Very dynamic and constantly, constantly changing. New technologies and new things to do every day,
you can never come to work… rarely come to work, and try to say
I’m going to get this done today, I’m going to get this done today, I’m going to get this done…
But the minute you walk in the door it is diverted, you’re off on another direction.
My name is Jerry Tomai and I’m the Facilities Operation Supervisor for
McGough Facility Management at Securian Financial Building in St. Paul.
We oversee 1.5 million square feet of commercial office space downtown St. Paul
and we take care of everything from the electrical systems, HVAC systems, down to grounds and plumbing.
Typical day for me would start with coming in, in the morning, checking e-mails and voicemails to make sure that nothing new is come up.
And then from there we have a couple of different work order systems that we use.
One for Securian and one for our preventative maintenance and our tenants.
We have an energy management system that we take that we use to monitor and control different things pieces of equipment in the building.
And we do all of the upkeep and maintenance and programming of that.
I did a lot of education, modular education in the air force for different mechanical systems.
And then I had an apprenticeship for construction and the two areas kind of blended well together for the job that I’m doing now.
And then I went to school for Facility Systems Technology at Century College.
We have to be really diversified and be able to cover a lot of different things, some carpentry, some basic HVAC, electrical systems.
We use a lot of hand tools and power tools, things like that.
Some specialized test equipment like electric meters and airflow measuring equipment.
And then probably the biggest tool we use is the computer and the energy management system.
There’s a really good tool in that energy management system that allows you to
troubleshoot what could be happening before you even have to leave the office.
We have the one building across the street that was actually designed very well for energy efficiency and
we’ve actually become LEED certified with that building.
One of the biggest parts of our job is to make sure that all our equipment is running efficiently and using as little energy as possible.
We have an energy management system that monitors and controls all the equipment in the building.
The system is web based and it’s in the server environment here at Securian. And so we can login from home,
we can login actually anywhere there is an internet connection and make changes to the system and start and stop equipment.
It’s a much more technical job than most people realize.
We’ve got a lot of digital controls and computerization as opposed to mechanical things, mechanical controls.
It’s pretty specialized, it’s gotten very technical.
Technology in the field is changing constantly and being able to accept that change and being able to embrace that change is important.
Learn as much as you can, a little bit about a lot of things really helps in this field,
the more knowledge you have the better it is for your position.