When people stop trusting the system, they find workarounds. Operators learn to ignore the noise. The failures get harder to catch, and the damage compounds.
Most large facility portfolios have never undergone formal alarm rationalization. EEMUA 191 established the operational basis for alarm management in process industries decades ago, and ISA-18.2 codified the same principles across industrial and building systems, recommending no more than one alarm per ten minutes per operator during normal operations. Most commercial building portfolios exceed that benchmark by a factor of ten or more. The alarms were configured at commissioning and never touched again. Operators learned to ignore them. And somewhere in that noise, real maintenance events stopped getting addressed.
The structural conditions that created the problem run deeper than alarm configuration. Buildings designed and operated for personal comfort are now routinely carrying laboratory systems, high-density compute environments, production operations, and event infrastructure, sometimes all within the same campus. A corporate headquarters that absorbed a research division. A hospital wing that grew to include imaging suites and outpatient surgery on mechanical systems designed for patient rooms. The equipment, the operational model, and the vendor agreements were set against the original design intent and never formally updated to reflect what the building actually became. That gap between original purpose and current operational reality is rarely visible until something fails.
Every dollar of deferred maintenance that doesn't get addressed costs four to seven in future capital. That multiplier is well-documented and consistently underestimated, because the degradation is gradual and the connection between today's ignored alarm and next year's equipment failure is rarely visible until after the fact. Meanwhile, 87% of organizations report running preventive maintenance programs. Fewer than half are actually spending the majority of their maintenance hours on planned work. The gap between stated strategy and operational reality is one of the most consistent findings across the industry. That is consistently where the largest recoverable value sits.
The organizations I work with have typically already tried point solutions: alarm reduction projects, CMMS upgrades, new monitoring platforms. Approximately 70% of digital transformations fail to meet their objectives. Not because the technology is wrong, but because modern tools get layered over broken operational processes. The diagnostic work I do reads the system as it actually behaves, identifies where the leverage is highest, and produces a roadmap that addresses the foundation before anything else.
The process starts with an introductory conversation as a chance for you to describe the operational environment and how the problem is presenting, and for me to understand what data would be needed to scope an assessment properly. From there, the right stakeholders and data get assembled for a working session, and the Operational Baseline Assessment is scoped from what that surfaces. The on-site engagement produces direct access to Building Automation System historian data, work order records, and equipment conditions as they actually exist. The output is a structured problem statement and, where data is available and accessible, a preliminary size estimate of the operational gap, giving both parties a shared understanding of the situation and a clear basis for deciding how to move forward.
Credited in full toward the Operational Maturity Assessment
A structured diagnostic across multiple operational domains: Alarm and notification management, preventive and predictive maintenance program health, day-to-day operational processes and procedural integrity, data visibility and decision-making infrastructure, and capital planning methodology. The output is a prioritized gap analysis with a clear picture of where the highest-leverage opportunities sit. Scoped and deliverable-based.
For clients who want experienced advisory continuity through implementation. My role is to surface organizational obstacles before they derail execution, keep the program aligned with its strategic intent, and ensure the right internal and external resources are standing up at the right time. Scope, timeline, and structure determined per engagement.
A selection of outcomes from 18+ years of portfolio-scale engagements across corporate campuses, healthcare systems, data centers, retail operations, and energy infrastructure.
200+ building portfolio drowning in 900,000+ annual alarms. Operations team unable to distinguish real maintenance events from noise. Preventive programs had collapsed into reactive firefighting.
BMS alarm rationalization reduced alarm volume 80% and generated $10M in immediate cost avoidance, with $100M+ in estimated long-term impact through restored asset reliability and return to planned maintenance programs.
2,000+ grocery stores running disparate refrigeration systems with no unified visibility, no centralized operations capability, and a legacy vendor platform that had become costly, unsupported, and operationally limiting.
Served as product owner and strategic director through development and deployment of a cloud-based unified refrigeration and operations data platform, replacing the legacy system and enabling centralized operations management from the client's home base across the full national portfolio.
Escalating energy costs in a high-density compute environment with unclear optimization opportunities and no framework for validating savings or qualifying utility rebates.
Continuous commissioning energy conservation measures program produced $2.3M in validated annual energy savings, independently verified through measurement and verification protocols and qualified for utility rebates.
Results reflect specific client contexts. Portfolio size, baseline condition, data availability, and organizational complexity vary. Outcomes from your engagement will reflect your specific situation.
Founder & Principal
Ackerman Infrastructure Operations Advisors
My early career was in naval nuclear operations, an environment where procedural discipline, systems thinking, and zero-tolerance failure analysis are not aspirational standards but daily operational requirements. That foundation shapes how I approach every facility portfolio engagement: read the system as it actually behaves, not as it was designed to behave, and identify exactly where the breakdown is occurring before recommending anything.
The methodology comes from years of reading operational systems under pressure: identifying where signal has degraded into noise, where preventive programs have quietly collapsed into reactive firefighting, and where the data needed to manage a large portfolio exists but is fragmented across platforms that don't talk to each other. That work has taken place across corporate campuses, healthcare systems, data centers, retail operations, and energy infrastructure. It has included BMS alarm rationalization across 200+ building enterprise portfolios, predictive maintenance platforms serving 2,000+ locations, continuous commissioning energy conservation measures programs with independently validated savings, capital planning frameworks deployed at global scale, and 3,000+ enterprise facility assessments covering operations, equipment, process, and site conditions across every major infrastructure category.
The organizations I work with have typically tried point solutions already: alarm reduction projects, CMMS upgrades, operational audits. What they need is someone who can read what the data is actually saying across the whole system and deliver a roadmap they can move on. My role is to identify the opportunity, build the roadmap, and make sure the right resources are aligned to execute it, whether that is your existing teams, your current vendors, or someone I help you bring in.
Schedule a brief introductory conversation to determine whether an Operational Baseline Assessment is the right starting point for your organization.
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