WGAN-TV | Intro to Aetos Imaging for Remote Commercial Property Facilities Management, Collaboration and Training using Matterport | Guest: Aetos Imaging Co-Founder and President Connor Offutt | Episode: 147 | Thursday, 2 June 2022 | www.AetosImaging.com


www.AetosImaging.com

WGAN-TV Transcript | Intro to Aetos Imaging for Remote Commercial Property Facilities Management, Collaboration and Training using Matterport

Hi All,

[WGAN-TV Transcript Below]

How can commercial real estate Facility Managers, Engineers and General Contractors enhance Matterport digital twins for:

1. Remote Facilities Management?
2. Remote Collaboration?
3. Remote Training?
4. MEP documentation: including dynamic data via API integrations such as temperate and pressure?

On Thursday, 2 June 2022, my guest on WGAN-TV Live at 5 will be Aetos Imaging Co-Founder and President Connor Offutt:

✓ WGAN-TV | Intro to Aetos Imaging for Remote Commercial Property Facilities Management, Collaboration and Training using Matterport

Connor will demo and discuss Aetos Imaging's Aetos Operate platform to leverages Matterport digital twins to give property management a virtual twin of their real-world asset and give staff remote operations tools:

1. VISUAL EQUIPMENT DATABASE – By tagging all of the equipment, components and the systems they belong to, your building can create a visual equipment database for management teams. Aetos Operate Integrates with Facilities Management platforms such as Angus Anywhere, Building Engines, FM 360

2. BETTER TRAINING – Our platform allows your building to offer custom training simulations that are tailored to your operations, not just an industry boilerplate. Staff can easily find and identify equipment, react to critical emergencies or even go through specific equipment maintenance procedures.

3. BETTER ONBOARDING – Imagine if every new hire learned directly from your best trainers and your most seasoned experts. We make it easier than ever to keep your entire facilities workforce up-to-date on the most critical training procedures.

4. COLLABORATION IN 3D – Aetos integrates native video conferencing technology that allows users to directly engage with your building's Matterport digital twins online. No lag and no clunky controls, just a remote twin of your real-world asset in which to walk, talk and solve problems together.

Questions that I should ask Connor?

Best,

Dan

---

WGAN-TV | Intro to Aetos Imaging for Remote Commercial Property Facilities Management, Collaboration and Training using Matterport | Guest: Aetos Imaging Co-Founder and President Connor Offutt | Episode: 147 | Thursday, 2 June 2022 | www.AetosImaging.com

A "must watch" show. If you / your clients are using Matterport for Facilities Management (FM) of commercial real estate (such as Matterport digital twins of the Mechanical-Electrical-Plumbing (MEP) spaces, including:

1. Main Engine Room
2. Fire Pump Rooms
3. Automatic Transfer Switch (ATS) Systems
4. Fan Rooms
5. Electrical Rooms
6. Command Center: Fire Panel

In addition to Facilities Management, these departments will also find this Matterport integration by Matterport Partner Aetos Imaging helpful:

1. Security
2. Engineering
3. General Contractor
4. Vendor Management
5. Insurance Underwriting
6. Sale of building

Plus, if you / your client are using Facilities Management platforms such as Angus Anywhere, Building Engines, FM 360, Aetos Operate seamlessly integrates with these platforms.

If you are a Matterport Service Provider (MSP), understanding this super-geeky topic will help you get bigger spaces to do Matterport scans.


Transcript (video above)

[00:00:03]
Dan Smigrod: How can commercial real estate facility managers, engineers and general contractors enhance Matterport digital twins for:

remote facilities management,
remote collaboration,
remote training,
mechanical-electrical-plumbing (MEP) documentation, including dynamic data via API integration such as temperature and pressure?

Stay tuned to find out.

Hi all. I'm Dan Smigrod, Founder of the We Get Around Network Forum.

Today is Thursday, June 2, 2022 and you're watching WGAN-TV Live at 5. We have an awesome show for you today. It's a bit geeky.

It's a Matterport mashup: Introduction to Aetos Imaging for Remote Commercial Property Facilities Management and Training using Matterport. And here to talk to us about this topic is Connor Offutt. Hey Connor, good to see you.

[00:01:02]
Connor Offutt: Good to see you Dan.

[00:01:04]
Dan Smigrod: Connor is co-Founder and President of Aetos Imaging based in Atlanta. In fact, you'll find them at: AetosImaging.com For the purpose of our show, we're going to do a little bit of role-playing. Connor is going to get to play himself.

I'm actually going to be Bob, a Facilities Manager and Chief Engineer of ACME Commercial Buildings based in Atlanta and we have 100 buildings in 25 states. This obviously works for fewer buildings that are under facilities management. But for today's purpose, we have 100 buildings in 25 states.

[00:01:55]
Bob: Just a little bit of context for you, Connor. I'm interested in saving money, saving time. Time means doing things faster and I'm also interested in improving job satisfaction of our team members.

I reached out to you because my trusted colleague, Dan Smigrod, Founder of the We Get Around Network Forum said I should do a Zoom call with a member of the Aetos Imaging team because we are already using Matterport, but we're having challenges and Dan thought since Aetos Imaging is a Matterport Partner, that it's like: 1+ 1 = 100.

I'm really curious to find out about this, Connor. My four things that I was talking to Dan about that I needed help with are:

1) visual equipment database;
2) training and simulations;
3) on-boarding; and 4) collaboration within a Matterport tour. As I mentioned, we're already creating Matterport tours of our mechanical, electrical, and plumbing spaces; our chillers, coolers, sink sensors, all our spaces.

We thought by doing these Matterport digital twins of our spaces, that it would enable us to do a lot of improvements to save money, save time.

But as soon as we began, for example, for a visual equipment database, we thought we could just do Matterport MatterTags for every piece of equipment; that that would be a great way to create a visual database of everything in our spaces.

