ConnexFM 2025 Recap: Practical Advice for Implementing IoT Devices in Multi-Sites

As the pressure to do more with less resources grows, many multi-site facilities managers are turning to Internet-connected devices (also known as IoT, or Internet of Things, technology) to enable smarter, leaner operations. But what does real-world implementation actually look like? What does a facilities manager need to know before they jump in?

At ConnexFM 2025 in Denver, Colorado, Mysa’s own Matt Thompson and Jeremy Lombardo, Facilities Manager of Neighbourly Pharmacy, led a practical, insight-rich session titled "Internet–Connected Devices in Multi–Site HVAC–R Management: Best Practices for Real–World Applications." 

In this conversation, the pair dug deep into the challenges of scaling a connected tech strategy across large portfolios, the critical role of getting stakeholder buy-in, and the lessons they’ve learned from their own experience rolling out Mysa HQ in an initial pilot program with Neighbourly Pharmacy. 

Whether you're just beginning to explore IoT in your facilities or looking to optimize existing systems, their discussion offers a candid look at what works—and what doesn’t—from leaders in the field. Read the transcript below!

🎧 Want to listen to the full session or browse the presentation slides? Click the button below to download the audio recording and deck!

Introduction

Moderator: Our speakers are Matt, Director of Mysa, and Jeremy, Facility Manager for Neighborly Pharmacy. Thank you guys, and I'll hand it over to you.

Matt Thompson: Thank you very much. He used a keyword there which is "conversation" – you can see we’re sitting on the couch having a conversation, not standing at a pulpit. We’d really like to get some feedback from you. We’ll leave plenty of time for Q&A, but also if you just have comments along the way, we’re going to be soliciting those. I know it’s after lunch, so please help us out.

I’ve been in this controls space for a little over 20 years now. I’m going to try to speak in general terms about connected devices, and then I’m going to let my co–worker here speak more specifically to facilities management.

Jeremy Lombardo: Hi everyone, thank you for coming. I really appreciate the support today. Hopefully, you’ll get something from this conversation – I’ve already gotten quite a bit from being here in proximity to all the years of talent.

I’m a bit of a new kid on the block. I came into facilities through the back door. I was just telling a story over lunch where I was in a company without a facilities team, getting on a soapbox telling everyone that we’re leaving opportunities on the table. We need to negotiate our leases better, we need to build preventative maintenance plans, we need to know what our assets are out in the field. And be careful what you wish for, because suddenly it was "Congratulations Jeremy, you are the facilities manager for the company."

Neighborly Pharmacy is a Canadian national chain. It’s a roll–up business that’s been in business for about 10 years now. We just celebrated our 10th anniversary. I joined the team in 2017. We operate over 300 pharmacy locations across Canada. They are in rural and very rural markets. The core function of the business is to continue the legacy of service in those communities when an owner–operator goes out of business and is looking to retire, ensuring continuity of access to medication for the community. I’m super excited to be part of that team, building a facilities department and a real estate team for this startup company that’s transitioning into a "big kid" now.

The Facilities Manager’s Dilemma

Jeremy: We thought this title was fitting for people who work in facilities management – "Everything is your first priority." It feels that way some days at least.

So, as a facilities manager, every day it’s like drinking out of a fire hose. You’re stuck in operational chaos with a game of whack–a–mole where once you fix one issue, another one pops up. There never seems to be enough time in the day.

Just for reference, how many individuals here are either in asset management or facility managers? [Audience responds] Awesome. And how many are vendor partners in the audience? Okay, nice, we’ve got a mixed group. Any other Canadians or just me? Okay, we’ve got a couple.

My understanding of facilities management is to really put our employees and our patients/customers first and make sure they have a safe and healthy environment to shop and work. The problem I'm experiencing internally, and I'm wondering if anybody else can identify with this, is that I'm treated like a bit of a bullpen pinch hitter that's called out from the minors whenever there's a crisis and a fixer is needed to resolve a situation. Can anybody identify with that dynamic? [Audience nods]

A core function of my job has turned into working as PR for the profession and fighting for a seat at the table so that we can strategically plan. I've been planting a lot of seeds around the organization. I took a management course a few years back and the 101 principle was to look at relationships as deposits in a bank account. If you only go to the bank when you want to make a withdrawal, eventually you get an NSF and it blows up in your face. So it's better to make a lot of deposits in that bank account if you ever need to make withdrawals.

