As ROC Manager, Dan leads our Remote Operations Centre team, delivering 24/7 support and building optimisation for our customers.
Arriving at the ROC
My day officially starts at 8:30am but as the ROC services are available to customers 24/7, I make sure I can be contacted by my team at any time so I can help with escalation and support whoever is on-call that week.
We work on a shift rotation across the ROC with one person on-call for out-of-hours support each week, so we have eyes on our customers’ systems at any time day or night and it’s something that the team handles really well.
The first thing I do when I log on is check for any emails or outstanding work orders from overnight. There’s always something new to pick up and staying on top of everything early helps the rest of the day run more smoothly.
Morning
If I had to pick one word to summarise my job, it would be communication. It can be a phone call, a Teams meeting or just a quick email but either way I’m making sure everyone internally and externally is aligned and fully supported.
As well as the team in the ROC I work closely with Dave Jenkins who is my line manager, Paul Anderson who is Head of Smart Buildings, as well as various people from the projects and service teams.
It’s important that we stay in close contact with the people installing and servicing the systems we work with, if there’s an issue we can’t resolve remotely we need to be able to pass on the right information to the engineer who’s going to be onsite so that we can get the customer up and running again as quickly as possible.
Afternoon
We’re very reliant on IT in the ROC so I’m also frequently in touch with Joel Brammer who is Infrastructure & Systems Engineer and our CTO Michael Bironneau to fix any problems we’re having and deal with operational issues but also to consider planned developments for the future.
We’re always looking for ways to help our customers reach peak efficiency, whether that’s better data visibility or advanced automation through AI. Whatever it is that we decide to implement we have to make sure that it works for us and for our customers.
Finding new ways to solve customer problems is a big part of what we do at the ROC. One of the more interesting fixes we’ve made recently involved finding a way for a leisure centre to stop the swimming pool heating up too quickly and the lining getting damaged.
To address this concern, I designed an algorithm that then looks at the rate of change as limited and limits the amount of heating depending on the rate of change. That kind of hands-on building optimisation problem solving is one of the things I enjoy most.
End of day
I finish at 5:00pm but my phone is never really off so I can be available for any bigger issues that come up. If we know that there’s likely to be a busier period with customers hosting events or similar, then we’ll have more people on shift to support outside usual office hours, but either way being able to pick up the phone for my team when they’re under pressure is a vital part of my job.
Luckily, I work with a very capable and knowledgeable team. When I joined Complete Energy Controls as only their 18th employee, I did it because I believed that they were the best people in the industry. Since the acquisition by learnd the number of people I work with has obviously grown but I still look around and see people at the cutting edge of BMS and building optimisation.