But we're finding it's just too clunky doing these MatterTags. Anyway, that's the problem. Do you have some questions for me or is that enough to tell me about the visual equipment database of how Aetos Imaging + Matterport can help us?

[00:03:59]
Connor Offutt: Bob, thanks for the introduction and thank you for clarifying some of the things that you're looking for and what you wished you would have gotten out of Matterport. Quite frankly, that's exactly how we started our journey as a company.

As we started providing Matterport services to our commercial buildings operations clients, there are all these sets of problems that they wished that they could solve with Matterport, they hoped they could solve, similar to what you're talking about and Matterport is just not optimized for commercial real estate operations, training, etc.

That's really when we got to work and we decided that rather than waiting for either Matterport to provide bespoke solutions to this or another third-party, we said, we have all the expertise on operations and buildings and facilities management, let's go ahead and build the software solution that solves some of these problems that are being faced in the overall operations of building spaces.

To address your first point, let's dissect what the issue really is. Are you running into problems where you're unable to really filter or sort or manage large volumes of information? You said 100 buildings. That means you've got probably 1,000 Matterport scans and across those 1,000 scans, you've got a very large number of equipment, components, systems, etc, that are compromised in those spaces. Is that generally correct?

[00:05:29]
Bob: Yeah. I would say, Connor, that we're using our facilities management platform Angus AnyWhere. We can locate stuff, but we actually need to see it.

When we know that we need to look at this particular chiller and it's in this particular building, we're finding that, where is that Matterport scan and now we're moussing in to go find that particular chiller. It really turns out to be a bit overwhelming every time we want to query the visual database to go see what it is that we need to look at.

[00:06:14]
Connor Offutt: Exactly. That's one of the first things that we went out to solve. We've solved this by creating our own tagging structure that persists across organizations set by your permission structure.

You can then assign what level of employee – a building manager maybe only has access to their own buildings worth of data. Maybe a portfolio manager has access to the whole portfolio worth the data. Then the tagging system that we've created allows you to do all those things.

You can now filter by chiller and see all your chillers across 100 buildings; immediately view that and access that. You can connect that to your existing data.

You mentioned that you're using Angus AnyWhere as your work order management software. Whether you're using that or FM360, Building Engines, really any CMMS that has an open API, we're able to pull that data directly into our tagging software and our tagging feature and then we roll that data up to what we call the equipment page and you're able to query, sort, filter all of that equipment data across any number of organizations or any number of facilities, and across any number of equipment types.

We've really made the management of that data way more intuitive, way more accessible and really built the whole software platform around commercial operations.

Whereas I think the original intent of Matterport was to really dive into real estate marketing and virtual tours – it's very good at that – it really hasn't been perfected for operations and that's where we are exclusively focused.

[00:07:52]
Bob: That's where we're stuck. We do certainly have hundreds, if not 1,000+ Matterport scans. We think we have all these buildings; that's sometimes a filter. We just want to look at one particular building and get to that Matterport scan quickly.

But often we need to look at equipment that is in multiple buildings. The question is, how do we find all the chillers that were made by this particular manufacturer that are within, let's call it 1,000+ Matterport digital twins. Does Aetos Imaging enable the ability to filter?

I just think intuitively you want to be able to say, I'm looking by building or I'm looking by equipment, or there's a particular system, or somehow we have tagging of what it is that's unique to keeping track. Does Aetos Imaging do that?

[00:08:56]
Connor Offutt: That's exactly what we do. That's one of the many things that we do to provide operational value and we knew right away that the problem that you're encountering is something we had to solve. We've solved it and it works exactly like you're describing.

You can filter by system, filter by label, filter by building. Really filter by; we expose a dozen variables that you can sort your data with and that becomes a critical piece to operating, getting value out of your [Matterport] scans. Because it's one thing for it to exist, it's another thing about how we make that scan accessible, valuable, and operationally drive improvements across rollover.

[00:09:40]
Bob: I mentioned there's equipment and systems, but we also have spaces. In our minds, we think that we have our main engine rooms or fire pump rooms, or automatic transfer switching systems (or ATS systems), fan rooms, electrical rooms. Is there a way to tag spaces so that we want to go, "Oh! Look at all those rooms across our different facilities."

[00:10:09]
Connor Offutt: One hundred percent and I can't wait to show you here in a second. When I show you a demonstration of the [Aetos Operate] platform, I'll show exactly how we do that. But yes, the answer is unequivocal. - Unequivocally yes, we can filter by all of those categories.

[00:10:22]
Bob: - Even before you show me a demo, I'm still trying to get my hands around it because one of the things that we were trying to do with Matterport MatterTags and really there's not even enough characters, even if it wasn't so painful, but we were trying to annotate within the MatterTag either when that chiller was last serviced or when the next service needs to be or there's some temperamental problem with that particular chiller. We have a very large organization.

As I mentioned: 100 facilities in 25 states. My knowledge of all these spaces is really – I think Dan told me you use the word, tribal knowledge, and that resonated with me because all the knowledge of all our spaces is within the individuals that are servicing those spaces. That seems like a horrible place to be when people retire or move on, or just trying to facilitate a conversation faster. I feel the annotation that we wanted to be able to do was things like: we need some photos of that chiller to show something.

[00:11:44]
Bob: Talk a little bit about annotation in terms of photos or video or MEP drawings.

[00:11:50]
Connor Offutt: - Let's think about this from a standpoint of first principles. If you were to think of a system that did all the things that you wanted, it would do, what would that look like?

That's the way that we think about this problem. Well, you'd have to have a sub-folder structure within your tags, they gave you the flexibility to add whatever type of data that you would like to associate with these tags, that's directly accessible within these spaces.

You then want to propagate that data up and expose that data to a proper organization page that allows you to filter, sort and organize your viewing so that you can actually get real reporting and real useful utility out of that structure.