To do that, I need to ask myself: How approachable am I today? I need to ask people questions about themselves and listen. How much am I willing to share about myself in the job? Because let's face it, we spend more hours with the people we work with than our family sometimes.

This picture [referring to slide] is a great way to explain the craziness that is our day, but I love it, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Once I found facilities management, I think I found my home. The fact that there's a mothership with thousands of other people who think and act like me is great. I'm super nervous and excited because this is the first time they've let me out of the office in a long time.

Connected Devices in Facilities Management

Matt: Okay, so I want to get into hardware a little bit. I specifically put that little subheading there because I've been present at and involved with a lot of really cool, fun, hypothetical conversations about what the world could look like when we reach the "Jetsons stage" – when we sprinkle a little AI on everything and it makes it better.

We're going to have a day where before a system even breaks, it can diagnose itself, find the right part, get three quotes, and even replace it, and we never miss a beat. I love having those talks. But as Jeremy and I were discussing this, we realized that doesn't always equate to something you can take back to work with you on Monday. So our real goal today is to bring it back to the world we live in right now, what capabilities we have right now, and certainly this AI thing is going to continue to change and evolve, and that's fine. We'll evolve with it, hopefully.

What is IoT?

Matt: So to start with, what does this term IoT mean? Do you know Tony Fadell? He invented the iPod and iPhone before he founded Nest. I used to work for Tony, and he hated this concept – he hated the IoT term. He would always rant and rave, "It doesn't really mean anything, it's a stupid term." Well, 10 years later, we're still using the term, so let's try to define IoT.

We think now we're talking about the ability for smart devices to talk to each other, maybe without being wired together. Turns out it's possible to communicate without being physically connected to something else.

If we can agree that IoT falls into this bucket, then some of the things we're looking at include:

1. Two–way communication – If you think about it in your home, when you're asking a question of Google or Alexa or Siri, you actually have two–way communication. You're talking both ways.
2. Remote visibility and control – Maybe now you can see that doorbell camera in case you have porch pirates, or you can check on your dog sitter.
3. Real-time alerts – [Phone chimes] See, there's one now. This is something we didn't have a few years ago without a serious, hard–wired solution that possibly had a phone line calling a call center so they could call somebody else. Now, alerts pop right up on your phone to let you know if a window broke or your furnace is running too cold.
4. Smart automation – For example, a smart irrigation controller that can look at the forecast and say, "It's really going to rain heavily tonight, I don't need to run the irrigation system today."

Things to Watch-Out For

Matt: I want to share two watch-out points before we move on:

1. Different communication protocols – There are many different communication protocols and options. Some are better than others for different things. Depending on what we're trying to do, it may be a big problem if some of our devices are speaking ZigBee or Z–Wave and others are using Bluetooth or WiFi. Very early in our conversation about sensors or controls, we need to understand the big picture to make sure they'll be able to speak to one another. In most cases, if we have WiFi, there will be a bridge option or hub option to make that device speak to WiFi, which is very prevalent.
2. Dedicated networks – We've learned the hard way that we're better off when we have our own WiFi network running for these controls and connected devices. Every time we talk to a client who says, "There's no problem, we've got WiFi in all our stores," they're not wrong. But what happens when we get there and try to connect to it? Now our HVAC technician spends three hours on the phone with some faraway office trying to get through the firewall. There's a good reason that firewall is there, but maybe keeping us out isn't a bad idea. Things go much better when there's a second or dedicated WiFi network for your control devices.

Practical Benefits for Facilities Management

Matt: How do we bring this back specifically to the FM space? We have the ability to:

• Monitor systems regularly
• Get real–time alerts
• Hopefully get early diagnosis from those systems

I've listed four systems at the bottom [of the slide] that we know very well: HVAC, refrigeration, lighting, and doors/security/occupancy. Are there other things on your mind that you would consider high value to monitor or get alerts from?

[Audience member: Computer vision?]

Excellent. The point is there are things we can monitor with smart and wireless devices right now that aren't just nice-to-have – they're actually critical, especially if we're thinking about a walk-in freezer, or keeping staff and customers comfortable.

Deciding What Connected Devices Can Do For Us

Matt: There are two ways to look at this. The first is from the vision of a manufacturer or controls company: "Here's all the amazing things we can do for you" – unloading all these crazy options and things you've probably never thought of before. If you've ever had a sales pitch from a SaaS company, that's often how it goes – an enormous menu of things they're capable of doing.

