You are here: IWMSNews » Interviews » Thought Leader Interviews: Andy Fuhrman

Thought Leader Interviews: Andy Fuhrman

In our “Thought Leader Interviews” series iwmsnews.com interviews all important Thought Leaders from the IWMS industry. In our seventh interview we have interviewed Andy Fuhrman, CEO for Open Standards Consortium for Real Estate (OSCRE Americas)

1. Please introduce yourself to our readers

I’m Andy Fuhrman, CEO for Open Standards Consortium for Real Estate (OSCRE Americas) since 2003. I feel extremely fortunate to have lived my life doing the type of work I find incredibly interesting, challenging and rewarding. I don’t believe luck had anything to do with it. I made the right decisions, took educated risks, reached out to others for guidance and offered guidance to others. I also believe being a member in IFMA played a significant role in helping me achieve my goals through education and networking. Out of all the professional member associations that exist within the FM/CRE sector, IFMA leads the pact globally as the premier resource for education, publications, seminars, conferences, councils and networking on the topic of CAFM/IWMS.

2. Can you explain a bit about your background and your career?

Though my work background started off servicing mainframe computers for Honeywell Computers from Midtown to Lower Manhattan back in the late 60’s, I got caught up in the culture of the 60’s, leaving a bit of a blank spot of several years on my resume, until 1974 when I discovered I was meant to follow in my father and grandfathers footsteps as a union carpenter. Of the twenty years that followed, I concentrated primarily in heavy and commercial construction in the Silicon Valley, the last ten as a construction superintendent for many of the world’s leading high tech firms.

On October 18th 1989, the day after the 7.1 Loma Prieta earthquake, I was deployed to Borland International (C++, Paradox, Quattro Pro, Sidekick) who at the time was gaining market share with their products and about to become a publicly traded company. One of their two buildings in Scotts Valley, CA was damaged to the point it was not safe for occupancy. The other also had significant problems but could be occupied with some immediate work. In addition to coordinating all the trades and building officials, I also was responsible for finding new office space in the area, creating the space plan and moving their staff in and out of various facilities as the company re-occupied the second building and continued to grow into other facilities around town.

During that time I started using AutoCAD for space planning, construction and acquiring building permits and soon learned about other software applications that could be used with AutoCAD to track Space, People, Organizations and Assets. I couldn’t image any of the high tech companies I had worked for and all others in the Silicon Valley that wouldn’t want to do a better job at managing their facilities and after some research decided to switch careers to start my own consulting and services practices CAFM Services.

Though I started by being a vendor for a particular CAFM application, I realized that one application wasn’t the best fit for all of my clients and eventually became software neutral which served me well gaining a reputation as a trusted advisor to my clients, colleagues and in fact the software vendors.

CAFM Services operated from 1992 through 2003, putting it in mothballs a few times to work for other organizations. I officially shut it down in 2003 when I was invited to lead OSCRE.

During this phase of my career, I was able to blend my knowledge of construction, building inspection (I was also an ICBO Certified Building Inspector), project management, technology, facility and maintenance management and real estate to provide quality services for my customers. I was fortunate to be a key contributor in Silicon Valley’s Smart Permitting program designed to enable the public to submit electronic plans and specifications to the planning department for building permits. I developed and trained most of the Bay Area building departments in the use of electronic plan check.

3. Can you elaborate a bit more about your organization? What makes your organization unique?

Back at the turn of this century, industry thought leaders Dave Clute of Cisco, Barney Kinzer of Microsoft, Paul Savastano of Sprint, Keith Perske of Sun Microsystems and Ian Cameron began a dialog in search of ways they could reduce the amount of labor resources, time, costs and difficulties each were experiencing in their organizations software integration and general exchange of data between internal and external business process stakeholders. This topic was a fundamental problem in all medium to large private and public sector business organization, interest grew throughout the FM/CRE community – which became the genesis of OSCRE’s birth.