Without having really robust folder management within tags, you're never going to get to a proper solution; then you're running into character limits and it just ends up being a long scroll through text or notes, etc. You have to have a really good authorization; really good organization of the data. Then you need to be able to input any data type, whether that's a video folder, access to API links to your CMMS; photos; inspection histories; work order management, etc.

You need to be able to view all of that from within the modal structure. Which is why we had to go ahead and build our own modal documentation structure; our own database that presented all that information in the way that they actually wanted to use it. We've gone ahead and done that, we've sorted it by folders and it makes it really really easy for you to access all that information once it's imported.

[00:13:23]
Bob: - Well, we really thought we love these Matterport scans because we can walk through the space but again, in terms of tagging, we found even just to put the photos and video and the MEP drawings and some annotation of notes or when it was serviced or when it's scheduled to be serviced.

All of a sudden we found that we had 15 to 20 different MatterTags, all that needed to go in one spot. We couldn't tell which tag was which and it actually is a tedious process to annotate a Matterport digital twin manually using the Matterport MatterTag system.

Dan thought that you had some solutions. I'm glad to hear that you have some modal point that collects all this stuff. We're still struggling with some of our team making notes on the electrical panels with china markers about when something was serviced or to be serviced and the training manuals – if we're lucky – they're in a file cabinet someplace. The knowledge is all over the place.

[00:14:40]
Bob: Does the Aetos Imaging system make it super-easy to sort, filter, get to, go "fly-in" right to that spot, and then to see all the annotations regarding that particular space or device?

[00:14:56]
Connor Offutt: - Super-easy! We've designed it to be completely compatible with what you're looking for. Really, that's how we've engineered the data system that we've created.

[00:15:05]
Bob: - I can't be the only one that has this type of problem. Are there other problems that you addressed that I hadn't even thought of mentioning to you regarding how you do this?

[00:15:15]
Connor Offutt: - Everywhere. When we started to work with [Matterport] 3D spaces, we realized that there's this untapped potential that is really under-leveraged in the market and [Matterport] 3D scans could be so much-much for larger organizations for operations.

They're just not; because nobody has spent the time to customize a set of software tools that solve some of these problems directly. That's why we believe we're onto something so powerful here, because we're solely focused on commercial operations. You mentioned some of those four things in the beginning, we can dive into training and how important training is at the building.

[00:15:57]
Bob: - Well, let's hold off on the three other needs. I'll come back to them in a moment. But just to stay focused on this visual equipment database because, as the Facilities Manager and Chief Engineer, I still have colleagues on our team that are focused on security and engineering, general contractors, vendor management, etc. So does the system work with these others; my peers as well? Would they find this helpful, useful?

[00:16:29]
Connor Offutt: - What do you still need to be convinced of that I haven't articulated already like. What are the solutions that you're looking for that I haven't already touched on?

[00:16:41]
Bob: - Well, you've literally touched on everything that I was thinking about because I needed help with keeping track of 100 buildings and all the different equipment and being able to filter by equipment and systems by labels or tags that we use and then deep-dive to see the annotation.

The key for me, what I'm missing is actually to see how easy, fast, and seamless it is to filter; to get to a spot and be able to see all that tag information. Is that something you can demo for me now?

[00:17:20]
Connor Offutt: - Absolutely, I can jump into that right now.

[00:17:27]
Connor Offutt: Do you see my screen okay?

[00:17:28]
Bob: - I do.

[00:17:29]
Connor Offutt: - Great. Let's just dive into how we solve this in particular. Here you can see on our building tab, we have any number of buildings laid out onto a platform for easy use.

You talked about having 100 buildings. Sometimes you want to see data on a building specific basis, sometimes you want to see aggregate data across the whole portfolio.

Well, we can do that. I can jump into the CODA building. I can see what Matterport scans we have of that property and I can see equipment break-outs of all the equipment that we have at that property.

[00:18:04]
Bob: - If I may, Connor, the screen is somewhat small for me. Could you talk me through what we're seeing?

[00:18:12]
Connor Offutt: - Yeah. Up here on top are the individual scans that we've done and collected or you've already had at your property so easily organizing and managing the spaces that we've scanned or that you scanned already. Main chiller room, this is a fire command center, this is a lobby and this is a fire pump room. All of the MEP spaces that we've shown, this is a demo environment, there's more at this building. This is really just to show you the example.

[00:18:39]
Bob: - Yes, please don't show me anything that's confidential to another client.

[00:18:42]
Connor Offutt: - I would never do that. We've made sure that all of these are shareable and we've got permissions accordingly. Even at this building level, you can see all that equipment is then exposed.

[00:18:53]
Bob: - Well, you're still going a little bit fast for me. If you scroll back up and just go to the left, I just really want to understand this. I guess this is called the Aetos Operate.

I guess this is one of a number of solutions that Aetos Imaging offers. This is fine. Let's stay on Aetos Imaging. I get it that I'm at the Aetos Operate dashboard. The equipment and buildings: that means I can filter initially by looking at the buildings I want to focus on or the equipment which may be at multiple buildings.

[00:19:29]
Connor Offutt: - Correct. If I go into the equipment page here, this is where we can do all of that filtering and sorting that we were just talking about.

[00:19:38]
Bob: - Before you get there, I'm sorry, I'm not the fastest at getting through this. I see on the left side is: Scans. In addition to being able to look at Buildings or look at specific Equipment, I could also go to a specific Matterport scan.

But as I described to you, that's part of our problem right now is being able to find the right scan with the right equipment in the right building. Forgive me for interrupting, you were about to take me through how you filter. I see some filters, I guess at the very top?

[00:20:18]
Connor Offutt: -Absolutely. All of these represent tags that we've placed into the scene [scan], into the individual [Matterport] scans that hold data. We call this modal data; that can be general information as to what system that's assigned to.

Or we could say, "I only want to look at equipment or tags that are associated with the Chilled Water Distribution System." I can then also filter by Label Type. If you want to call something a pump, an extinguisher, or a sensor, a VFD, you can do that.

