In an industry that is in charge of billions of dollars of assets, it’s crazy think that the current approaches to asset management are so far behind the curve.

For utilities, which manage facilities, pipes, lines, valves, meters, and many other physical assets, the need to adopt technology to prepare for the financial future couldn’t be greater.

Currently, asset management strategies are largely based on two approaches:

1. Inventory your assets- understand what they are, where they are, how old they are, and any other basic data. Put that into a software system (GIS, CityWorks, Lucity) so they can be visualized and managed.
2. Manage your assets (repair, replace, etc) based on their age– look at a typical or assumed end of useful life curve to figure out what to repair or replace. In other words, assume that an underground pipe is 50 years old and should be replaced in 10 years, because they last about 60 years total.

What’s the problem with this approach? It facilitates throwing massive amounts of money out the window! If an asset is replaced before it’s end of useful life, or isn’t replaced before a major failure, it will cost your organization money that could be prevented with strategic asset management approaches.

So what is the winning strategy? Managing your assets based on their condition, risk, and cost. What does that entail?

Condition– In other words, understanding the true condition of an asset before deciding how to repair or replace. Forget just relying on age- understand the condition (good or bad) of it before making a decision. Do this by looking at the age, the composition, the conditions surrounding it, and any other factors that could extend or shorten it’s like. Great example is an old car- do you need to replace an old car in great condition, just because it’s old?

Risk- Assets fail, so make sure to manage the highest risk assets. Which assets are critical to a system? Which assets would cause great financial impact to an organization if there was a failure? Prioritizing asset management based on the highest risk assets will ensure major risk reductions and optimization of repairing and replacing the right assets.

Cost– What are the costs to replace, reduce risk, and to optimize decisions? Organizations need to be able to quantify this for planning and day to day purposes. Speak the language that all of world speaks- money!

Using these principles for asset management will help organizations make smarter decisions, reduce risk, and save money.

We’ve all heard the stat that most startups are doomed to failure. Many times it’s because the wrong team is put in place. Sometimes it’s bad timing. Other times it’s funding, or unwillingness to pivot. But as I stated in my previous post, “How Big Is The Problem You’re Solving,” most startups just aren’t meeting a major market need. In other words, the pain of business as usual just isn’t that high.

But that’s not your startup, right?! You KNOW yours is a good idea, with a huge market to address and it solves a huge problem you’re very familiar with. RIGHT?!

You may not be able to know right away how big your customer’s problem is until you start discovery- in other words, sitting down with prospects and asking questions about their people, processes, and tools. And identifying where your solution and capabilities can match up with any gaps you identify. Overall, you need to stop building and start selling to be flexible and address the real needs of the market.

This process takes time, years even, depending on the structure of your sales and dev teams.

But there’s one question you can ask to know if you have a good idea or not, which is: are companies currently building and maintaining internal, “home grown” tools to solve this issue? If so, you might be sitting on a gold mine.

Home grown solutions are extremely common. Usually they are formed as projects by extremely smart employees simply because there’s no off the shelf tool or approach available. Some real world examples I’ve seen:

• Using Microsoft Excel to develop a capital project plan, Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), schedule, and budget- now solved by tools like Primavera P6, EcoSys, Planview, and other now major software providers
• Quantifying Environment, Health, and Safety data in an access database- now solved by dozens of EHS solutions like Enablon and Sphera
• Trying to quantify the condition of infrastructure using a workbook and basic statistics- solved by automated Machine Learning technology like Fracta

All of these companies are solving big issues using COTS, also known as Commercial Off the Shelf Solutions, and have been extremely successful. But why are off the shelf software products so successful? Two reasons- cost and scale.

These days, software can be created, deployed, maintained, and updated relatively automatically. This requires only a handful of resources from the software provider, who charges a company a nominal, annual fee. This approach is predictable and low risk.

If a company decides to build a tool internally, it requires a tremendous amount of resources to create and maintain. More developers, more subject matter experts, and more time. And the end result? Won’t contain all the updates and industry best practices a COTS will provide.

See your prospects fumbling with internal tools? You might also see green.

In a new survey by Inc,  it’s estimated that 42% of software startups fail. This means that as a salesperson coming in to scale a new product, you have almost a 1 in 2 chance of joining a company that will fail.

The cause is very simple- your product is not solving a big enough problem. No matter how great your dev team is or how much money you’ve secured, if you don’t have a large, addressable market with need for your product, you will fail.

As a salesperson that has had the experience of selling a product that didn’t meet a market need or solve a large scale problem, nothing can be more frustrating. You’re prospecting your ass off, getting people to discovery only to find out you just don’t have a compelling offering.

