Part 3: The Ultimate Guide to Facility Mapping and Asset Clarity

Transcript

I guess we'll go ahead and get it kicked off. We're super excited, as I said, that you are everyone is here today. We are gonna be talking about mapping in Limble.

My name is Bethany, and I lead the community, for Limble. And if you haven't had a chance to check that out, I encourage you to do so. We have some really great conversations, all the time in Limble, but especially after events. A lot of times, there's a discussion that continues there.

And we have John from, the Limble team. John, do you wanna take a second to introduce yourself?

Yeah. Sure. John DeBenedetto. There's two Johns. So, you know, whenever there's multiple Johns, DeBenedetto is a tough name. So Debo is my nickname.

Yeah. I have worked with Limble a little over six months, seven months now, somewhere around there. But prior to working for Limble, worked at Grove City College, which you'll see a little bit today. We're gonna use them as the basis for a lot of the mapping stuff I'm talking about because I built it there.

So I implemented Limble. I I searched through CMMSs to replace our current one and found Limble to be the best. So I onboarded them and kinda used every part that I could, including the mapping feature over the course of my time there before joining Limble. So fun fun to be on both sides of it as a user and then also on the Limble side seeing how the company functions and the cool things that other people and users are are doing, and that's kinda my drive behind this was I wanna help other people see different ways of using the system.

So Awesome.

And, John Reimer, do you wanna take just a couple seconds to introduce yourself?

Sure. You bet. John Reimer with FM three sixty. We've been, you know, partnering with Limble for at least three years now, you know, doing a number of implementations, integrations, a lot of on-site work.

And, and I'm excited to see you know, I've already got, of course, a sample of what Deebo can do, inside of Limble with the mapping. And so we look forward to seeing that, and then we'll talk about how else we could help, you know, potential customers in bringing that to life as well.

Awesome. So just to kind of go over a little bit of, some housekeeping notes, we are recording today's session, and we will email out the recording after today's event.

The session will last about sixty minutes, and that includes, a q and a session at the end. So you can submit questions as we're going if you'd like in the chat, and we will add them to the q and a at the end and, answer them from there. If we run out of time, we always host the q and a questions we didn't get to in the Limble community afterwards. And you can get, to that through our website on the footer or just go into the Limble community through you can sign in through your SSO.

So I'm going to, kinda go over the agenda. We are gonna talk about the community and introduction, which we can check that off. We have, we're gonna go over some mapping features. Deebo's gonna lead that section.

Then looking at mapping your asset hierarchy, how to visualize your data on a map with Power BI.

And then we'll talk a little bit about the f m three sixty and Limble partnership, and then that's when we'll open it up to the q and a.

John, I guess I'll do I'll hand it off to you.

Okay.

Yeah. Sounds good. Let me share my screen. We're gonna share so that I can see both everything going on. Okay. So so there's three things I wanna talk through as far as demos today.

And so the first one's gonna be Limble, and we just wanna talk about Limble and what they have as far as the mapping goes. So we'll walk through that.

Just a disclaimer on that. If you're like, well, I don't see this mapping feature, it is on the enterprise plan. So if you do not have the enterprise plan and you don't see it, that that could be why. So you can talk to your customer success manager or account manager if you're looking for other features that you could get with enterprise. That's a bit of disclaimer for one, but I do wanna show you how it functions, which could be good for you to know.

The second part, we're gonna dive into Canva, and we're gonna look at an asset tree and how to build that out.

And Canva's free. I did it on a free account. It is very easy to use. I know some of the earlier webinars in the series were pretty advanced doing some crazy stuff with MCP servers and a lot of advanced Power BI stuff and things like that.

I'm gonna show you how easy Canva can be to build this out. And then the last part is we will jump into Power BI, and I'll show you a sample of how I built a map on there. And so those are the the three things I wanna cover today. So let's start in Limble, and this is GrowCity's site.

So I've they have given me permission to do this. I helped build this for them, and I have some other things I'm building for this webinar that I'm giving them access to. So thank you to Grove City for letting us have command of this and that we can show how we built it out. So for one question we get I've I've gotten from customers several times is how do I even put an asset on the map, and how do I build the map?

So at a very basic level, if I wanted to add this onto a map and asset let's say I wanna know where the Stuart bathroom is. So if I click on Stuart bathroom, it has an option for map, and I hit set map location. This is a little overwhelming. You can see the entire world.

That can be a little bit much to look at. If we change it to street view, I can start to zoom in. I know I'm in Western Pennsylvania. And as I get closer, I see Grove City.

I zoom in here. I get to the college.

Now I know that it's this house right here.

And so now I know that's where the bathroom is, and I'm gonna add it. So I click add. I've got a couple different options, but the easiest one to add is just a quick checkbox. And I know that it's towards the back of the house, so I'm putting it right there.

We could change it. We could do it a little different, and we could do a area. So this could be more of, like, a building structure if it's something like that. Maybe that doesn't line up well, so I say I don't wanna do that.

And instead, I could do a polygon, I think they call it, or adding the vertexes.

Right? Like that.

And there's just a rough how I could look if it was a building. It's not, so we'll just we'll go back and add that dot there and say, boom. There's the bathroom right around there.

That's how basic it is to just add one asset. And so when it gets a little more powerful is when you start to link them together. So I'm gonna show you some examples. This is that same campus, but I wanna show you a couple things that you can do when you start to group them together.