You can filter by Space Type. If you only want to look at chilled water distribution system equipment that has a label valve in the lobby, we can do that.

Then we can even specify Floor and really go down to any level of granularity. We can filter by Building Type, we can filter by [Matterport] Scan, we can filter by Space Type. All of these variables that we've exposed, you can filter and sort your information –

[00:21:17]
Bob: -Okay. I recognize this is a demo database, so if I ask a question and my filter request might not be there, I am interested in chillers and multiple buildings. Is that something you could filter and show me how quickly we can get there?

[00:21:35]
Connor Offutt: -Yeah. Here I just selected the label of Chiller. We can see that we have two chillers across these four buildings. One is at 1180 Peachtree and one is at the CODA Building.

[00:21:47]
Bob: -Okay. In your demo database, if we clicked on one of those, would you be able to show your modal example or would you prefer to go to a different –

[00:21:55]
Connor Offutt: -Absolutely. Actually let me go to a better modal example for the –

[00:21:59]
Dan Smigrod: -I certainly can appreciate this is a demo database and therefore, it's not as robust as my 1,000+ Matterport scans.

[00:22:08]
Connor Offutt: -Absolutely. Here we are inside of a scan, you could see I just simply click on a piece of equipment that represents a tag, and that takes me to exactly where we are in the scene [scan]. You can see it here.

[00:22:22]
Bob: -I'm sorry, you went a little fast for me because I'm really intrigued. You knew where this spot was, but what I'm interested in is how you use the filter to go to an exact point within a Matterport digital twin.

[00:22:36]
Connor Offutt: -Yes. Again, let's pop up in the modal data, and look at this. We can see that this is an Air Handler Unit that's been assigned to the Water Treatment and it has the label of a Control Panel. If I wanted to filter by the Water Treatment and Control Panel, let's just go back and do this. If I want to say Water Treatment, let's find that here.

Where is that? There you go. Then I want to say, "Okay, I see the three water treatment systems and associated tags that I have."

Then I also want to say, "All right, it's a Control Panel." Where is that? There you go. I can see we've filtered down to these two units that satisfy those filterable criteria and I can simply click on the link or click "View" and I'm taken to exactly where that is in my buildings.

[00:23:27]
Bob: -Okay. Could we do that?

[00:23:29]
Connor Offutt: -Let's do that. I'm going to click "View" and we're going to go there. That brings you to the exact spot where that is in your building.

[00:23:37]
Bob: -Okay. This is awesome because this is exactly among the big problems that we're having, is to be able to filter a mass amount of information by equipment, buildings, systems, labels, tags, and then go right to that spot [within the Matterport tour]: it's taken us a lot of time to get there. It looked easy, fast, and simple.... .

[00:24:06]
Connor Offutt: -Yes. As long as everything is labeled properly, which it sounds like you've already gone through the hassle of doing, then this really exposes – this makes it extremely easy to do exactly what you're talking about.

[00:24:21]
Dan Smigrod: -You've mentioned this is what you call your modal and we did talk about that there's a lot of opportunities to do different visual documentation. Can you show us everything that can be documented about this particular –

[00:24:39]
Connor Offutt: -Absolutely. As I was alluding to in the past, we essentially organize all of your data here by sub-folders, which you can actually set as a general setting across your organization. Here's the types of folders, here's the types of data that I would like to collect, that we would like to collect at this building or across our organization.

[00:25:02]
Bob: -Okay. Let me see if I can read across because some of the print is small. There's Files, Angus Connections, Inspection History, MEP Drawings, Photos, Service Records, Training.

[00:25:16]
Connor Offutt: -These are all sample categories of information. We allow you to set the exact standards and the exact parameters. Think of these as folders inside of your data that you can specify as to what they should be. If you want to call this inspection service history, you can call it that. You can customize all the names of the folder.

[00:25:44]
Bob: -I notice I don't see any videos, but I could add a video of the training video to how that device works.

[00:25:52]
Connor Offutt: -Absolutely. You can add any file type directly to the system. What that looks like here is generally, here's what I can access imagery directly from the [Aetos Operate] platform.

Here we can sort all that in Files and all these structures, all these folders have that as well. I can even jump into Angus Connections.

This is all a mocked up demo, not real information. I could say, "Hey! When was the last time that this was maintained?" It's all natively connected with your CMMS data, so that you don't need to do triple or double data input. Because we recognize that's a huge problem. You don't want to have to input the same data multiple times.

[00:26:36]
Bob: -Well, yes. That's the problem we're having with the Matterport MatterTags today. We already use the Angus AnyWhere CMMS platform for our facilities management platform. It seems redundant to have to type in information twice. I think what I'm hearing is as long as it's in Angus AnyWhere and we tag it appropriately, it's going to show up in the appropriate place.

[00:27:06]
Connor Offutt: -You got it. That's why we had to create this modal substructure, so that we have these different modals of data accessible to you.

All that really needs to happen is you just need to link at one time. So that you're creating the tag and you're setting up all the data, you just need to make sure that that piece of equipment is associated with the right corresponding work or a measurement equipment data so that they're tagged up properly.

[00:27:34]
Bob: -Matterport has introduced a service called Matterport Notes. But we find that it's a little bit kludgy in terms of how we would like to use it. I see you have something that says Notes. Can you help me understand that?

[00:27:46]
Connor Offutt: -Yeah. We love [Matterport] Notes. We think that Notes is fantastic. We're just taking it to the next level and making sure that the Notes function in a way that is best suited for commercial operations. Not all the features that we want to have on Notes are already live, but the idea is that you can have a series of running history of notes, you could add, delete, modify, edit, etc.

You can call out individual users across the entire user management structure. If I want to mention to a contractor that they need to come out to the building, they would then get a notification on their dashboard and so really everybody's experience as they login is customized to what information they need to be accessing.