Management might tell you it’s your fault, that you aren’t selling it correctly or hard enough, and that there are plenty of people you should be able convince to buy your product (whether they really need it or not).

The company might be able to pivot, but it requires changing the management team’s strategic direction and abandoning the original plan, which could take years and money and time the company doesn’t have.

How to Avoid This Situation

To avoid this situation, take the following steps before you join the company. If you’ve already joined, note this as a valuable life lesson and try not to let it happen again.

1. Figure out who the company’s potential clients would be and find a contact that there that would evaluate the offering. They know the industry, the problems they face, and whether or not this potential offering would help them
2. Ask existing or previous sales reps there about how clients have received the offering. Also, are they meeting their quota?
3. How many clients are out there that would buy this offering? Harder to ascertain, but easy to run some quick calculations based on available territory, target companies in each sector, etc.
4. Find out what the deal size is and multiply that by the number of companies

After you run the numbers, are you looking at something small or significant?

• Less than $1,000,000- very small
• Between $1,000,000-$5,000,000- small but potential for promise
• $5,000,000 and $10,000,000- great potential

Selling a new product that solves a big problem with a big market size will ensure your sales success.

Often times enterprise software systems come in “modules” that offer functionality to serve multiple business groups, departments, or processes. Examples include:

• Requirements
• Contracts
• Safety
• Objectives
• Risk
• Procurement

Often times in the sales process, multiple modules will be offered together in a package deal, to increase value and bring more users into the best practices provided by an enterprise software system.

Makes sense, right?

Of course! Only buy the modules that you need. And expand into different modules once you’re ready (and once the department, group, or business function it serves is ready).

But a very prudent question to ask is how are these modules connected? How is data shared between Contracts and Risk? How can we roll data up across all of our modules to support our corporate goals and objective tracking?

It’s a pretty logical to assume that it would be straight forward and easy to make modules talk to each other. However, often times modules don’t talk to each other at all, and require quite a bit of work to connect- even though they are from the same platform, company, and system.

If you’re looking into an enterprise system with multiple modules, consider these questions:

1. Do the modules share a single database– if yes, this should make it easier for the modules to “talk” to each other and share data
2. Are there any integrations required to share data between modules– if so, there could be additional software costs (adapters, servers, etc) and service costs (technical consulting to install the modules)
3. If an integration is required, how is it set up- are there any pre-built adapters to make the integration easier? Is data shared through XML/batch files or is the integration real time? What data fields can be exposed?

Asking these questions can save you a lot of time, money, and headaches.

As a solution consultant and sales engineer within the enterprise software space, I am constantly asked by clients one key question:

• Can I create [XYZ] report?

This is such a rational, legitimate question! After all, what’s the point of an enterprise software platform that collects and aggregates data if you can’t generate the reports you need?

Hopefully the answer to this question is “Yes.” Well developed, well thought out systems can facilitate the aggregation, roll ups, and slices and dices of data in multiple ways with ease. Want to compare how department A is performing against department B? How about instead of comparing department A, we compare Program 1 to Program 2? What about rolling up transactional data in more than one vertical across the company?

The possibilities really are endless in the way clients want to report on their data. And they have every right to! However it can put some enterprise software systems in a bind if their data structures aren’t carefully designed.

This is a result of using excel spreadsheets before the implementation of a enterprise system, where data structures aren’t enforced. Referencing cells in formulas is quite a manual process, however it provides users with a lot of flexibility to facilitate aggregations and calculations. However this can get pretty complicated for many enterprise systems to replicate. It becomes almost impossible for a system with poor data structures.

Here are some questions to ask when investigating data structures of enterprise software systems: 

Are reports configurable or do they require custom development?

As discussed in my previous post, you want a tool that is configurable, not customizable. This will save buckets of money on development costs and allow non-technical users to operate and administer your system. If reports aren’t configurable and require custom development, reporting will be a nightmare.

Does the vendor have a reporting team? 

There will always be some reporting requirements that stretch any system. However if the vendor has an entire reporting team dedicated to running SQL scripts to pull client reports, that may be an indication that reporting may not be as simple and straight forward as previously thought.

Does the system have multiple types of database objects? Can they be related?

Well designed enterprise software systems have multiple database objects at varying levels of detail. These systems will also allow users to associate multiple object types together. Sometimes reports will require associating object A with object C, while others will require associations of object B with object C. If an enterprise software has only a couple of data objects that don’t talk to each other, creating reports could be impossible with a custom SQL script.

Can transactional data be tagged with multiple categories?