Members of OSCRE suggest business processes where paper documents are exchanged or where computer software is used by ‘data originators’ to create information, which they send to the ‘data recipient’ in either paper or electronic format. The data recipient then either manually re-enters the information into their application or has to take time to ‘scrub’ the data prior to importing it into their application. The third scenario is where an in-house or outsourced IT resource integrates the data originators and recipients software applications. All three scenarios require significant labor, time, cost along with lower quality and less transparent data that everyone uses to make critical business decisions.

Members who participate in OSCRE work groups are not necessarily IT pros, but rather the people who know the business of the business, e.g., Move Managers, Portfolio and Lease Managers, Maintenance Staff, Brokers, Appraisers, etc., who know what information they need, where it comes from, what to do with when they get it and who else needs it.

Instead of paying full cost for consultants and internal staff time to develop a solution unique to a single organization, OSCRE members share the cost by developing a solution with other professionals who meld their best practices in to an industry standard as they have already done for:

• Appraisal Reporting Standard
• Commercial Information Exchange
• Commercial Property Information Exchange
• Lease Abstract Standard
• Real Property Unique Identifier
• Space Classification Standard
• Work Requests/Work Order Standard

For information about these standards and the members who developed them, download the following brochure.
http://web.pisces.co.uk/Public%20Library/OA%20Public%20Docs/MarketingMaterials/OSCRE-2QFY08-Brochures.pdf

Organizations adopting these standards are reporting savings in labor costs and time for each transaction between 25% and 90%.

While OSCRE may be fairly unique in the Real Property industry, we’re not unique in the business world as industry sector like High Tech Manufacturing, Travel and even Meat & Poultry have adopted Extensible Markup Language (XML) as the preferred method for interoperable data exchange, and have realized and reported similar benefits as mentioned above in efficiency, consistency and transparency. These really are big numbers and the reason why interest in OSCRE is growing rapidly, particularly with respect with today’s economic climate and as businesses look inward for cost cutting and business optimization.

4. What motivates you as a person?

I’m a builder. I like to build things that people want that serves a purpose, whether it’s brick and mortar buildings, bridges or the dampening ring to the Stanford Linear Accelerator – or working with clients to help them select and implement the best technology solutions for their organization and budget and/or assisting other professionals to streamlining business processes and improve data quality as we’re doing inside of OSCRE.

I’m not much of a follower and need work to be cutting edge, challenging and fun.

5. How do you want to be seen by the IWMS Community?

I served my time measuring buildings, creating CAD drawings, polylining millions of square feet of floor-space and connecting them to the BL+FL+RM id’s, creating and maintaining Moves/Adds/Change processes and inventory, using the systems for high reliability maintenance for nationwide data centers and of course integrating applications together.

I’ve made every attempt to remain vendor neutral and believe those that know me see me as a person with integrity, honesty and one who believes that FM/CRE, in which IWMS plays a significant role, directly impacts the financial bottom line of all business organizations. By helping to mature our industry we play a crucial role in the health and competitiveness for domestic and global businesses.

I also believe it’s the responsibility of us baby boomers to mentor new generations of industry professionals and make sure we did more than just earn a paycheck, by leaving the industry in much better shape than how we found it.

Bottom line, I’d like to be seen as a fun guy with an off the wall sense of humor who did something meaningful.

6. What does the term Integrated Workplace Management System (IWMS) mean to you?

Having been there pretty much from the start of Computer Aided Facility Management (CAFM) movement, it’s my opinion a few individuals felt they could create a new marketing strategy over their competitors by developing a new term for their products. For those of you who remember, after CAFM came Computer Integrated Facility Management (CIFM) then came Integrated Workplace Management Systems.

Back in the early days of CAFM we were integrating these applications that contained modules for Space Planning & Forecasting, Move Management, Maintenance Management, Cable/IT Management, Equipment Asset Management and some modules by folks like Nick Springate for Electrical and HVAC. Even today there’s a range of capabilities different FM/CRE applications provide. They still need to be integrated with HR for New Hires & Terminations, Security or IT for Contractors, Finance, ERP and a host of other applications, just like CAFM applications were.