So if I go in here and I say, alright. I wanna see tasks on the map. Right? So tasks are are open work orders or PMs that are assigned to an asset that has a mapping location.

It's gonna show up on here. So I go through and say, I wanna see anything open, and I wanna have it with a tag for lighting. So I wanna see all my lighting work orders throughout campus. When I do that and I activate it, now I can actually see where all of them are on the college campus.

And now you can see there's a lot of blue over here. This could help if you have a maintenance person who's looking to okay. I'm gonna do some work orders. I'm gonna do lighting.

Oh, wow. I can hit all six of these in one go because they're in the same location. I don't necessarily see that when I'm looking on my list of work orders, but on the map, it's a little more visible. So that's one example.

Similarly, here's one that's all by the same person. So we're looking at Jake's work orders. This is where Jake's work orders are laid out so he can kinda group them together. If you had things spread out over multiple sites, that can be really valuable to see them.

Where do I go? Maybe you know what? I'm driving up here. Maybe while I'm up there, I'll also hit that work order.

You can kinda come up with a an efficient plan for trying to map those out.

There's some other things you can do. For example, this one is lamppost. This is every lamppost on the college campus. Okay?

There's a lot. There was a lot more than I thought there would be when I started that project.

But now I can zoom in and see that if we were to do some digging work around here, we're gonna do some construction on one of these buildings. I'm I can actually kind of say, okay. Well, then we need to make sure that these lamp posts are deactivated or we check for the power for this. It's also great for reporting issues.

And so if somebody says, hey. Lamp post forty five has a light burned out. Well, which one is that? Where is it located?

Now we have that information, and you can easily navigate to it. So if a maintenance guy gets a work order for lamppost forty five, they can just put it in and see it on a map, or they can even use the directions that say navigate to that. So that's kind of the power of it.

And, John, I just wanna insert like, you you kinda found this in Limble, and it was not an overnight project for you. This was something that, like you said, you discovered that there were more, but it was an ongoing like, it took it took a little bit of time. It wasn't like you snapped your finger and everything was represented on this map. Could you talk a little bit about the the process of setting it up and what that looked like for you?

Yes. Totally. Because that's what I was gonna actually show next with this rooms one. Because if I click rooms, this is every room on our campus that I put in there, and it's, like, just a blob.

And you're like, what the heck is that? That is every room, and that looks that looks like a lot. It is a lot. It took me a while to do.

It was not something that I did immediately. And so I want you to be aware. It took me some time to figure out how to do this, and I basically set aside about fifteen minutes a day to a half hour a day at the end of my day where, alright, the the work's done. Everybody's left the office or is soon to leave the office.

And so to close out my day, I'm just gonna set aside some time and take a little bite out of this giant, you know, burger. And little by little, I'm gonna nibble away at it. So it took me probably two to three weeks of just a little bit of time each day adding assets before I was able to get most of the rooms on campus pretty much mapped out. And then we really started to see the benefits of a new employee comes on.

He doesn't know any of the campus, but he knows how to use his Limble app, and he can actually navigate to each of the open work orders that he has. So now he doesn't necessarily need to be a master at all thirty four buildings. But it took time. So pace yourself if you're adding them.

Maybe do small projects. Focus on one building. Focus on one floor. Don't think you have to accomplish it all right away.

Another one I wanna mention, this can be really helpful for, like, fire systems. This is where each of our fire panels on campus are located. Each year when we have a contractor outside contractor come to campus and he needs to test them, You can print this off and show them and say, here you go. This helps them know where in the building it's located so they're not running around this giant building looking.

They know it's right around here. They can click on it and see more if if they're a Limble user. But if they're not, this at least gives a visual representation of where they should be going. So it saved contractors a lot of time finding things.

One more really advanced thing that I was able to do is this is our steam line. So our whole campus is heated by steam from the central utility plant right here. So we have four large boilers. We get the water into steam from there, and then we send the steam all over campus.

Where are the steam lines? Well, I added them in at not the condensate lines. That was another project I didn't get to before I left the college, but this is at least all of our steam lines that we're feeding throughout campus. And so the catch with Limble is right now the way that mapping is set up is that you can have one line.

So this condensate line one, that's running from the building down here, up here, and I think I, yeah, I I fed it into that building. So that's one asset, but you can't do multiple lines. So what I did is I made a list of assets, condensate line one, condensate line two or sorry, steam line one, steam line two. And then I fed them into the system and built them one by one and connected them.

So a little more advanced, but I just wanna plant the seed of ideas. This is great for utility line calls when you gotta dig up the ground. Our guys have a general idea of what we have mapped so that we could do that. I did name them condensate.

Sorry. I I did name them condensate. They're in the same location as the steam lines. They run parallel next to each other, but I didn't do water lines.

It was the other one I meant to mention or electric. But all of it could be theoretically added, and then you can see everything in the ground. So that's a quick kinda summary of how you can use Limble's features currently and build out maps that will kinda show what's possible in the system.

The next thing I wanna jump to and now with this one, I just showed you how it is to add an asset and then what you can do with it. On this next one, we're gonna jump into Canva, and I wanna show you what it looks like when this is the the finished product, and then we'll go back and show you how we built it. So this is Grove City College campus again. This is a illustrated map that we have.