Tagging transactional data with multiple categories allows users to tell the system where they want the data to go. If an enterprise software system does not allow you to tag data with more than one transaction, roll ups across departments, programs, regions, and more will be extremely difficult.

After working with numerous enterprise softwares over the years, I am commonly asked by clients to distinguish the difference between software configuration and customization. Both have their challenges and benefits:

Configuration means an end user (someone who is not a developer) can build, alter, and to an extent customize an enterprise software to match a client’s needs and business processes. Enterprise softwares that allow for configuration usually have a somewhat easy to use back end interface that an administrator, consultant or designer can access to alter settings as needed. Most modern enterprise softwares are built to be completely configurable. Some might argue that configuration limits a customer’s options during an implementation. For some software platforms this is true- however if the software has a solid, well developed architecture the system can be configured to match any client’s needs.

Customization usually involves developers that implement or build code for an enterprise software. Customization can be expensive as it requires constant maintenance and hiring highly skilled workers. However, sometimes customization allows a client to implement a system that fits their requirements exactly as needed.

In the sustainability space, I am sure many of you have heard quite a bit of chatter about Life Cycle Assessment, also known as the practice of modeling a product’s environmental impacts across it’s entire life span.

This practice is important for a number of reasons- reducing environmental impacts, trimming down the size of your Scope 3 carbon portfolio, etc. However, at the end of the day, it all comes down to product marketing.

Corporations are catching on to this highly technical, highly advanced practice because when conducted correctly, LCA’s are the basis for EPD’s- also known as Environmental Product Declarations. I won’t go into a ton of detail (please contact me if you have additional questions), but EPD’s allow you to make environmental marketing claims about your product compared to another.

If an EPD of a smartphone was created, reviewed, and accepted by a verification body, it could allow Apple to say that their iPhone is more green that a certain Android phone, and visa versa.

Along with the branding, nutritional facts, labeling, and (especially) pricing, sustainability metrics will be another way for a consumer to choose between products. And EPD’s, supported by Life Cycle Assessment, and Life Cycle Assessment software tools and data, will be the catalyst for these sustainability metrics. But as I described above, practicing LCA with the correct approach can be challenging.

Additionally, making marketing claims against a competitor can be risky for any brand. Claims needs to have substantial evidence and be validated with extensive data and research. Nobody likes a lawsuit!

This is why having reliable, accurate, and updated data is absolutely crucial when conducting LCA studies with the objective of making a marketing claim.

And in terms of LCA data- the data that powers these studies- there is a lot of questionable data!

While I won’t identify the ones to think you should avoid, here are the scientifically backed LCA databases one should consider:

• EcoInvent
• US LCI
• GaBi Databases (Disclosure: I work for PE INTERNATIONAL, the providers of this data)
• ELCD

Have questions? Feel free to contact me!

Please keep in my mind that these opinions are strictly my own!

Jobseekers often ask me about the key skills one needs to obtain to be successful in corporate sustainability. Throughout the years I have learned a lot about the various tricks of the trade, and I believe there are three skill sets every sustainability professional should know:

1. Understand highly technical practices such as Life Cycle Assessment from the product side, as well as the methods for quantifying corporate sustainability indicators from the operational side. Organizations can’t measure actual progress without quantitative practices such as these, and they are often overlooked and seen as overly difficult (especially within sustainability).

2. Additionally, learn the various software solutions available for sustainability management. Tools make quantifications of impacts automated and much easier to manage. Having a basic understanding of how these systems work is going to help immensely when a client or supervisor wants to implement one of these systems at your organization.

3. Understand how to design and implement higher level corporate sustainability initiatives, such as stakeholder engagements, sustainability strategy development, and sustainability management systems. These skills are immensely important for any candidate as:

• A stakeholder assessment identifies what sustainability aspects are important to an organization, and whom it is important to (internal and external stakeholders)
• A strategy incorporates the identified sustainability aspects into their vision and develops it into a blueprint for the organization to follow for sustainability success
• A sustainability management system is the engine that continually drives the organization toward achieving their sustainability goals and reducing risk

To me, number 3 has been the most important. It has allowed me to provide my clients with unified, cohesive solutions that have increased brand recognition, decreased cost, increased sales, and reduced risk for their organization.

You’ll notice that there aren’t any certifications, accreditation’s, or other professional sustainability “labels” mentioned above; while I think they can somewhat beneficial, they come and go and if everyone has them, how does that differentiate you? To me, it doesn’t, and the facets I have listed above can apply to more than just sustainability.

Think about how you can apply all three of these facets to your job to help your organization succeed.

Love it? Hate it? Let me know!