With nine years of experience deploying Optigo solutions across two companies, Pranjal De is building OT network health into the foundation of EllisDon’s P3 portfolio — using a single score to end multi-vendor blame cycles and give non-technical stakeholders a language for infrastructure risk.
At a Glance
- The Client: EllisDon Facilities Services (EDFS), a division of one of Canada’s largest employee-owned construction and building services companies, managing long-term P3 contracts across healthcare, K12, correctional, and commercial markets in Canada.
- The Scale: Thirteen-plus active projects, including multi-decade facility management agreements procured through government partners. OptigoVN is currently deployed across five sites, with a full portfolio rollout underway.
- The Complexity: Multi-vendor BAS environments managed under long-term service obligations, with strict performance requirements and penalties — and general managers and facility owners, without BACnet expertise, who need clear answers.
Pranjal De has spent 20 years in building automation. For nine of them, he has relied on Optigo — first as a controls technologist at Modern Niagara, then as Director of Technical Services at EllisDon Facilities Services. EllisDon is one of Canada’s leading employee-owned construction and building services companies, and its facilities division holds long-term P3 contracts where performance obligations — and financial penalties for failure — follow the company for decades.
In environments like that, finger-pointing is not just frustrating. It is expensive.
"If I don't have clean data, if I don't understand the quality of the data in my networks, how do I trust anything else? Optigo is part of that foundational layer — without it, I can't confidently put anything on top."
The Challenge: Running a P3 Portfolio Without a Common Language
EllisDon Facilities Services doesn’t complete a project and move on. Under the P3 model, EDFS enters into long-term facility management agreements — often 30 years — and carries contractual responsibility for how those buildings perform. When something goes wrong on a multi-vendor OT network, the question of “whose fault is this?” has real financial consequences.
The difficulty is that the people accountable for those consequences — general managers, facility owners, government project representatives — are not strictly BACnet controls engineers. When a building automation system misbehaves and three vendors are on the same network, each party can look at their own slice of the system and confidently claim it isn’t them. Without an independent, objective view of the network, disputes are hard to close.
De describes the communication gap directly: he can walk into a room with facilities managers and infrastructure owners who understand nothing about BACnet, and he needs to explain that something is fundamentally wrong with the network. The technical details are irrelevant to them. What they need is a reference point — a number they can act on. “I’ve got facilities managers, I’ve got Infrastructure Ontario people that don’t know anything about BACnet networks, but they see a number. And that number gives them reference to an issue that they’re experiencing.”
The Investigation: Nine Years, Two Companies, the Same Problem
De’s first use of Optigo’s tools came while he was at another Optigo Networks partner, Modern Niagara, deploying Visual BACnet in response to a lighting integration failure on a client site. His first use of OptigoVN — Optigo’s current flagship platform — at EllisDon came just recently, responding to a lighting integration failure at a facility he now manages. Nine years apart, different companies, the same scenario.
The EllisDon incident began with flickering lights. The lighting contractor arrived and declared the cause: BACnet traffic from EllisDon’s system was flooding their network. It was a confident claim — the kind that, without network visibility, can trigger weeks of back-and-forth scoping, split testing, and escalating vendor disputes.
De applied OptigoVN to the OT segments on the network. The analysis was unambiguous. One segment showed no connection to the lighting system at all. The second layer did — and the data showed excess reads originating from the lighting system, while EllisDon’s system was not writing to it excessively. The claim didn’t hold.
Armed with insights, De pulled up the OptigoVN data and walked the lighting contractor through it directly. “Without that tool, I’d be splitting networks and scoping networks and pointing fingers forever,” De said. “It just shut down that conversation.”
The lighting contractor went back, investigated their own system, and found a driver issue on their own network segment. The dispute that might have taken weeks was resolved in one meeting.
The Solution: One Score, Three Stakeholder Groups
De’s first use of Optigo’s tools came while he was at another Optigo Networks partner, Modern Niagara, deploying Visual BACnet in response to a lighting integration failure on a client site. His first use of OptigoVN — Optigo’s current flagship platform — at EllisDon came just recently, responding to a lighting integration failure at a facility he now manages. Nine years apart, different companies, the same scenario.
