For 16 years, McKinstry has proudly delivered a work order maintenance management solution and service—InfoCentre—to help property managers, facility engineers, and building owners deliver faster service to their tenants, increase operating income, and reduce facility operating costs.

Ahead of our “InfoCentre 4.0” launch this summer, McKinstry Account Executive Alex Ortiz penned the first of a two-part series for industry website AutomatedBuildings.com.

That story—How an Inefficient Work Order Management Process Hurts Tenants, Operators, and Owners – and What to Do About It (Part I)—was featured in the April 2017 edition of AutomatedBuildings.com and is reproduced in its entirety below:

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Innovation is one of McKinstry’s core values.

Throughout 2016, McKinstry’s Western Washington Region organized an “Everyday Innovation” campaign that set out to share innovations and recognize innovators company-wide. We chose this name for the campaign because even smaller-scale or “everyday” innovations can make a big difference in improving the way we work.

All said, the organizers of the campaign have received more than 60 submissions that highlight an impressive array of creative thinking and have sparked discussions about innovation throughout McKinstry.

While the campaign is ongoing, we’ll be featuring nine of the very best innovation submissions we’ve received thus far in a series of Everyday Innovation posts. This post features the first three submissions.

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We live in a thirsty world, but our water supply is dripping through our fingers.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), dripping faucets and leaking fixtures alone can waste more than a trillion gallons of water annually nationwide, and billions (if not trillions) are wasted through aging infrastructure. With drought looming in the West, many states are facing a serious water crisis.

Unfortunately, we don’t really know how much water is being consumed or how much is lost in transit. However, “smart” water meters and their infrastructure can help establish an accurate baseline across an entire city or utility. This can help reduce water waste, identify leaks and generate vital usage data.

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Like offensive linemen and line cooks, facility managers only get noticed when something goes wrong. That’s why they need the right tools to properly care for equipment, provide oversight of vendors and ensure that tenants remain happy.

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LEDs aren’t just for student science projects anymore.

Out on our city streets, LED streetlights are an emerging technology that use significantly less energy, offer improved light quality, and last longer. On an apples-to-apples, technology-to-technology comparison, LED streetlights easily beat out all the other streetlighting technologies.

No wonder, then, that cities nationwide are beginning to replace their streetlights with LEDs. However, many cities are missing out on the real opportunity with LED streetlights: smart controls and the potential for a networked city.

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The U.S. Department of Energy’s Quadrennial Technology Review (QTR) may be a mouthful, but here’s an easier way to think of it: it’s an important report covering energy technology that comes out every four years.

McKinstry is always on the lookout for the latest and greatest research and thinking in our field, so we’ve been taking a look at the QTR ever since it was released a few weeks ago.

Feel free to chime in with your own opinions and questions in the comments, but here are our five main takeaways from the whopper, 505-page document:

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From the moment you wake up to the moment your head hits the pillow, there’s one constant in your life—light. Whether it’s natural or artificial, in your home or your office, fluorescent or LED, light is always surrounding you.

For being so omnipresent in our lives, it’s remarkable how lighting isn’t always focused on what’s optimal for people. Surprisingly often, the various lights in our lives are too harsh, too dim, building-centric, or one-size-fits-all.

One company—PLANLED, based in Federal Way, Wash.—is betting that people fed up with inadequate illumination will embrace the new concept of human-centric lighting (HCL). PLANLED distributes, markets, and sells a variety of different HCL solutions for indoor, outdoor/sports, and industrial settings.

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As raging wildfires, barren fields, and dried-up waterways continue to dominate the landscape of the American West, it’s abundantly clear that drought and water scarcity are critical issues that require immediate action.

While there’s no comprehensive solution to the current drought, organizations and individuals throughout the region are looking to use every possible strategy to mitigate the drought’s impacts.

McKinstry explored how using a simple yet innovative procurement mechanism—performance contracting—could quickly help address water conservation in the seven Colorado River Basin states (AZ, CA, CO, NM, NV, UT, WY). What we found was that schools and public governments in those states could save big.

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While building systems and technologies are capitalizing on opportunities to take advantage of the current technological revolution, the construction industry mainly continues to lag behind more advanced, innovative approaches used by other industries to leverage the most out of big data resources.

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It’s no surprise to educators that providing a strong foundation in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) creates long-term positive benefits for students as they prepare to join the workforce.

In the past 10 years alone, STEM jobs have grown three times faster than non-STEM jobs. A strong workforce, in turn, strengthens local communities. McKinstry believes that the private sector has an important role to play in supporting these advancements in education, and we have a long history of putting that commitment into action in our communities through investments of our time, talents and resources.

We care about the future of today’s students, and we want to see the next generation succeed. That’s why we’re dedicated to creating opportunities for students from all backgrounds. So, what do we do?

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