What I found is this. Students don't always know where they're at and what they're trying to tag. And maybe you've had this issue too where they just do a poor job of tagging assets properly for issues. And that really affects data validation. Right? You you can't get good reports if you're not able to know confidently that your work orders are tied to the right assets. And so college students, they will often choose the path of least resistance, and so I tried to make it the least resistant as possible.

So I have this map here that they may not even know what building they're in, but they can visualize it. And so they say, well, I live in this building. I don't know the name of it. I'm a new freshman.

I just moved in, and there's something wrong with my room. My lights burned out. Well, they could go to this map and say, yeah. I live in this building.

And when they click on it, it will actually open a floor plan. So they can say, oh, well, I actually live on the third floor or I live on the second floor, and they can bounce around on this floor plan. And then when they find their room, say, their room one twenty five, but they don't know their room number even though it's on the door. They're just really stressed out moving in.

They're afraid it's their first time away from home. They at least know, okay. I can click here, and it's gonna pull up the work request portal, and it's gonna say, hey. Sorry you're having a problem with Memorial one twenty five.

And now they can put in their information and submit it. We literally had this happen with football players moving in. They move in before everyone else. They don't have any instructions, and they were able to let us know where they're at and what issue they were having, which was awesome for the student experience for us to respond so much quicker rather than, you know, get a parent phone call a week later that say, my son's been living in this mess without heat or without cooling or without, you know, lighting.

We were able to to make make that go away much sooner. So that's a quick layout of what that looks like. I also wanna show some other examples because this is a college campus, and maybe that obviously doesn't apply to you. You're like, we're a manufacturing place or we're something.

You can build out a really cool kinda hierarchy to what I just showed you. So you've got your general site. And let's say, like, if I click on this building here, here's a floor plan for maybe a warehouse. And so I've got three forklifts here.

Right? And now I can click on one of those forklifts. And now I've got a blown up view of the forklift where it actually lists out the items. So maybe in your Limble system, you do not just have forklift.

You literally have mast, carriage, front axle, and these parts are all listed. And they're clickable parts where you can submit work orders. Well, you could add a link to these, and then they could actually have somebody, you know, list it immediately.

And maybe you have a new guy, and they don't know what the mast is, but they know that this is the thing that's having the problem. They visually know it. This kinda helps make sure that the people are selecting the right things. So we will go back from here, and I will show you how to build this.

Really simple. This is what I was saying. This one's free. I did this on a free Canva account.

All you have to do is you create a Canva account, you log in, and you're gonna choose to create a website. A little weird because some people will be like, oh, maybe I'll make a doc or a whiteboard. The website I found was the best way to do it. And so you're gonna click on that, and then you're gonna upload your map.

And so I've already uploaded my stuff ahead of time, so I have some things I can use.

But there's my map. I click on it, and I upload it, and I put it right here.

I center it.

And now there's these other pages we can add. So let's say I wanna add another page like I was just showing you, and we're gonna add a floor right here. This is third floor. Not accurate, but at least you'll get the idea. Right? So now we've got this page.

Well, how do I link them? Well, what we wanna do is we wanna have this map here, and I'm gonna add an element and a shape. We're just gonna add a square, big ugly square, and we're gonna put it right over that building.

Right there. Right? That's where that building is. That's where I want it to click. Two issues.

One, how do I link it? Well, that's the fun part. We click on these three dots, and we go down to link, and it literally gives us the option of linking the pages together. So all I have to do is click, boom.

I'm gonna click there and link it. That's now linked. Just like I showed you, now they can click on it. But you can't see the building.

What do we do about that? Well, right up here, transparency. We click transparency. We make it zero, and now it's visible.

So that's it. Those two small things. I uploaded my picture. I added a link, and I made it transparent.

And now right there, you can keep going off of it. So then I can go to this page, and I can add more there. I can add links. I can add these boxes.

I can do the same thing. Make them transparent, put them over top of the room, and then we'll add a link to it.

And in this case, what we would do is we would grab the link from the asset. So we're gonna go back over to Grove City, and I'm gonna go back to the Stuart bathroom. Say I wanna submit that work order for the Stuart Stuart bathroom. If I go to where the QR code is, we know the QR codes.

Right? Most of you should know you're probably using the QR codes. What you may not be aware of is that there's this link above it right here that simulates the QR code. That is specific to the asset.

That is where you wanna grab it. So if I grab that QR code, I copy that link address, and then I go back over here, I can open the link, and then I can put that link right in there.

And there it is. Done. So now when I click on that link, it's gonna now it's gonna open Stuart bathroom, which makes no sense, but at least you get the idea of what it was doing.

One other thing I wanna show while we're on this is that there could be some unique settings. Let's see.

Actually, we're gonna open that one up real quick One more time. There we go.

Here's a pump room. Right? So I want you to think about the different visuals you can use because this could be pump one and pump two, and you have no idea which is which.

But you know that the one's closer to the wall. So if I click on that, boom. That's pump number one. I added some text to it.

And, again, I can see a breakdown of this. This could also not just be for work orders. It could also just be for diagrams, for laying things out, for helping teach people where things are at. So just think of the possibilities of mapping out your assets, but then also integrating work orders into the mix for that.

So In general.

Out of the back arrow to get to the top.

I think another thing that's really important is that it it helps new employees get or team members get up to speed. Like like, you know, on a college campus, you don't know where everything is. You wouldn't know day one, and and so it helps your new team members get acclimated and and be more efficient in their work every day.