The EllisDon incident began with flickering lights. The lighting contractor arrived and declared the cause: BACnet traffic from EllisDon’s system was flooding their network. It was a confident claim — the kind that, without network visibility, can trigger weeks of back-and-forth scoping, split testing, and escalating vendor disputes.
De applied OptigoVN to the OT segments on the network. The analysis was unambiguous. One segment showed no connection to the lighting system at all. The second layer did — and the data showed excess reads originating from the lighting system, while EllisDon’s system was not writing to it excessively. The claim didn’t hold.
Armed with insights, De pulled up the OptigoVN data and walked the lighting contractor through it directly. “Without that tool, I’d be splitting networks and scoping networks and pointing fingers forever,” De said. “It just shut down that conversation.”
The lighting contractor went back, investigated their own system, and found a driver issue on their own network segment. The dispute that might have taken weeks was resolved in one meeting.
The Solution: One Score, Three Stakeholder Groups
The lighting case is one proof point. The broader value De has built around Optigo—first with Visual BACnet, and now with OptigoVN—over nine years is the ability to translate complex OT network conditions into a single health score that non-technical stakeholders can understand — and act on.
When De was at Modern Niagara, EllisDon was a client. A problem site in Oakville had a struggling network and a multi-vendor environment nobody could untangle. De deployed Optigo Visual BACnet, and returned a network health score of 14%.
“That health score was the only number that EllisDon needed — who was a client of mine at the time — and the healthcare provider needed to justify that something was significantly wrong. They didn’t know any of the details. They saw one score and they were like, okay, come in, do your job.”
Today, De presents four numbers in quarterly performance meetings with EllisDon’s GMs: the OptigoVN network health score, and maintenance, energy, and comfort scores from another well known fault detection and diagnostics (FDD) company. Four numbers. That is the complete executive summary of how a building is performing.
That simplicity is not accidental. De has watched general managers and real estate operations directors engage with the score in a way they never could with raw BACnet diagnostics. When the score drops, he does not have to explain broadcast storms or duplicate device IDs. He shows the number and asks the relevant vendor: what happened on your project?
The Foundation: A Prerequisite, Not an Add-On
De is deliberate about where OptigoVN sits in the technology stack. He describes three pillars: a foundational layer, an analytics layer, and a service layer. OptigoVN belongs in the foundation — alongside BAS inputs, metering, and cybersecurity — not as a bolt-on tool deployed after problems appear.
“If I don’t have clean data, if I don’t understand the quality of the data in my networks coming into all the analytics tools that I have, all the AI tools, the cloud-based tools that I’m building my facilities off of — how do I trust anything else?”
The logic is direct: fault detection and diagnostics tools depend on reliable data. If the underlying BACnet network has ghost reads, duplicate device IDs, or misconfigured traffic, FDD alerts become noise. Validating network health before layering analytics on top is not optional — it is a prerequisite for trusting what the analytics say.
EllisDon is now deploying OptigoVN across five sites with a full rollout planned wherever analytics are active in the portfolio. De’s approach on cost is consistent with how he managed it at Modern Niagara: absorb the tool as overhead during construction, then carry it forward as a line item in the service contract.
“I don’t understand why anybody wouldn’t want to use it,” De said. “It’s an insurance policy. And it’s pretty inexpensive compared to everything else sitting in the stack.”
The Results
- A lighting integration dispute resolved on a single call — root cause confirmed as a driver issue within the lighting contractor’s own system, with network data to prove it
- A 14% network health score at a troubled Oakville healthcare site gave facility ownership the single data point needed to authorize remediation — the score has since recovered to approximately 50%, with diagnostic work ongoing
- Four-metric quarterly reporting model (OptigoVN network health score is one) now in use across EllisDon’s managed portfolio
- OptigoVN deployed across five EDFS sites; portfolio-wide rollout underway
