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Chip Pierpont and includes a nationwide content management platform that
hip Pierpont works with local, interactive touch screens. To join, our clients
is Director simply purchase a digital media player and a monitor and we
Cof Facility handle the rest, including the content management functional-
Technologies at the ity, cyber security and User Acceptance Testing (UAT), resulting
U.S. General Services in plug and play at the local level. One of the key aspects of this
Administration digital signage solution is the offering of near real-time electricity
(GSA), where he usage information coming from our smart meters system. The
oversees delivery of interactive energy dashboard allows the user to see, for exam-
technology imple- ple, what the actual BTU count is on a running ticker. They can
mentation for all view what their energy use was today versus yesterday, today
space requirements versus last week, today versus the same day last year, and it stays
of federal agencies. current. It also plays off that data with quiz questions that gets
The landlord for the people interacting with the screens by showing them energy
civilian federal gov- equivalencies, such as how many electric cars could be powered
ernment, GSA/PBS with the actual savings from their building.
owns or leases 8,700 Digital signage is not new; but for us, having a platform that’s
assets, maintains an scalable across 1,500 plus buildings, and having near-real-time
inventory of more energy information being fed into the building is. The tenant
than 370 million square feet of workspace for 1.1 million federal now has accurate, near real-time knowledge of how the activity
employees, and preserves more than 481 historic properties. within their workspace is affecting the energy use. We’re proud
Chip and his team provide policy direction to modernize existing of that, because the scope of the ongoing project is huge,
structures and to design new construction to the highest stan- amounting to approximately 1,800 owned buildings. It’s greater
dards of smart building technology and automation. than 9,000 when you include leased buildings. Overall, we have
more than 1,400 property managers and we serve over a million
What technology and business initiatives were most federal tenants.
important in 2016? Another initiative involves GSALink, our energy fault detec-
One highlight of 2016 was the rollout of our national tion and diagnostics (FDD) analytics platform built back in 2012.
Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS). We currently have 81 buildings connected to that platform
While CMMS may not be cutting-edge IT building technology totaling about 45 million square feet. We took the opportunity
per se, the sheer magnitude of our portfolio made it unique. in 2016 to do more with regard to developing rules and deeper
We incorporated a single Maximo CMMS system across 1,520 analytics around the existing platform. It was important to us,
buildings; it was cloud based and was the first use of Amazon before expanding the number of buildings, to go back and
Web Services (AWS) by a federal government entity. It was also identify opportunities to further leverage the platform using
the first AWS application that was approved for federal cyber the analytics.
security. That’s something we’re proud of, because even with We utilized a third-party study by Carnegie-Mellon University
this size portfolio and dealing with very stringent cyber security to validate our energy savings, looking at a 12-year span of
requirements, we were able to implement a web-based solution. energy bills; including information that came through our smart
In conjunction with this effort, we implemented national stan- meters platform. One of the most interesting insights from the
dards associated with work flows, naming conventions for equip- study showed that when GSALink analytics was combined with
ment and preventative maintenance allowing us to effectively our ion smart-meter program (our advanced-meter program),
partner with our design and construction partners. As they were that tandem produced an average of 24% reduction in energy.
doing work in existing buildings (or building new buildings), we We were extremely pleased to see such positive results.
were able to integrate new or renovated equipment into our
CMMS system fairly flawlessly. In addition, we fine-tuned utiliza- What will the focus be in 2017?
tion of the system by implementing some new tenant-focused One of our primary initiatives is the Facility Manager (FM)
functions. Those included being able to break down the data dashboard. It will sit on all 1,400 plus facility managers’ desktops,
and information by specific tenant agencies—or even sub-users pull data from multiple disparate systems, and present that on
within those agencies—which allowed us granularity of data to a single dashboard in a usable and consumable fashion. Most
discuss specific service related performance metrics. facility-related software solutions provide a tremendous amount
In 2016 we also deployed a new nationwide digital signage of data and information in their own right. But with all this data
platform. The pilot stage, totaling 50 buildings is 90% complete coming from different sources, facility managers have to jump

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