At your Service

A number of years ago, when I was the Director of Maintenance at a hospital, my email responses to those who corresponded with me, almost always wrapped up with “At your Service”. My supervisor was irritated with that simple gesture and asked that I stop using it without explaining why. My thoughts were that he felt I was putting the facility department at some kind of risk by promising more than we could deliver. I chose to continue using that closing till I moved on and as you can see it continues to this day!

I was corresponding with a new friend of mine recently and of course the topic was state of Building Automation Systems (BAS). He offered this view of the industry… “Our industry is on the verge of exploding while simultaneously about to implode with lack of talent and drive”. WoW! I thought, he is singing my song! I begin to think about the leadership of those major companies and what I know personally know to be true… I joined JCI back in 1982 and the first things I noticed was that the projects we had, appeared to be tied to the pneumatic service fitter and his relationship to the customer. Lesson #1, great personal relationships matter. Being a small office in those days it was easy to hear sales talk, the rules of the universe were “wine and dine them, take them and play golf or ball games and it creates an imbalance in the relationship and you can leverage that feeling into buying your stuff to level the field. But don’t forget to keep the fitter in the loop to ensure the sale.

But, starting in the mid 80’s, the industry began to transition to DDC control, the electrician were the first to go and then the fitters also began to set free to explore another way to make a living. At the time, I thought, “What a waste of talent and experience to push these electricians/mechanics out of jobs they had learned in apprentice classes and being on the front line every day.” But what a great opportunity for me, I admit I spent allot of time with the fitters as pneumatic controls was the foundation to learn how to automate the temperature control in that era and for me to be successful I needed to transfer that logic into direct digital control. So the industry was in a similar state as my new friend mentioned above.

By the 90’s, I had earned my way up through several levels with JCI; PMI to Service Rep to Sys Appl Engr to PM. The new technology was exploding across the BAS world, I found as the PM for construction and service projects I needed those talented and energize technicians to successfully deliver projects that worked and were fully functional. The tech hiring, I witnessed were those cheap fresh out of some technical college or institute to wire and program systems they had no knowledge or training about. These techs were talented and knew how to turn on a computer but had no understanding of what an ATC System could do and how to make it happen. With out training up front (no time for that. .projects to get done) these tech were frustrated and their self esteem was not compatible in delivering well performing building systems. But smart management had advisors to suggest this could be overcome by implementing easy to program legacy controls by salesmen answering configuration questions in compliance with control specifications in a project specification copied and pasted from old pneumatic specifications written by control sales engineers, that were also retired because it was costly to retrain the old farts that were in the twilights of their careers.

Can’t remember how many characters LI lets me have for posting…so I am going to wrap up this post and label it as phase I. Besides I have ranch duties to do that have to be accomplished today.

At your service! Roger o.c.g.