I think we're in a much better position in the FM space if we turn that upside down and start with you as the customer: What is it that we're trying to do? Before we consider everything that's possible, what are we honestly trying to accomplish?

It might be something really simple. If all we're trying to do is monitor temperature on a freezer and document it for compliance instead of hanging a clipboard outside with a pencil, we may not need a super involved, complex system. However, if we want a fully automated and integrated system for the entire building, we can do that too. But it has to start with: What are we trying to solve?

That sounds obvious, but I've seen it go the other way many times – where the tail was wagging the dog. When I talk about "what does problem–solving look like," I'm asking: Are we trying to fix a single item, or are we trying to bring the entire company to a new level or into the 21st century? That scale makes a big difference. Is it 300 pharmacies we need to fix or just one?

Jeremy: Right now it's 10 at a time.

Matt: 10 at a time, okay. Excellent. Once we know what we're trying to solve for, then we can look at the solutions that are out there. And this is subtle but big: How much are we willing to invest? Now, invest isn't just money – it's time, attention, and resources. There's a lot that goes into how much we're really willing to invest to solve this problem.

I bring this up because I've been in cases, especially with restaurants, where we found a solution, we could fix the problem, but they weren't willing to invest in fixing it. They'd say, "We've had the same problem for 20 years. We're comfortable with it. We're comfortable complaining about it. We really don't want to invest in fixing it." At least we found that out before getting too far down the road.

And of course, part of investing is cost. If there's a cost, and Jeremy's going to talk about this more, how are we going to recover that or where is that going to come from? None of us typically are running a charity. We've got somebody who has to approve this, and we need to speak their language.

Getting Buy-In from Leadership

Jeremy: I am more scared when a vendor call goes well than when it doesn't, because when it goes well, it means more work for me. And I already described the dilemma – I don't have enough time, people, technology, or money to get everything done that we need to do today.

So it's about small bite-sized pieces. Right now the name of the game is quick wins, and how can I be in as many places at once. This is why when I had the meeting initially about these IoT devices, it was appealing because it gives me access to my 300 stores one day. For now, it gives me access to 10 stores and counting.

I can introduce the new technology into the system at a price point no one will be concerned about, and they'll see the return on investment right away. Then it snowballs in a good way – we're not giving them more than they can chew.

I know that if I come to my leadership team without a jacket on, they pay much less attention. They pay much more attention now that I show up to work with a jacket and tie, and have a jacket on the back of my chair for video calls. The guy in the hoodie just wasn't cutting it. That was the first takeaway.

The second takeaway was that the C-suite team doesn't have time to hear how excited I am about how I got to my conclusion. They need the conclusion first and maybe one or two things, and they need numbers and examples. So I'll go online, grab a quick ROI calculator, take the dollar investment that I want, amortize it over whatever period, input the expected savings, give them the screenshot, tell them about the program, and then we're good.

But I was only able to do that because of seed planting. I want all these things [pointing to slide], but my C-suite team only cares about two of these things. If I waste time talking about other things, they stop listening by the time I get to the good stuff. So order matters – that's what I've learned from dealing with the C-suite team and the finance team.

It's about planting seeds and making those emotional deposits. When they ask me for help with something, I promptly step up and provide support. If I have to shuffle things to accommodate, I let them know what other projects are being put on the back burner to prioritize theirs, and CC my director so everyone's on board. They know I'm agreeable. I call it a game, but it's not – it's just good relationship skills and networking.

So one day our accounting controller came to me and said, "Jeremy, I've got a problem. Senior leadership is looking at our utilities expenses, and they're not happy with how high they are. What can we do to bring down our cost year over year by, let's say, 15%? I know it's not going to be easy and you don't have a lot of people power, but what moves can we make?"

The only reason we were having this conversation was because around the proverbial water cooler (which we didn't have during COVID, it was just a Teams meeting), I would tell him about opportunities to buy into fixed hedging contracts for our electricity and gasoline by different regions, with projected savings from locking these in for five years. He loved it and agreed with those ideas, so he came asking what more we could do.

I told him I'd been talking to some vendors. The only reason I knew about this was because my wife did something mysterious for a long time – she lowered the thermostat every time I left the house. I learned that if you lower your thermostat one degree Celsius for an eight-hour period, you save 1%. So if you lower it 8-10 degrees for an eight-hour period, you can knock off about 10% of your heating or air conditioning costs – the difference between unoccupied and occupied settings.