It’s all marketing semantics. IWMS is simply CAFM done correctly. I’m sure someone’s going to come with a new term in the next year or two that makes it sound like their product has enhanced capabilities, like Corporate Real Estate Enterprise Planning System (CREEPS), with catchy slogans such as ‘I’ve got the CREEPS….how about you?’

7. What do you think of the Credit Crunch? What impact does it have on FM and RE?

While I’m saddened all the pain the current economic climate is causing friends, family and others around the globe, many of us have lived through other bust times only to see another bubble filled with opportunities to follow. As Gartner reports, IT spending hasn’t suffered anywhere as much as other budget areas. In fact, as many organizations trim down their workforce, now is the time they look internally for areas they can improve their business processes, which is an opportunity for the IWMS market as it is for OSCRE and others whose role it is to provide optimization tools, techniques and strategies into the workplace.

8. What is your opinion about Sustainability and IWMS?

While I feel Sustainability is a critical and much needed requirement for the health of our planet and that it adds business value, I see some very significant problems how this data is gathered, processed, reported, analyzed and exchanged, particularly as there is always a real property component association. And both are in dire need of standardizing the business language in order to have apples-to-apples comparison for internal and external benchmarking.

My biggest concern is that City and County building and planning departments are beginning to require construction projects to receive a LEED compliance certification prior to Certificate of Occupancy (CO). Right now LEED templates do not lend themselves for easy data mapping from Owner/Operator applications nor does USGBC allow for interoperable data exchange.

Businesses that have short product lifecycles like the High Tech, Bio-Tech and even green products where time to market is critical, tying CO’s and LEED certification together will drive businesses to less restrictive locations, either domestic or international. What we need is not to eliminate this requirement, but make it easier to collect, process, report, analyze and exchange require data while maintaining rigor for compliance. IWMS will play an ever increasing role.

9. How do you see IWMS in the year 2015?

What a great question.

When I left construction to jump into CAFM back in 1993, I was convinced every business would easily understand its value and sales in products and services would be exceptional. Well here it is 16 years later and it amazes me that it’s not as ubiquitous as a hammer is to a maintenance workers.

What this tells me is that we haven’t done a good enough job at training FM/CRE workers how to use the applications in a manner that provides a significant ROI quickly and consistently. We also need to do a better job at collecting before and after metrics as a means to educate upper management how we impact the company’s financial bottom line with IWMS applications.
Lastly, one of the biggest sources of friction that consumes labor costs, time to reliable information in order to make critical decisions is the lack of Standards that would allow software vendors to incorporate them right out of the box in order to greatly reduce the customers implementation and testing time from 4 to 10 months to one week. Why are customers still creating their own Space, Personnel, Maintenance, Lease, Construction Type, Equipment and a host of other classifications that never match anyone else’s in the industry? Why does each installation have to re-create the wheel?

I hope in another 6 years, OSCRE members would have made a significant contribution to IWMS/CMMS applications that clearly show upper management they can’t live without it provide sufficient funding for proper staffing and maintenance for optimized performance.

10. What would be your Million Dollar Tip for our readers?

You make your own luck by working hard at your profession. I also believe it’s great to be ignorant about certain topics (like I am about going after Federal funding) as you don’t know what you are capable of achieving and sometimes can achieve the what others believe are impossible. Follow your instincts.

Next interview

In our “Thought Leader Interviews” Bruce Forbes, CEO and Founder of Archibus, will be interviewed next week.

Related Posts

1. Thought Leader Interviews
2. Thought Leader Interviews: Michael Schley
3. Thought Leader Interviews: George Ahn
4. Thought Leader Interviews: Craig Gillespie
5. Thought Leader Interviews: Michael Swanstrom