[00:28:37]
Bob: -Should we be using the Notes feature or the Angus AnyWhere? Is there a reason to use two different?

[00:28:45]
Connor Offutt: -That's a really good question. The simple answer is, we can't expect all users to have all things. We've double engineered it to say that, all right, if you have a CMMS – Angus AnyWhere – or you want to keep Notes and do your correspondence there, no problem, that can happen there. If you don't or if you'd prefer to just leave a note directly on the equipment data, you can do that. It's essentially redundant.

[00:29:14]
Bob: -Okay. We may have some vendors that don't have access to our Angus AnyWhere, but we could send them a note through that Notes feature.

[00:29:30]
Connor Offutt: Exactly. - Absolutely, and we're even working on a new feature that's coming out later this year [2022], which is to be able to directly send what we call projects.

A project could be an RFP, it could be a renovation, it could be an equipment change, so you can send and create individual projects, and our vision is to allow for seamless collaboration of real-time projects across your operations to make sure that all of that data is properly assessed. You have a record of it, your history, you've conversations that happen on this.

[00:30:06]
Bob: - Cool. I'm excited that Dan said I should talk to you. ;-) One of the challenges that we have is we thought with the Matterport digital twin, that we could reduce the amount of airline tickets where our senior people, who are our best, most knowledgeable people, they'd actually want to fly the least amount.

What we've been doing with the Matterport digital twins is doing Zoom calls and calling up the Matterport digital twin in a share screen, and we find the latency, the delay is inhibiting us from having a real conversation, and then it's really awkward because if I'm showing one of my colleagues and they are saying, "No go to the left, turn." Do you have a solution for that?

[00:31:04]
Connor Offutt: - We've encountered that situation so many times that we had to engineer a solution to solve that exact problem because we knew that for us to push this to the next level of usability, something had to be done about creating a native video conferencing solution that allowed those things to be better.

We've had many calls like that where a chief or an engineer say, "Not left, go up, down," in that exact experience. What we've done, is we've created our own video conferencing platform that exists as part of the Aetos Operate software.

When you get Aetos Operate at your buildings, you're essentially getting unlimited [video] calls. You're really getting a powerful video conferencing platform that enables these spaces to be collaborated with in these online [video] calls. We're talking about saving [airline] tickets, saving travel time to the building. All that's extremely important. One second, let me make sure that there is crying in the background.

[00:32:09]
Bob: - It sounds like your VP of marketing is getting a little bit cranky. ;-)

[00:32:19]
Bob: Well, I guess it's a new world, we all work out of the house, and it's interesting, your VP of Marketing joined you in your home today.

[00:32:28]
Connor Offutt: - Sometimes you can't control a four-year-old screaming in the background of your home office, so I apologize to all the viewers.

[00:32:36]
Bob: - That's awesome. ;-)

[00:32:41]
Bob: Can I think of this as a video conferencing overlay on top of Matterport? Video conferencing is deeply integrated with Matterport – that completely eliminates the latency?

[00:32:54]
Connor Offutt: - That's exactly what we've done.

[00:32:56]
Bob: - Can anyone on the call take control of the Matterport if I want to enable them, if they want to ask for permission? Is that how it works?

[00:33:05]
Connor Offutt: - Exactly how it works.

[00:33:06]
Bob: - We pass it back-and-forth of who can actually move the Matterport screen?

[00:33:09]
Connor Offutt: - The same way that you would assign a new host on a Zoom call and then allow or set permissions for me to allow to share screen, etc. We've integrated those types of features directly into Matterport to say, "Okay, Bob, let me let you drive and you can get to the exact information that you're looking for."

We can all add notes together during that collaboration space. Everything we just showed you on the data side of those modals, we can now have a collaboration call that's saved as its own environment, if you will, so that those tags and the notes and the conversation that we have during that call can be saved in perpetuity and then referenced back so that we want to say then three months later, what did we say on that project call?

I thought we were going to move the chiller over here. We went through all these notes. Can I go back and see what we talked about? Yes. All the notes and the tags that we conduct and create during that conversation can be tagged in our archive for future reference.

[00:34:09]
Bob: - Can I save the video as well?

[00:34:13]
Connor Offutt: - Not yet. A lot of this stuff is in refinement, but the ultimate vision is, yes.

[00:34:23]
Bob: - Because I could imagine sometimes we have some persnickety problems and we actually do get not only my team, the facilities team or engineers on the Zoom calls, but security. We get contractors on the call, vendors, and we have a lot of people, and it just seems like it'd be really great to have a record of that call and then to be able even to tag it to a specific problem or challenge, so when we came back let's say it's documented, even for those that weren't able to participate in that call, that knowledge is there.

[00:35:01]
Connor Offutt: - You got it, Bob, think about how difficult it is to coordinate schedules and logistics where everybody's got to fly out.

Oftentimes, you know how this is. You manage 100 buildings. You're looking at a couple of pipes doing a quick inspection and then you're out of there.

You spent the whole flight ticket, a whole day's worth of activity, all those logistics. Engineers had to come, walk into the building.Bring them into the space, take their time to do the babysitting, if you will, of the contractor at the building. All of that can now be done virtually.

[00:35:35]
Bob: - Yeah. Connor, during COVID, what we found was we actually all could work remotely and we all could collaborate with Zoom and these Matterport digital twins made that possible in a way we've never imagined, so it's been super-helpful.

But we've also felt this pain point of latency, manipulating the Matterport tour during the Zoom call, and then who's given the tour and having people direct you to go up the stairs and off to the left when really I should just pass the control to the person to take charge of that Matterport twin. How do you solve that?

[00:36:16]
Connor Offutt: - What you wish you could have done, we've solved.

[00:36:18]
Bob: - That's awesome. That solves two of our challenges: 1) visual equipment database and 2) collaborating within a Matterport tour with video conferencing. The third item I wanted to talk about was 3) training and simulations.