He thought that was good, and I added: "Here's the kicker – if we invest in proper preventative maintenance programs and look at negotiating stronger leases with our landlords to get them to invest in more energy-efficient HVAC systems, we can easily knock off another 20%. So conservatively speaking, we can reduce our annual spend by 20% just by doing these two things. And I have vendors with technology that takes that responsibility away from the store managers, saving labor hours."

They were listening and told me to have these meetings and bring back information. We did that, completed a first rollout, and the results were favorable. But we made a lot of mistakes along the way, which I'm here to share so you won't have to make the same ones.

ROI and Implementation

Matt: We talked about getting buy-in. We have to speak in terms of what the C-suite has on their mind, not necessarily what's on our mind. Usually that comes down to ROI – are they going to get money back? But we also need communication with those on-site managers so it's not something being done to them, but with them or for them.

We've learned the hard way that when we put this together at the corporate level and rolled it out without explaining the how or why to the folks on the ground, they just suddenly had new work people in their store putting in new things. That's definitely something we learned from.

We also select pilot locations that will get us the biggest return. We quickly found that in cooler climates in Canada, the HVAC runs on gas most of the time, with better savings on electricity. So if I want to show bigger ROIs, I should focus on locations that are warmer in nature.

We also wanted to cluster the new pilot locations so they're closer together for milk run rollouts. And we wanted to do multiple things once we had boots on the ground. We got hit with "save a nickel, spend a dime" – we skipped having techs collect data on the first visit and then had a tech do the install. Sometimes they found the equipment was too old and wasn't compatible with the technology, or it just didn't work.

Implementation Tips

Matt: There are three slides I want to make sure we cover. The first is about implementation. It's going to be hard to take the busiest person in the business and make them the project manager of this. So if you can find somebody to be the project manager who can keep all the pieces in place, I suggest you do. They don't have to be a super expert on HVAC. They'll help build and follow a timeline with all your partners. Without a timeline, it becomes "when I'm free and when I get to it," which is pretty much never for people in facilities management.

Document everything and keep your stakeholders informed as you go. And my last bullet is critical: measure results and report. This is one we miss a lot of times, and it's incredibly important. When we've sold this idea and managed the implementation and installation, we're really selling ourselves short if we don't go back and say, "Hey, we achieved 22% average savings by location, with one at 36%." That's what opens the door for the next project. That's how you put chips in the bank.

Audience member: How did you achieve the savings?

Matt: In this particular case, it was all about reducing electric or gas use during heating season – not letting the 17-year-old kid at the store have full power over the thermostat 24/7.

Audience member: So like continuous retrocommissioning?

Matt: Yeah, just as simple as putting in a schedule that makes sense that we can control remotely. And that's just energy savings. Remember we talked earlier about basic diagnostics and the ability to maybe not roll a truck? That's all compound savings. If I have an alert that says a walk-in freezer is running hot, but I can also see the door's been open for 45 minutes, I don't need to send a truck out there. I just need to make a phone call, have them shut the door, and see if the temperature comes back to where it's supposed to be. I couldn't have done that if I didn't know. It would have generated a work order, and we'd have paid somebody to go out there and say, "Shut the door, sign this for me, please."

Lessons Learned

Jeremy: From a postmortem standpoint, front store managers need to be part of the conversation because they're the end users. We need to make sure that our installers have good bedside manner. They need to leave the stores with the manager and team empowered to use the new technology.

I had one front store manager call me saying, "This stupid thing doesn't work." It was actually working quite well because the HVAC wasn't hitting setpoint, which meant we needed to roll a truck. But before, they just had the system cranked all day and night, and they were at a comfortable temperature. With better understanding, that would have been a great opportunity and would have saved me from getting an earful from three or four different people, which might have tanked the project depending on who heard about it. So it's very important to control the narrative.

I trusted the regional directors – God bless them – but that's not their focus. They're not facilities-focused, so things slip through the cracks. For things this important, which give me line of sight into all stores at once, I need to make sure my team manages the process and stays very close.

Repetition is key – they're so busy at the store level that they turn around and forget what they told me to do. And email is not communication.

Q&A Session

Audience member: How did you measure and verify the results?

Matt: We took year–over–year electric and gas bills. We were able to take the same time period and say, "What's different?" Well, what's different is we changed these controls and these are the results we saw.

