lease on it. So that's costly for them. And so what we are hoping to help, or we are helping with, is giving them a better snapshot on how that utilization is, what the occupancy is for the space, so that they can make those decisions and say, we should actually consolidate these two buildings in Boston, or we should expand, because actually people are coming in more than we thought. That's a little bit of what our solution

04:53

does. How does it do that? You know? I mean, there's a, let's unpack that.

04:58

Yeah. No. Great question. Great follow. Up, because I think the how is very important. So the how before used to be done manually, and so we had some customer tell us when we were doing what we call voice of the customer. Does it takes, you know, six people months to compile reports, compile reports from our leasing, you know, module, and then we got to go to our maintenance module, compile, compile reports from that to see how much it's costing us to maintain a space. And then we got to go get the trends and understand from the booking information how we're utilizing just on the way people are booking spaces. So when you book a conference room, or when you book your desk to go in there, they say, Okay, well, it was booked around 40, maybe 60% of what we thought it would be. But then the mystery now is, oh, they booked the space. Did they use it? And so the other thing we can do is bring some occupancy data, which is from the batch swipes right now, batch lives. We're gonna do more with that later. The point is, they are doing that, all of that manually. They're tracking all of that right now manually. And it's so painful, but yet so necessary for them. What we do at Accruent in with space intelligence is that we, you know, are lucky enough to have access to a lot of that data. We have the booking information already available. We have the cmmss that have the facility costs for space, and we have the leasing information with our product called Lucerne. So three of our products just happen to have the information that they go and gather on their own, and what we do is we just bring it together. We since we have it, we can easily create those integrations. We can bring it into a data lake, and from there, we can then surface it with a BI tool in a way that's visual and meaningful, and then just like that, in a snapshot, cutting down months into what could be days for them to make a decision. We have another part that is called the plan module. So once they know you know the trends of how they're using their spaces, they can then through an interactive floor map, play around with different scenarios and say, What if I move my departments around? Do I get more utilization out of that space different scenarios? Then do it that then goes to a PDF that gets sent it out to the stakeholders and make decisions. And so that's what we're doing with datas. So

07:10

you're saying I can run some simulations? Yeah, you could. Well,

07:13

07:39

is there an interest with sort of a digital twin type of concept, where you have a digitally represented asset and then be able to sort of see how that asset and then be able to bring it into the real world. Are you looking into something like that? Yeah,

07:54

I think digital twin is one of those words that you know. What is a digital twin? But if you're saying, Can I get all my floor maps? Can I visually represent my space? Yeah, absolutely. We partner with the right mapping vendors, and we have interactive maps. This isn't just a PDF for you. This isn't just anything for you. We have an actual vendor that will take your renderings from any CAD that you would like, and very quickly, we're gonna this vendor actually uses AI very quickly modules it for you there. From there, we can overlay that information. And so it's not just reports now and me looking at numbers and trying to figure out I can visually see, okay, here is where most of my people book spaces. And what I'm excited about in q1 what we're going to do is we're going to do that Wi Fi data. And so all these devices that we bring to do our work with mobile devices, whatever. Of course, it'll be anonymous, but what it'll do is it'll gather congregation points. And so that's a big deal for our customers. Because, again, answering that question, okay, I know my space was booked. I know Scott said I'm gonna use that space. Did he actually use it? I can't say if Scott actually used it, but I can say there were devices in that. Yeah, exactly. And that way. So what was people are coming in, people are using the area just to expand on that a little bit more. That visual will also help them know how to rearrange a room, right? We are finding out ourselves at Accruent that we have spaces that we go into. We're a hybrid company, but it turns out most of the time we go to use the big conference rooms versus the individual desks, because when we're going back into the office, we're doing it for collaboration. Guess what we're doing? We're about to do some renovations in our office, and we're about to make it more of a collaborative space versus an individual workstation. So decisions like that are big for customers, especially when they want to see engagement go up. One of the intangibles from this awesome solution, of course, I can go on point and say, Look how much money I saved you from, you know, terminating a lease that you weren't using or whatever. That takes a lot of money. But there's also the intangible your. Employee experience, which means a lot to our customers, sure that my employees are happy. How can I make sure they're coming into the office? The reason I want them coming into the office is because what happens? They collaborate, they innovate, they do really cool stuff together. There are things that it's way better for me to stay at home and work and be able to think through. There are other things we as humans are made to connect with one another. Well, you need to come into the office. And so what we're also seeing is our customers start reimagining their spaces in this way, and then some are using our tool to think about that.

10:31

Do you get into energy management, like, for example, along with the redesign or the realization that some areas within your organization, nobody really ever goes in. Are we looking at some energy management stuff with these properties as well?

10:51

Yeah, I think it's in the cards of the areas we're gonna explore next year, we have a product line called observe, and then there's energy management component to that, and so we can consume that information, Building Information Management Systems. And it is all right. Now we have what we call our lighthouse customers. They're our first set of customers. We just launched this product in July, and they're helping us evolve the way we do our product. When we do a product, we don't just go to our in the back of the back of the room and we just figure it out and launch it. We're working with our customers the whole way, and they're taking us in the Wi Fi area and the heat map area, and eventually we're going to start asking those questions, well, what else can we do? And I'm sure this energy management will be there, because we've heard it. We just need to eventually prioritize it with our customers so that we execute upon it.