Yes. And that was what was crazy when we saw a new employee come in, and he completed fifteen work orders on his first day. And we were like, wow, man. You're amazing.

And he was like, well, the app made it really easy. I just followed where it was, you know, telling me to go, and I was able to get I had all my information. I had everything documented. So building out PMs, building out mapping, this made it really easy.

And, really, in this day and age, right, we wanna believe that we're gonna have a plumber for thirty five years. We're gonna have an electrician forever. But in reality, the minute they get you know, this younger generation gets a new job that pays more, they're gone. And so we want to hold on to people.

That's the ultimate goal. But, also, making it easier to have new people come in can actually take some of the pain off of that transition. And so that was something we really worked on at the college was trying to make it easier for new people to come on and up to speed quicker where we didn't have such a loss on, okay. There's a new person, but it's gonna take them two years before they're really effective.

So yeah. Awesome.

Does this Canva functionality work the same in the app form?

You might have to explain that a little more. I'm not totally sure what that means.

Maybe he's using meaning in the Canva app. Can you use it?

Oh, I don't know. I haven't tested out the Canva app, so that's a good good thing to try.

Okay. Yeah. I haven't messed with the Canva app, so I can't speak to that. I hope it works the same, but you might have to validate that for me and get back to me. I would love that. Maybe I'll explore that more, and then maybe I can put something out in the community about the Canva app and what kind of potential it has to to go along with this. Yeah.

I do believe websites created in Canva are responsive. So if that's the right line of thinking that they are responsive, then that means they would reduce first screen size. I would say, hypothetically, that it should work. But it'll be a a fun test to run after this and an interesting discussion in the community.

And this is what I love. Right? Pushing our ideas further. So the idea of having it on the Canva app, what a cool idea to even push it further to be like, hey.

It's right on my phone and the map's available. We were building this into the college website. We kinda had a central go to where students would go for information, and that's where we were hosting this. But, again, there are a ton of ways you can do this.

And Canva is not the only site. There's tons of places where, likely, if you talk to your IT team, they're likely gonna tell you they have an IT resource similar to Canva or or they use Canva that you could host this on. So ask around and make sure you're compliant with what your your company is asking you to do as far as IT security and everything, but this is a good example. Yeah.

Okay. That's number two. So let's move on to number three. Are we okay on time?

Yeah. You're good on time.

Okay. Just making sure. The third one I wanna show is, again, a little more on the advanced side. If you're comfortable with Power BI, great.

If you are not, that's okay. There there are some articles we have on how to get comfortable with Power BI, how to connect your data. We're not gonna dive into the connection of the data per se today. We're more gonna focus on a few things in Power BI that will make the mapping part possible.

So we'll jump in and and show off what I have. If you notice the same map, we saw it earlier. Same thing again.

But this time, I've added in Limble data. So I've connected the API to Power BI, and I've put a map on here. And then I've put a bunch of kinda widgets that show off a variety of information. And so to do that, I'm adding filters to that.

Right now, this is gonna show, for instance, total work orders. This is every work order we have open right now. There's two hundred and eighty. I did remove one priority called events because that one's didn't wanna see that information.

We wanna see the rest. So I did filter that out. Then I took this, and I copied it, moved it down here, and I refiltered it and said I only wanna see high priority. Then I moved it down here.

I only wanna see events. So I copied and pasted a lot of this to make it work. But then I thought about something with these buildings. Maybe I could put the number of open work orders on each of those, and so I dropped those in.

And so now at a glance, I can look at the whole college campus and see where are the pinch points. I even added a like, this was something I did, like, a few days ago because I I wondered if it was possible, and I googled a lot to figure out how to do it. But this actually changes the color of the number when it's high enough. And so if it's over twenty, I wanna see it in red so that I can visually really see that that's a pinch point for us.

And if it's low, like zero or one, then show up in green. And if it's in the middle kind of yellow don't know, that's more of a brownish yellow, but whatever it is, that that's the middle, you know, color. So it changes color as as it goes. This could be great for having a high overview of how are we doing and where our pinch points are.

So if I click on edit, I'm gonna show you just a little bit how we did this. The first layer was that I added oops. Sorry. Messed that up.

There we go. I added the map layer. And then on top of this, I actually added a little white circle. So I made a white shape to drop on it because the map actually did have a number that was for the building.

That's where we get these numbers down below. So I did cover that up, and then I dropped my data on there, which, again, we're not gonna get too much into the data today.

But if you've used Power BI, you should have a pretty good idea on how to connect it and get the data in and then streamline it down.

If you don't reach out, we I'd love to talk to you a little more about it, and I can give you some more details.

And then what we did on top was we added a bookmark, and the bookmark is really where things get powerful. So when I click on one of these so for example, let's say the chapel. When I click on this number, it's gonna actually take me Oops.

Oh, I gotta go back. Hold on.

I jumped in past the preview part. I need to go back so we can see it properly.

When I click on the number, here's what it's gonna do. It's gonna actually blow up all the information. So not only can I see that there are sixteen work orders, when I click on it, now I can see those work orders? And this is something we mentioned in that first webinar talking through what kind of information you can show in Power BI. So I'm pulling Limble data into Power BI to show it off, and then I can even say, I just wanna see the event setup priority. Right? Or I just wanna see particular assets or a a particular person who requested it, and then I can see that information here.