Audience member: Do you weather normalize?

Matt: Yes. The guy sitting behind you [refers to Zachary Green, Mysa COO] is an ex-energy auditor who likes doing that stuff. I sent it all to him and he crunched all the numbers. When I can find a better partner who will spend time crunching numbers so I don't have to, so I can show the leadership and look good – that's customer service.

Audience member: Did you have to perform a survey of your facilities before installation?

Jeremy: We did, but we did it wrong. What we did was put together a survey, send it to managers, and ask them to answer questions and include pictures. They don't know what they're looking at, but they did the best they could. Based on the survey results, we picked up equipment and sent it out. Sometimes we had too many for a site, sometimes not enough, sometimes it wasn't compatible.

What we learned is that by trying to save up front, I paid through the nose on the back end. We made our money back on the program overall, but it would have been better to factor in tech site visits for assessment. Next time, we'll need to asset tag for IT, for our pharmacy team's automation, and other items. We're going to have one company asset tag everything, share the budget costs, and come back with the data we need for the next rollout.

Matt: I'm glad you brought that up too. In this case it's pharmacy, so many medications are under refrigeration, just as a restaurant has all their inventory under refrigeration. For the pharmacy, that's a really big deal. The store manager may not have thought of that, but if we send a technician, anything they hear with a compressor, they're probably going to check. "Do we want to monitor this? Do we want to monitor that?" We get a much better picture of what we might be able to do.

Audience member: So you did the asset capture yourself without hiring a third party?

Jeremy: We tried to.

Audience member: And was it the same challenge you had with automation? Who was advising you on automation systems?

Jeremy: We didn't include pharmacy automations, freezers, or fridges because we were asking our managers to do it and wanted to keep the scope narrow. But that was a mistake. We realize now we need to roll the truck with professionals and have them asset tag the whole place.

Audience member: Your techs were first, not only on the mechanical side but also automation?

Jeremy: The next batch will be. We're working with a couple of companies to determine who is the best partner for this go-forward strategy.

Audience member: So more comprehensive?

Jeremy: Exactly, so we can minimize truck rolls and cost of licenses.

Audience member: I think this one's for you, Matt. Has it become cost-effective yet to, via automation, measure pressure drop to know when to change filters for best energy use?

Matt: It depends – is that a legal answer? The question was, is it cost-prohibitive to start measuring pressure drop across the coil to make sure filters aren't clogged. We've found that it depends on the customer. Are they willing to invest in that? We can do that pretty reasonably – it's just a couple of pressure sensors. Or is just knowing their discharge air temperature enough? That depends on what they're trying to do and what their goals are. We can do it all, but doing it all... That's why the question mentioned "cost-effective."

It really depends on the client/owner and what's important to them. For some, absolutely – they want to know that. That's probably somebody with a mechanical background. Somebody else may say, "I just want to know if it's broken before I get a call from a store manager." We'll try to meet your specific goal.

Audience member: In this business model, you have a lot of connectivity to all the different stores. Who manages that connection to the network? Who's charged for it, and who manages it if it goes down?

Jeremy: We run a closed network in the pharmacies, so they weren't going to allow any other devices to tie into our WiFi. So we opted for a cellular connection on site for each device. Mysa supports it entirely. If we get a flag, they're usually on it before I even hear about it.

Matt: I'm happy to add to that. What we found is bringing a cellular modem is the easiest way to get connection. In our case, we prepare it before shipping. So now that AC technician doesn't need to become a network engineer. If they can take these out of the box, plug in the modem and connect the thermostats, since they've been paired before, they all connect and they're up. That means the tech can get back in the truck and go fix other things. Some hard lessons went into that decision, but we finally decided to do it ourselves and have everything show up in a box ready to go.

Audience member: Did you run into any compliance or regulatory issues with respect to having to pull permits? Or in your pharmacy company, where you have parts of your area that are sterile, where you can't have setbacks, you have to maintain certain air conditioning – how did you plan for that? Was that part of the survey up front?

Jeremy: It was part of the survey. There were two central fill laboratory-type environments in our pilot. One of them we weren't able to complete because the old technology wasn't compatible. For the other, we had additional sensors because of pharmacy college regulations. But it's pretty much a plug-and-play thing for somebody who knows what they're doing, so permitting wasn't an issue. This was an "ask for forgiveness rather than permission" play.

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