That the challenge we have today with training is often our best people are in a different city, and we're either struggling with the Zoom challenge that we just discussed or we're flying people and we're spending a lot of money on training and we thought somehow we would be able to annotate these Matterport tours with some type of – "okay, watch these five videos of how to deal with this chiller, or this automatic transfer switch."

But we don't know whether they've actually watched it, completed it; actually taken a test to answer some questions.

[00:37:28]
Connor Offutt: Can you take Matterport tags and turn that into a sequence of operations? Because a lot of these things are dependent. First things first, then second thing, the third thing, you're not able to do that with MatterTags.

[00:37:39]
Bob: Exactly. Can you talk me through how training and simulations would work with Aetos Imaging with your Aetos Operate platform?

[00:37:50]
Connor Offutt: Absolutely. This is something I just get incredibly excited about. I think it's one of our hallmark features, and I think quite frankly, this in my view, will have the largest impact on the built environment overall. Because training is such a huge problem right now, turnover is high, expertise is low.

There's not enough engineers, subject matter experts to go around, so every organization is looking at how do they do more with less.

This is where when we started to really unpack what was possible to do with [Matterport] 3D scans, we just get so excited about the ability to create custom training scenarios that are then repeatable, trackable, bespoke to each individual building or generalized across the portfolio standard.

-That is really something that elevates training and on-boarding at a facility to a whole nother level. Just before we even dive into how, we're seeing applications, not just with engineers, with contractors, with vendors, with security staff, property management staff, at the building level, at the portfolio level.

There's a lot of situations where one engineer maybe covers multiple buildings or oversees a large portfolio, like yourself. You need eyes on the ground at 100 buildings and you need to be able to see, did Joe pass his refresh training?

Did Bob go through the right emergency response procedures for reacting to a fire or flood at the building? Disaster recovery plans, etc. These are all things that are really, really difficult to scale. If you do end up scaling them, it usually ends up being a generic video or a generic manual that is not really specific or relevant to the specific operations or subsystems at an individual facility.

Sure a chiller is a chiller, but where is the emergency shutoff valve? Where is the contingency switch? Where is the isolation valve? Where is the control panel? How do you make sure that your operating staff is trained on the actual critical functions, critical operations of your building. That's where they're going to be spending their time.

[00:40:14]
Bob: Do you have an example that you could show us in terms of training?

[00:40:17]
Connor Offutt: I would love to.

[00:40:18]
Bob: Using the Aetos Operate platform.

[00:40:21]
Connor Offutt: Let's jump into our example here. Once again, do you see my screen okay?

[00:40:27]
Bob: Yes.

[00:40:27]
Connor Offutt: Great. Let's look at how we address all these things. Now what our platform allows you to do is to create a sequence of operations training simulations, step 1, step 2, step 3, and input any amount of learning data that you'd like to put into this. If you want to add videos, images, files, etc, we can put all this into this operation. If I begin this, you can see here, step 1 is, we call this again, this is a demo course, but this is a chiller operations overview.

Let's say you're a new engineer, you're just joined this building. I need to understand where the chiller is? How does it work? How does my chief want me to conduct chiller operations at this property? Well, first, I need to go start the BMS so we can have a step-by-step process here. Then we move them and take them from one place to another.

There's that visual context of where we are, at any point if I need to look around and orient myself, or see where I am. I can do that.

I can move around and explore exactly where I am and if I needed to just come back to this step, I just re-center. You notice here I can then click, it's really engaging. We want to make sure that this next generation of education that happens at these buildings is not passive learning, it's active learning.

Every study shows that active learning has a much higher throughput of engagement and learning retention than passive learning.

This is the epitome of active learning that gets customized to your building. Here we are going through step 3, read the effector indicator and my favorite step that I love to talk about here, this is actually directly from the chief to this building; it is a manual – feel the oil sump.

This is something you're never going to see in a generic training manual. You're never going to be seeing this as part of a standard course that is generic. In this building, part of the verification process to make sure all systems are good is you actually physically put your hand on the oil sump, check the temperature. That's one of the steps that this chief wanted to make sure it happens on a regular basis at this building.

Again, this really shows the power of customization, step-by-step processes that we can create and identify, making them bespoke to a building.

[00:42:47]
Bob: Well, if you just go back for one second to that temperature there, because I would imagine with some of the IoT devices that measure temperature that we could put a sensor there that could show up in the tour? Even though I'm in Atlanta and that device, that chiller is in a different city that I can actually see what the temperature is.

[00:43:16]
Connor Offutt: You could. Now, real quick, let's differentiate between what we call the visual equipment database or the information layer versus bespoke courses, we tend not to mix the two. Courses are stand-alone training simulations that do not pull that data down.

[00:43:34]
Bob: Yes, I completely understand that, but I just wanted to just double-check that it is possible to add a sensor to that that reads the temperature that we can know visually, see remotely within a Matterport digital twin?

[00:43:50]
Connor Offutt: Yes. You would do that back in the visual equipment database that we talked about prior. You would add a sub-folder that would be called a temperature gauge. You would connect that to your IoT data, and then that would be accessible and visible directly from the modal.

[00:44:07]
Bob: Awesome. You've taken me through step 3, I think there was a step 4 you were about to show me.

[00:44:13]
Connor Offutt: Notice that we're tracking progress up here. All of this data rolls up to the dashboard level to the admin so that if I'm a supervisor, I can see Connor finished the course. He got this many answers complete. I'll show you the question-and-answer process here.

This is a six-step process here we walked through. And then once that's finished, we can then move to the quizzing, the testing, and that's where we confirm that they went through all this information so we can ask them questions. "What outside elements affect the chiller load?" We could say, "that's condensation." I don t think this demo has complete or correct, non-correct answers put in yet.

[00:44:55]
Bob: Okay. I totally get it. Then there's a way for both the person taking the test to know they passed as well as the supervisor to know that they've completed that course. That's awesome. I think that even the training and simulations covers my last one which is 4) on-boarding.