And then as you notice as I change it, it's gonna change that number over here, which is great too. So that's where it gets really powerful when I can also drill down and see that information. So I'm gonna go back to edit, and notice this is one screen. This is one work order list.

So how did I only build one and make it show every time I click on one of those? That's where we use option here. We go to view, and we add bookmarks. And so a bookmark is an automatic like, a snapshot of how I'm viewing.

So right now, I'm viewing this because of a filter. So I filtered the results down to Harbison only. And when I'm ready and I say, okay. This is what I want.

I want a snapshot of this view of work orders. I go over here to the bookmarks, and I hit add. And when I hit add, it adds a new one, and this one's number thirty nine. And then I can rename it.

So I rename it, and I say this is Harbison Chapel.

And now anytime I use that bookmark, it's automatically gonna send me right to this page, right to this view. And so over here on the map, I add a button, and I do a blank button.

And that blank button, we can format with an action. And so I add an action, and I say bookmark.

And then that bookmark, we can choose which one. And then I can say harvest and chapel. And so when I make it that and then I click on it, it knows, oh, he bookmarked, and bookmark goes straight to that. So that's how I set that up.

Again, if this is a little overwhelming, it may be a little much. That's okay. Start with the basics. Start with building out this matrix here.

Don't don't start with the map. Just start with the basics. These are slicers at the top that I built out.

Those took me a little while to figure out.

Take your time. Ask for help. If you have an IT person who's really knowledgeable on this stuff, they can help guide you. That's what I did.

I also used the community. I said, hey. I'm really lost in Power BI. Can somebody help me?

And I had two or three different people, Limble users reach out and say, yeah. I can help you. And they gave me their information. We connected, and they walked me through how to set this stuff up.

I did not have any experience previously using an API. I just kinda learned over time through Google and other Limble users.

So John, quick question.

As you were building out these three different methods of mapping, were there any, like, pitfalls or any challenges you had that people might wanna be aware of or things that they might wanna spend a little bit of time thinking before they they they do the build out?

Yeah. Sure. So one thing I would definitely say is walk before you run, crawl before you walk. If you are new to Limble and you are just getting started, this is really fun stuff to look at, but you have a priority, and that is getting your assets in properly.

Get your assets comfortable. And, really, for the onboarding process, I have seen some people that get caught up where they're like, well, I wanna put all my fields, and I wanna map everything out. I wanna do all that when I first get Limble. I would caution against that.

I would say your goal with getting implemented is to get your critical assets in, to get comfortable with the system, to build out PMs. Do those things first. This, I would recommend all three things I just showed you today are I would generally recommend once you are very comfortable in the system, feeling really good, and you're kinda looking for more. Like, what else can I build in Limble?

I've got time, or I, you know, I like to create and build. Great. But make sure you've got everything else first. It it can cause too much, like, chaos to to bring all this on board right away.

Makes sense. That's very helpful.

And and this is one that I would say This was the one I attempted three times. I got so frustrated I quit on twice. I think it's something I'd love to see in the future. Limble do a little cleaner of how to do the mapping.

Sure. So if this one frustrates you, it it's it's not you. It's it's a differ if it's a difficult one to do. So take your time.

Try it out. If you're frustrated, take a break. Don't do it. Don't stress yourself out.

Like I mentioned earlier, just take chunks of time, small chunks of time to work on the mapping features. It kinda it kinda comes to fruition over the course of months and years. And then, honestly, too, the the lamppost, that was such a fun thing, but it did take me months to map them all out and figure out where they were. I would also recommend finding help, delegating tasks.

If you find somebody who really I I have a couple workers who just they really love mundane tasks. They love the simple, basic, repetitive task. It was hard for me to do. They loved it.

Give a task like that to them. Say, hey. We want you to map everything on campus. Do you think you could work on that?

Maybe you've got somebody injured on light duty. We had a housekeeper who he had surgery on his shoulder, and he couldn't lift over ten pounds. He was a perfect example of somebody where I could utilize for Limble projects. I had him put QR code stickers on every room on campus.

Every room. He did it in a week. I thought it would take him, like, a month or two. He was chipper.

He was excited. He had so much fun with it. It was like a huge scavenger hunt.

Same thing with mapping. You know, we had somebody on light duty, and they mapped out every lamppost on campus for me on a CAD map. So utilize your workers as best you can and find ways to do that heavy lifting. And then when you go putting in the mapping, it'll be a lot simpler.

Yeah. And and, you know, the mapping, like chicken or egg, like, you also added QR codes to all the lampposts, the metal QR codes that allowed you to you know, on the safety aspect on a campus, say, hey. Quickly, this light post is out. It's completely dark over here.

And marrying those two projects together has really had an impact on y'all's y'all's tickets and safety program.

Yeah. Yeah. And the lamppost thing was really fun too. If you notice here are some burned out lights, and we can kinda see a trail.

There was actually a couple times where we found a trail and found out that it was a wire that had been busted, either chewed through by an animal or, you know, overloaded. And while multiple people were reporting issues, when we actually saw the line on a map, we were able to recognize that they were all related and actually come to a root cause rather than trying to replace each of them. We were we saw a trend. So, yeah, with the with the lamppost, it was the same thing.

Sometimes we've had lamppost go out, and we realize that it's it's not the bulb. It's actually in succession because we can see where they've been reported. And that's a big safety thing. Being able to report on where the lamp posts are and when they're burned out and and fixed is really important to to safety of our students.