11:40

See, I like the way that Accruent works with the customers. You're not, you're not in a vacuum, you're not assuming anything. You're you're getting the information that is truly consumer driven, and be able to do that in a way that delivers a product, yeah, that is truly needed in the marketplace. Yeah,

11:59

yeah. Yeah, we are in no means consider ourselves, or we like to keep a humble, you know, personality about being a subject matter expert. We We definitely think we need to know about our space and need to know about, you know, what the trends are, which direction we want to go. But we have to keep in mind that our experts are our customers. They are there in the trenches. They're doing the work right, and what we're doing is helping them do the work easier, faster, quicker. And so we have to keep going back to them, and have to keep them a part of the conversation, otherwise we will miss with our execution, and it'll be at a lose. Lose. We win, if our customers win. And so we got to keep

12:39

them in the conversation, yeah, or you're, you're delivering something that's maybe not interested or interesting to the marketplace. Plus you're in, you're in technology, you're in innovation. That's, that's what you do, right? And if you're not checking the pulse of what's taking place in the market, how do you adapt? How do you grow? How do you become or stay nimble? Because it's to your point. I think that you brought it up. It's fast out there, yeah. And as a, let's say I'm a I own this property. It changes all the time. It's that big, it's that dynamic, yeah. And to find some company or organization that can help along with that journey that just makes sense. Yeah,

13:25

and things, things are evolving, not just in the space, like you said, they are, certainly are, but technology is changing a lot, right, very fast. And so what technology could solve you before? I mean, there was a time in the world where Excel was the right answer, but we moved on from there. Thank

13:41

goodness, yeah, don't shut us off, yeah. But I

13:46

was just in the room with customers,

13:47

and

13:49

15:00

what do you think about that whole AI conversation? How do you how do you foresee it outside of the it's going to be chewing on data and coming up with some some answers, hopefully, or some recommendations, yeah. Is that how you see it rolling? Or what do you see it in your world?

15:20

I think that because we sit on data for our customers, and the fact that we can, you know, make it anonymous, across and go and tap into that, we're going to benefit and our customers will be the real benefiters of this is, is providing recommendations, providing things. So we have a product called data insights, for example, that we need to evolve upon, and we will evolve upon. But imagine a world where I can tell you, talk about back our manufacturing world saying, Hey, you should replace this asset. I know the OEM says replace it next year. I think you can go four more years based on the fact all the data. And actually you should go with this OEM, because that's a much better solution, and it translates for workplace folks as well. But I think we will naturally love that way. We're also looking at Gen AI, we have another customer set that back to the workplaces, or higher ed. They they're managing events, not like this one, smaller events, where they're trying to wow their customers, or they're trying to, you know, for the case of higher ed, they trying to get students to be able to run things, okay? These are people who are not event planners, right? And who are trying to do their best to manage the smaller event with internal folks. Well, we showed them like, concept of what Jen and I could do, and we called them the bot Maurice. And Maurice would ask questions like, Okay, well, what is it that you need in your event? And the student could then start filling out, well, I need this. Oh, well, based on that, you would need, you know, yeah, these, these people requesting the event don't know what they want, right? Maurice does because of data, and that would bring down weeks of work that typically an event planner will do in the higher ed to just hours instead. And so that's another way we're looking for AI to help. It's exciting. Yeah, it is exciting. Now we just got to go do it all. So yeah,

17:10

you guys are pretty capable of that stuff. Yeah, yeah. I mean, if there's a, there's an organization that I, I feel I have a high confidence of being able to deliver, to deliver. Yeah, I'm all in. Yeah. So with all that said, and there's a lot, a lot to unpack, but we have to wrap it

17:31

up. Thanks everyone for listening. Yeah, how do they get a hold of you? Well, please reach out to me if you're interested in any of this. I.ortiz@accruent.com I O, R, T, I, Z, at accruent.com, happy to interact. LinkedIn. Oh, LinkedIn is, is Ortiz. I think, yeah, well, they can Israel Ortiz, because

17:49

I can, I can definitely give that, that link on industrial talk, and that's why I'm gonna do

17:53

I'll get that to you. Thank you for that. Yeah, there you go. All right, listeners, we're gonna

17:58

have all the contact information for Israel out on and dust wheel talk. So you need to connect with them. The world is changing. You need to find those individuals, those Sherpas, to be able to help you along in that journey. Israel is one of those Sherpas. He doesn't wear the cap, he just wears the fine suit. There you go. All right, yeah. All right. Listeners, we're gonna wrap it up on the inside, stay tuned. We will be right back.

18:23

You're listening to the industrial talk podcast network

18:31

that was Accruent insights. It was a fabulous event. What made it so great was just how customer focused Accruent team. Accruent was it was just and Israel Ortiz, phenomenal talent, incredible professional ASI. That's a current space intelligence getting more out of that asset, being able to do it in a way that makes sense. I'm telling you right now. You need these Sherpas. You need these individuals to be able to bring you along. It's an exciting time. I know I'm excited. Boy, big time. All right, you have a podcast. Put it out on industrial talk. You have technology. Put it out on industrial talk. If you have a desire to talk and tell me about and amplify your voice, let's talk, because we can do that for you, because it's all about education, collaboration and innovation. Here at industrial talk, that's what we're here for, you, industrial professionals, all right, be bold, be brave. dare greatly hang out with Israel, and you will change the world. We're gonna have another great conversation shortly. So stay tuned.