[00:45:15]
Connor Offutt: It is. Onboarding, it's really a combination of visual equipment database, collaboration and the training. When you put all those together, what you have is a beautiful pie, delicious pie, I guess, of how do I get my new team, my new personnel onboarded? Well, do I want to just throw them into the rooms and have them click all the information, look at data?

That's useful, that's really powerful. I can look up data that I didn't know before. I can just visualize it. Can I get on a call with them and not have to travel to the building, walk them through step-by-step sequences. Maybe there's a new project that we're working on or something like that. We can use calls for that, videoconferencing [within the Matterport].

Can I make sure that he goes through the top five things you need to know about this building, chiller operations, steam trap maintenance, emergency response procedures? Yes. Really, what we have with all those three prior features culminates in reduced onboarding time, improved quality of education, so you're actually improving the net result of your training and it is scalable across the whole portfolio.

[00:46:26]
Bob: Excuse me, I see that there's a really big opportunity to save on travel dollars. For our team, I know that that means improving job satisfaction for those that really would rather not travel. We also can leverage the experts in our organization to do the training across the chillers with those that have the knowledge.

I get it in terms of removing the tribal knowledge and replacing it with documentation that can pass from one colleague to the next to new people to on-boarding. Are there other benefits besides saving money, saving time and improving job satisfaction? I imagine we're going to have fewer errors that end up being costly.

[00:47:21]
Connor Offutt: We could have a whole additional hour to talk about the benefits and the ROI and all that. There are many. I think you have hard benefits and you have soft benefits.

The hard benefits are, you're going to see, for example, in New York, we have a building that has successfully reduced their steam energy consumption at the building because they're using our training protocols to go through steam trap maintenance.

They're missing fewer adjustments, they're making sure the systems are being operated at their optimal energy efficiency levels. You're seeing a reduction in the total cost of steam consumption at that building. It's a hard savings. You're taking a $1.8 million per year budget and now it's $1.75 million. We just saved them a lot of money on that.

[00:48:11]
Bob: Let's go to Hawaii! ;-)

[00:48:13]
Connor Offutt: Let's go to Hawaii exactly. ;-) Congratulations. Those are hard savings. Energy reductions is really the top thing that we see for building operating teams. The software slightly harder to measure are the onboarding time reductions.

A lot of times buildings don't necessarily track this. Does the data already exist? Do they have hard numbers on? How long it took them to onboard an engineer from six months down to three.

That data is a lot more amorphous. It's nebulous. But we do know that these results are happening. We do know based on anecdotes, based on customer satisfaction, based on all of the testimonials, the case studies that we've put together, we are having that effect at these buildings.

There's the remote and transportation cost reduction, that's significant. There's insurance and liability implications. Just having a [Matterport] scan. In general, you could argue that that's already a value prop of Matterport. We enhance that. Service records, histories, etc. It's really a lot easier to pull that.

[00:49:25]
Bob: I know every year we go through this whole insurance underwriting process of getting our buildings insured. The first thing that the insurance underwriting people want to know is how many fire extinguishers you got, where are they?

It sounds like we could anticipate, and tag things that they need to know like fire extinguishers. We could give them access to this and say, "hey, you could do this in 10 minutes" to say, "here are all the fire extinguishers in every building that we own and what floor they are located on." If you want to go look at them, just click on it. That's not my division, I'm the Facilities Manager and Chief Engineer.

There's a different person of insurance compliance, and security and insurance underwriting that deals with that. But I bet they would probably be giving me a big hug to make it super-easy to do compliance.

[00:50:22]
Connor Offutt: I couldn't agree more, and that's another benefit, the insurance [underwriting/claims documentation] side of things. Another one I really think is important, as an owner. Sometimes the operator and the owner are separate entities.

Sometimes they're the same entity. Owner-operators versus third-party operators. Now, who's the real winner here? The real winner is the building itself.

This is this whole push that requires some market education, some customer education. But what we're really doing is elevating the value of the physical asset by augmenting the utility through the digital asset.

[00:51:03]
Bob: I totally get that. That's why we did this Matterport digital twin thing, and we love it. It's just that it was creating operational issues for us with this process. Aetos Imaging obviously solves this for us; so we're excited.

[00:51:20]
Connor Offutt: Did you see the utility in negotiations? If you're, let's say selling off one of your buildings, that part you're leveraging that conversation is that the new owner is not only inheriting the building, but they're inheriting the best practices by the engineers that have been running this building for 30 years, and all that is codified and they inherit that as part of their purchase?

[00:51:41]
Bob: Yeah, I hadn't even thought of that, but that would be one of our other executives in the company. I could imagine they'd be really thrilled about how this helps and enables tours of the building for those to help expedite even before people get on an airplane.

[00:51:59]
Connor Offutt: New owner training, so the new owner of the building inherits that tribal knowledge that was used to run the building.

[00:52:07]
Bob: Totally get it. I'm ready to load up an armored car with the dollar bills, and just give me instructions of where to send it in Atlanta. ;-)

[00:52:14]
Connor Offutt: I'll give you the wiring instructions. ;-)

[00:52:16]
Bob: But before we get there, I'm just wondering, it seems like the process of onboarding may be a bit onerous.

[00:52:25]
Dan Smigrod: With 100 buildings, could you even just take me through maybe one building? Where do we begin?

[00:52:31]
Connor Offutt: It's a great question, and something that we, as a company, take a lot of pride in. We've recognized early that implementation onboarding from our perspective, making sure that our clients get the most use out of this is a process that we need to perfect.

The last thing that we want to do is say, here's the software, here's the platform good luck. We actually have a very thorough 30-90 day implementation process.

Depending on the complexity where we make sure we come out of that process having tagged all your equipment, connected it to any API CMMS, work order management platforms, API, IoT platforms that you need as part of your scope of work.