Even looking at this, look at this and think, where are the dark spots on campus? Like, this is kind of a nice site survey where you could actually go and say, well, the baseball field, is is it lit up well enough at night? Like, maybe we need to put an additional post or two on the edges, or maybe we need to install some lighting. Maybe this trail down here, there's nothing along here.

Is that maybe a weak spot for us? Maybe we need to check it out. So we even have, like, a Lumen detector that we can take down there and check for lighting, And this is part of what we are doing is testing out where are the spots on campus that maybe aren't covered. Another example, what about a fire hydrant?

What's your fire hydrant coverage look like? Are you in a place that you know, is everything good and, you know, accessible, or maybe there's a a weak spot in your plan. And so you pull this up and you see your fire hydrants and go, wow. You know, if this building's caught on fire, fire department's not gonna be able to get a hose there very easily.

Maybe we should look into that. And so health and safety, AED locations, another example where your AED's on campus. I think that would be a good one to put in here and actually map out where they're located, and then you could identify some spaces where maybe adding one would be would be beneficial. So, yeah, so those are the three kinda walk throughs I have.

Happy to talk through anything else you have, Bethany, or questions from the the the gallery.

Well, I guess one other question that I've I've heard is, what if you don't have a map to start with? Like, you had the image of the map. Where would somebody start in that regard? Like, they would kinda just do kind of a rudimentary way of starting.

Yeah. One that I honestly have seen a lot of that kinda works is just Google, just going to Google Maps and grabbing an image. So right here, I grabbed one. I actually grabbed this from my Limble Map. And so you could take a screenshot of the of the Google Map and then upload it, and that could be a start of a way to do it. The illustrated stuff, like, yeah, if you have a forklift, maybe you have this, you know, forklift map that you grab and you do something like that.

Look online if there's something more generic. If it's something very specific, see if maybe there's pictures that you could use from the provider, from the make, the model, something like that.

This yeah. Don't expect everybody to have a a Grove City map this illustrated and nice, but it's a place to start. And, honestly, even where AI is at anymore, I wouldn't be surprised if you could easily jump on AI and say, hey. Help me design a map or a layout.

And then you can, you know, give prompts that edit it and and change the image up. So there's a lot of resources out there. I also think that maybe f m three sixty, you know, could be a a partner on this or or help with some resources where you have some professional mapping coming in, and maybe that's what you need. You show off what you could do with mapping if you had better maps, and then your boss might sign off on some budget to get mapping so that you guys could do your job better.

So a lot of things to start with as far as mapping goes, but, you know, there's a lot of places you can go with it.

Awesome. Okay, John. We have a couple questions in the chat. So Jim is asking, if you have multiple manufacturing facilities in different states, how important is it to standardize asset fields between the facilities in relation to this level of mapping?

Yeah.

Well okay.

I wanna say this two part. One, it is really important to map your fields on on a common language. Figuring that out is very important. So I want to emphasize, you should be doing that as best you can.

Maybe your facilities are very independently run, but even then, there should be some type of congruence so that when you're doing reporting that it's coming up similarly, and you're not missing information because it was named differently. But relatively speaking, setting this up here is not the end of the world. You could really adjust your maps no matter what they're named or how they're set up. I I honestly don't think it would be too hard to do even if they're not necessarily similarly done.

I think good communication with those different site managers would be really helpful just to make sure that you've got the right maps and you've got them laid out in a way that you all agree is best. But as far as mapping names and fields, that could be something that you should do, but not necessarily tied and needed for the mapping.

That's helpful. We have another question. It says, how do you map FCU slash pumps, etcetera, inside a building? Say room three twenty three has a VAV dash one.

Okay. Yeah. So some of these buildings on campus, the the VAVs, you know, we had a bunch of them. Yes. We had a ton of them.

You could so this is where I was kinda clicking on the building. So let me go back to this other example.

Click on the building, and then on here, you could design the map. Even in Canva, you could add the VAV. And so we did have some maps with our VAVs throughout the building. So I showed you one of them, but that was more from a student perspective.

On a staff perspective, we did wanna go a little more drill in. So maybe this quality assurance room has some equipment in there, so you make another drill down. So I click on click on quality assurance, and it will actually open up another chart or graph. And here's the thing.

We talked about mapping being professional and all nice. You know? This is a nice looking graph.

I mean, really, you could also design something very basic on Word, save it as an image, and upload it. So if you just have a layout of where you put your your different closets and where your valves are located or VAVs or whatever else, whatever mapping you have, that's where the hierarchy comes in. The other option is say that this is the view you like for some people seeing it, but for the VAVs VAVs, you want, you know, an HVAC view. We could add just the word HVAC view over here on the side and click on it and then have a floor plan of the VABs separately so it doesn't clutter up the main view.

So options are limitless. You could literally have an electrical view with all your power lines and where they run, and you could make that a different view. You can keep building them out so that they're seen differently. As far as inside of Limble, that's where it's a little trickier, and that's where I found Canva to be helpful.

Because right now, there is no view that we just showed you. Right now, they're just all cluttered. See how they're all cluttered up? The best way to do it really is just to have different layers of your map so that I can remove that and then add a different layer.

But as far as seeing within this building right here, seeing floors one, two, and three, not currently an option in Limble yet.

Thank you for that.

One other thing I'd love you to touch on, Debo, because we get a lot of questions, and there's a lot of, thoughts around this. But you mentioned, like, having assets set up correctly, and, like, that needs to be foundational to building maps and spending some time there. What are some best practices for people setting up assets in Limble? What do you teach people who are onboarding?

And and kind of, you know, where do people start with that, and what do you think as far as best practices to get those done?

Yeah. Okay. I don't wanna depress people, but I need you to know you're never done with Limble. Okay? And that's a good thing. That's a good thing.

After four years of using it, I was still finding ways to do it better and build my assets out. So one of the things I highly recommend, one, at implementation, don't get too in the weeds. Focus on the asset itself, the name, the make, model, serial. Maybe you wanna put those in, but maybe you just need to get them in so that they're in the hierarchy the way you need, and that's a good place to start.

A lot of people in implementation get hung up on, can the hierarchy change? And, oh, I have to have it perfect before I start putting work orders in. That hierarchy can change. For example, these these fire panels, originally, I had them in the buildings.

And then later, I was like, maybe I want them all under their own fire system header. So I actually moved them out of the hierarchy into a separate column, and I liked them there more. And then I realized if I added an asset field, I could do this. Never mind.

I wanna put them back. I made some changes. That's okay.

I I like miss Frizzle says, like, get messy. Make mistakes. That's okay. Try it out.

You'd other than deleting something in Limble, there there's a lot you can do with moving it around. So as long as you're not deleting things, you're in good shape to try it. And if it's clunkier, go back the other way. So build out your assets comfortably slowly at first, and then over time, revisit.

So I tried to do once a quarter. Every three months, would sit down, revisit the assets, and see what else we could add. We originally didn't have golf carts. We originally didn't have vehicles.

We just started with buildings and rooms. And then we were like, well, you know what? If we added that, that'd be really great. So think of what other assets are not in your system once you've had Limble for a few years and think about adding them or add new fields.

So even voltage. We added a voltage field for a bunch of our equipment because we fried a panel that was supposed to be wired for high voltage or low voltage, and we did the opposite. So think about, you know, what information has caused mistakes in the past and then load that up. But, again, that's gonna happen slowly over time, and mapping is part of that.

Don't rush it. Just when you have time, set aside a, hey. This is my goal for the next year. I wanna add this type of asset, or I wanna map things out.

Things like that. Smaller goals that you can focus on each year.

That kind of brought up a question, for Denise. She said, do you have any assets that relocate often? Does this cause issues for mapping?

That is a great question. Yes. Yeah. Because some of our golf carts, for example, they they end up all over the place, and there's not necessarily a home for them.

To be honest, those are ones that I just decided not to necessarily map, or I mapped them based on where they are the most. So if they go around to two or three different locations, but forty to fifty percent of the time they're located here, then I would map it there. But, yeah, there there's honestly a case to be made that assets that are on the move all the time, you probably don't wanna map unless that's part of your workflow. So I have had some companies that are, like, re they're renting out equipment or they're moving it all over the country.

And so mapping them might not be the best way to do it, but they did have a drop down or an asset field with a text field that said, where is the asset located? And they would update that every time it was moved. And so maybe mapping is the way to do that for you. Maybe you're like, no.

Heck no. That's way too much. Okay. Would a would a, you know, drop down be a way to do it or a text field?

Maybe that's too much. Maybe you just need a whiteboard. I I know we are digital, and there are tons of good reasons to use digital everything. But sometimes when things move around a lot, the easiest way to do it was for the guys just to have a quick list on the whiteboard in the entrance of the building where we kept track of where the vehicles were moving to.

All options. Not gonna speak for which one's best for you, but explore them and see maybe which one would work best.

Well, just depending on if Denise is talking about rotating assets versus something like a golf cart or or fleet vehicle, you you could potentially use an integration, and I'll say it's a Limble to Limble integration, where we could take, as part of a work order, take the location of, hey. We know we're moving this asset from, let's say, the storeroom, you know, where we have it sitting on the shelf to a position in some building.

You could potentially update that asset's location, you know, location now based off of to where you're moving it to, like, through, like, a Limble to Limble integration. So we'd have to just verify that the set map location is available as an API endpoint because I as of I remember when I looked last year, it wasn't, but I know you guys continue to add more to the API, so we'd to verify that.

And, John, I was actually gonna say I saw the question about an AirTag. I was gonna ask you on this one if you if you knew if that was possible.

We've had other customers look at that, and it also would be an integration because you've got I mean, Limble has you know, as customers have construction equipment. Like, use the example, Debo, having construction assets that go to different sites.

We have ones that they've got, I guess, calibration tools that they will ship, you know, internationally.

And so being able to track those, often does involve an integration because usually, like, let's say, AirTags, for example, if there's you know, it has its own database that's capturing and tracking its location. So depending on the frequency, you could say, okay. Well, once a day or once an hour, I want to go and update that location in Limble from, you know, wherever that other monitoring, software is identifying that asset. So that is definitely a possibility.

You know, a lot of times, well, you know, let's say for this fleet, we're incorporating, you know, the the the, miles or information like that run hours. So then that feeds back in, of course, into the PM side of it so that you can start planning and coordinating the maintenance for those assets too.

John, since you have the mic, could you talk a little bit more about, like, the partnership that you have with Limble and how we work together and and maybe specifically think people who are thinking about mapping what that could look like?