We make sure that you've gone through all of the training needed to conduct these calls. You understand the use cases there. We even go through and help your team put together a sample course. Let's take something simple like chiller operations.

We're going to use that to teach you how to put these courses together. Its very intuitive UI is really self-explanatory. It's not that complicated, but we still do really go through this, what we call the implementation process to help educate our clients on how this is working. Then that rolls over to ongoing customer success, customer support; we're available 24/7.

[00:53:53]
Bob: I'm so glad that my friend, and colleague, Dan Smigrod, Founder of the We Get Around Network Forum asked me to reach out to the Aetos Imaging team to find out how the Matterport Partnership of Matterport plus Aetos Imaging would be 1 + 1 =100. Just awesome, thank you for taking the time. I'll thank Dan, ;-)

[00:54:19]
Dan Smigrod: I'm going to come out of the "Bob" character role-play and I want to ask you some questions as Dan, Founder of the We Get Around Network Forum. What are your thoughts about where we're headed with Matterport?

[00:54:34]
Dan Smigrod: Do you have some thoughts on that topic?

[00:54:36]
Connor Offutt: Yeah, I think that there was a lot of hype around what Matterport 3D scanning could be across a large set of vertical applications. One of those being commercial real estate, and specifically commercial real estate operations.

I think a lot of what we discussed in our role-playing call goes into why that didn't materialize. I think a lot of people maybe got burned or followed the hype cycle, and now we're back up on the trail. I do see Matterport making a lot of great decisions right now.

I think that they really got their act together. I think they're investing into the right things. I do see we, at this juncture, have a very robust dev team that works very directly with their API and SDK team. We're getting what we need out of the relationship there.

I'm actually really optimistic. I think we're just scratching the surface of digital twins, and their use cases across the industry.

I think that there might have been a little bit of a hype cycle that was met with some disappointment. Now we're of course correcting, and fixing a lot of that. I think that's probably a little bit of what we're seeing in the macro. I'm really, really excited about what the next 3-5 years are going to look like.

[00:56:01]
Dan Smigrod: Awesome, anything that we didn't cover that we should talk about?

[00:56:07]
Connor Offutt: I think it was pretty comprehensive. I just want to emphasize that we, as Aetos Imaging, are going to provide full-service whether you're using Matterport scans already or not. Obviously, if you already are, the process is way easier. We can just take them and integrate. If you are just looking at it as a first-time user, we can provide full service for your organization.

[00:56:32]
Dan Smigrod: They don't need to figure out who to go scan Matterport spaces, Aetos Imaging can handle the soup-to-nuts, including arranging for facilities to be scanned: the Matterport scans.

[00:56:45]
Connor Offutt: Absolutely, yes. I think that's important.

[00:56:49]
Dan Smigrod: Anything else we haven't talked about that we should cover?

[00:56:53]
Connor Offutt: I think just the other side of this is we didn't really go into the expedition of other required services at the building.

For example, in New York, local [building code] compliance, ESG compliance, things like, "I need to do an energy audit at my building" can this make that whole process better, faster and improve?

That's worth a whole WGAN-TV Podcast where we can go into how this pertains to green building, and how this pertains to the ESG. I think there's a lot to unpack there. We are actually already doing this.

[00:57:31]
Dan Smigrod: That sounds awesome. Let's actually plan on doing another WGAN-TV Live at 5 and talking about Aetos Imaging + Matterport Digital Twins = Green.

[00:57:40]
Connor Offutt: I'd love to.

[00:57:41]
Dan Smigrod: Awesome!

[00:57:42]
Connor Offutt: I love that I can bring on another panelists for that as well.

[00:57:46]
Dan Smigrod: Awesome. Anything else on this topic of: Facilities Management Training mashed up with Matterport digital twins? Anything else on security, vendor management, other stakeholders?

[00:58:03]
Connor Offutt: No I guess the last thing, if anybody is thinking about this, and they're worried about price. Call us, it's not that bad at all. I think you'll actually be extremely pleasantly surprised. [AetosImaging.com]

[00:58:18]
Dan Smigrod: I haven't even asked you about pricing and I won't. But when I start thinking about all the airline tickets, the money that can be saved in airline tickets and traveling, the money that can be saved in reduced energy costs through efficient training and documentation.

[00:58:40]
Dan Smigrod: It sounds like it's a money maker.

[00:58:44]
Connor Offutt: It is.

[00:58:46]
Dan Smigrod: On top of everything else plus the soft things that are hard to measure that just make life easier for the team, which means making it easier to retain people because it'll be really painful when Bob's team realizes that thinking about leaving, that they're going to an organization that doesn't have Aetos Imaging as a platform on top of a Matterport digital twin.

[00:59:09]
Connor Offutt: The last thing that I'll leave your audience is, we are a young but growing company, and we have great ambitions.

There's a lot of things that are in the works that we didn't even talk about today.

Feedback is greatly encouraged; if there's something that you see is an opportunity here that you think that we could work on. We are going to solve commercial real estate operations utilizing Matterport 3D scanning technology, and we're going to make sure that … that is a solved problem in the next two, three years. We're very, very excited with where things are headed.

Just know that we're a little bit the new kids on the block here trying to disrupt this whole space.

[00:59:48]
Dan Smigrod: Awesome. Connor, thanks for being on the show today.

[00:59:51]
Connor Offutt: Thank you.

[00:59:52]
Dan Smigrod: We've been visiting with Connor Offutt. Connor is the Co-Founder and President of Aetos Imaging. We've been talking about the Aetos Operate platform.

We're going to have Connor back on the show to talk about another Aetos Imaging solution regarding Aetos Imaging + Matterport = GREEN, I could call it: = GREEN or mash-up for using the platform related to all things green ESG, etc.

For Connor in Atlanta and I'm Dan Smigrod Founder of the We Get Around Network Forum in Atlanta. You've been watching WGAN-TV Live at 5.