Yeah. And and as as Devo pointed out, it is a lot of work. I mean, as you all know, even just gathering asset information is a lot of work, and you wanna do it right. And the same thing with the mapping. It's know, it could be something, I'll say, as simple as working off of your one line diagrams, right, mechanical electrical plumbing one line diagrams, trying to incorporate that information in.

Also, one of the things I want to further explore is, can you integrate? If you have, like, ArcGIS, do we, you know, find a way to integrate with that type of information as well so we get rid of some of the manual manipulation? So those are some of the things that we can definitely look at.

But we also have the hands that where it comes to doing the manual monotonous task, yes, that can be done.

Albeit, I'm gonna be honest with you, we are trying our darnedest to make sure that we're, being smart in the approach and leveraging AI and integrations wherever possible to automate and streamline a lot of those monotonous tasks.

Awesome. I I oh, John, you answered the question. You answered the question in the chat. We have one more question that came in. How do users decide on due dates for tasks? My default is different task templates with different due dates based on category input from the work request portal.

Oh, yeah. Go, okay. Here's my issue. Again, working with college students is different. Maybe not.

Maybe maybe it's not different than other places, but college students will be like, one of my eight lights is burned out, and it's it's urgent. High priority due tomorrow, and you're like, okay. Your your room is, like, five percent dimmer than normal. Like, we will get to it at a reasonable time, but putting high priority and saying due tomorrow is not an option for us.

So in my instance of the college, we did remove those options, and then we set those up based on the drop down. So if they said it was a lighting issue, we defaulted it to two weeks out. And if they said it was a fire alarm issue, we made it high priority and do immediately. So we modified the work request portal to automatically create a due date so that not necessarily the user got to decide.

And then for event setups, that was something we did need to know. So they would put it in. Like, we need it set up on this date, and then we would modify the due date afterwards. So that's my experience on my end.

Yeah. Then I'll I'll throw in there on on work request. I one hundred percent agree. I do not put priority on the work request form.

I would rather use a different field to allow them to communicate the severity of the impact. So, you know, if I'm saying I'm in manufacturing, you know, maybe you're posing the question of, is this impacting production, or is it impacting quality?

Is this a safety issue? Just try to gain some clarity from them because just to say something of high, medium, low is way too subjective. So you wanna qualify put as many qualifiers onto that as possible.

But then it really does come down to managing expectations. So you should, in my opinion, establish an internal service level agreement. I mean, you have those with contractors. Right?

You set up SLAs, so you should have one internally as well. So that depending on your your industry, your business, you can tailor those SLAs and it's a okay. Well, for this type of issue, you know, based on based off its impact to, you know, maybe it's the educational environment to manufacturing to health care, whatever it is, you're quantifying what that potential impact is. And, of course, here is the appropriate response time in order to assess it and then resolve it.

And then you can track those.

And and it helps it's gonna help you as a facility manager director to justify your resources as well. Because now you're tracking of, okay, Here's how quick we're able to respond. And, hey. We're doing a really good job with the higher priority issues, but we can't quite get to these other ones.

Here's the impact to the organization. In order to accommodate this, I need more resources. I need more money. And so you can use that as leverage to further justify, headcount and budget.

We have another question that popped in. It says, does everyone have to have the other site of mapping to see it? Or when you link it to Limble, everyone that has Limble can see the other maps?

I think this situation, I think you're talking about, like, a Canva map, or are you talking within Limble? If you're talking about Canva, Canva just has a website and a link that you can make, so you can share that with anyone not in Limble and wherever you wanna post it.

Within Limble, when you create the maps, you can share those maps with other users. It's kinda like dashboards. And so if you're talking about sharing with other Limble users, yes, within Limble, you build out the map. You can share that.

You can't share the Limble maps outside of Limble, so you'd need to be a Limble user to see anything you build inside the system. Other than, like, showed you where you can just kinda take a screenshot of what you've done and then share that with contractors, things like that. But to have the interactive part, you'd need to be a Limble user.

And, John, I did wanna mention too when you're talking about that with reporting, That's a big thing. Even on the request portal, when I showed you a map today where it was, hey. Show me all the lighting issues. That was because the request portal had tags set up. So if the student says it's a lighting issue, then it's gonna add a tag for lighting, and then I use that tag to create my map. So it's very good to collect good information. Good information in, good information out.

So And that's the battle cry of all of this.

I wanna thank you, Deebo and John, for your time in helping us put this together and taking the time to answer questions. And then thank you to everyone who attended today. We are so thankful that you are our customers. We learned so much from all of you.

And, you know, I love the creativity. And if anything, I hope that you walk away from this webinar thinking, you know, what what else can I do in Limble? And, kind of as Deebo said, like, just try it out. There's not much you can do aside from don't go through deleting stuff, but but really try to see how you can make the system work better for you.

And head to the community, share your thoughts there, ask questions there. It's a really great resource, and we would love to have you. And if you have any questions afterwards, Deebo and John are both in the community. You can tag them.

You can ask them questions. If you wanna share, we have a lot of people do show and tell in the community and get feedback. We would love to have you do that. It's community dot Limble dot com.

If you have a Limble account, you can log in through your SSO, or you're able to, set up account an account directly from that page. But we're so appreciative of you. We hope that you had a great time at our webinar today, and we will see you on the next one.

Good job, Oh, thanks, John.

You too.

See you.

‍