 Welcome to this episode of Door Hardware Nerds. I'm Mia Merrill and I'm a product manager here. Today I'm joined by Katie Flower. Katie, please introduce yourself and tell us about your role here. Thank you, Mia. My name is Katie Flower, as Mia mentioned. I've been in the door openings industry for 37 years. I've been with Ossobloy for 15 years, 11 years as a specification consultant and I am currently the last four years a training specialist. So I get to teach classes, build curriculum, work with people and I love it. Wonderful. Can you tell me a fun fact about yourself that most people don't know? I applied to be on the television show, Survivor and I never got called back but I did through a charity event in Florida over a 10 year span, get to meet and party with over 100 people who have been on Survivor as well as Amazing Race, Big Brother, some of the other reality shows. So I'm a big reality TV Survivor type fan. Oh my goodness, that's so fun and unexpected. All right, so you've been with Ossobloy for a long time. What's the thing that brought you to us? I, as I mentioned, had been in the door openings industry since I graduated from college in 1984 and I was working in distribution. So I sold Sergeant, I sold Yale, I sold Corbin Russo and I love Ossobloy products. And when they merged in the early 2000s, I knew eventually there would be a point in time where I would wanna go work for them. But I had certain things that I needed to finish up and in 2005, when I moved down to Texas from Vermont, that is when I started to get serious about potentially becoming part of the Ossobloy team. Okay, how does that transition from Vermont to Texas? Because that must have been shocking. I wasn't sure if I could do it because it's very cold, the winters are long, there's actually five seasons in Vermont, nobody knows, everybody thinks four seasons but the fifth season is mud season. So after the winter is finally over, you still get the rain in the spring and you can't go outside because the mud is three feet deep or at least so it seems. What got me to decide that I could move to a hotter climate was I was teaching for the Dorn Hardware Institute and teaching classes in June in Phoenix, Arizona or Scottsdale, Arizona. And with 110 degree temperature and it was a dry heat, I was like, you know what, this really isn't that bad. There's air conditioning, there's swimming pools, there's cold beer, so I think I can hack it if I move to a warmer climate. And so my mother passed away in 2003, that was really the only thing keeping me in Vermont. The rest of my family still lives there but I was very, very close with my mother and once she passed away, then I said, okay, now for my own career, for my own benefit, Vermont is way too small. I know I can do so much more if I move away and I started looking at other opportunities and a friend of mine who lived in Dallas that I taught DHI with said, hey, come on down to Dallas when you're ready and he helped me get my first job down here and I love it down here and I will not go back nor. Well, yeah, sometimes I don't know, I still question what I'm doing here in Connecticut. So, you know, I don't know, maybe one day, the South is calling my name, I'm not sure yet. All right, so you have the credentials AOC in your signature. What does that stand for? Absolutely, AOC is credentials through the Door Hardware Institute. It is a combination of an AHC, which is an architectural hardware consultant, a CDC certified door consultant and an EHC electrified hardware consultant, all combined into one architectural openings consultant. There are only 13 AOCs in the whole world that are credentialed through DHI and I am very fortunate to be the only female at this time. I challenge my female consultants out there who are earning their credentials, come on and join me. I need at least a couple more in the brotherhood of AOCs. Yeah, oh my gosh, yeah, as a female engineer, I always solidarity with other females that are achieving things in male-dominated field. So that's awesome, congratulations. Thank you. Happy to see you. When did you first discover your passion about building codes? I joined the industry in 1984 after graduating from college with a degree in architecture. And within the first week, I fell in love with doors and hardware and within probably the first three months, I started to discover building codes and their complexity. And I knew, I just knew in my heart that the more I learned about it, the more I could separate myself from my competition and become a valuable asset to whoever I worked with, contractors, architects, whether I worked for a distributor, whether I wanted to become a specification consultant, whatever, I knew that it would take me where I wanted to go. Okay. For those of you watching, Katie is actually gonna have a regular segment with us on door hardware nerds where she answers code-related questions. Yes, we have a little plug here. She's gonna be answering code-related questions around fire, ADA, life safety and egress. So look for code corner with Katie in the future. She's gonna be, we're gonna be releasing videos once a month for now. But the reason we're here today is we actually are gonna be talking about the egress calculator that you designed and came up with. So how did you even come up with this idea? Back in 2005, when I joined ASA Abloy as a specification consultant, one of the things when you're looking at floor plans, you don't always have the full information from the architect. So you've gotta know whether you need panic hardware on a door. You can't just guess. You have to be code compliant. And the egress calculator that I designed and developed in 2006 was in an Excel spreadsheet because it's a lot of the same calculations over and over again. And I figured if I could shortcut rather than have to get out my code book and look it up every single time, if I could just make an Excel spreadsheet with the formulas in there, it would be so much easier on myself. And then I decided, okay, well, now how can I share this with more people? Internally, the architectural team, I talked to my boss and I said, is this something that we can create copies for everybody so that they have their own copy of the egress calculator? Let me start adding code references to it. Let me make it more useful for all of the consultants that are writing specifications. And then it became, okay, now let's take it to branding and see if we can't make this something that we can give to architects. So the code is updated every three years and I would take the Excel spreadsheet, keep the 2006 edition, copy it, and then update it for the 2009 edition. Once you have the copy done, it really doesn't take that much to go through and make the updates. So I just kept it updated through the years. And then in November of a couple of years ago, my boss on the training team asked me, what can we do to really help separate OsaAvoi as a leader in the area of codes and standards? And I said, well, I have this egress calculator that I developed. I'd love to see it go mobile, either an app that you can download or some way that it's accessible on a phone, an iPad, whether you're at a job site, at a job trailer with a contractor, or you're at an architect's office, or even on your desktop, so that everybody can use it and it's more accessible rather than a clunky Excel spreadsheet that you got to email somebody or that you've got to download. Let's make it accessible. And immediately he was all for it and I got the blessing. I had so much support, it was amazing. We got the whole thing done in less than a year to make it mobile. Wow. How much frustration and time has this saved, do you think, an average user? Probably quite a lot. I mean, I use it all the time and I created it. I didn't, and again, when people, I still get a lot of our specification consultants internally and our architectural consultants sending me code questions. I have architects that I had relationships with for years that will every now and again ask me code questions. And now I can say, here's the egress calculator. Let's have a Zoom call. And I do a one-on-one. How do you use the egress calculator to save you some time to double check your hardware requirements and everybody's all for it. And then it's like, okay, if you want more information, there's a one-hour class on Ossobloy Academy. It's virtual so you can, we have them once a month. So just sign up for one. There's a six-minute tutorial on how to use it on the website itself. So it's really intuitive anyway. I'm sure it saves a lot of time and it takes out just the question because it has the code references. Can you use the lady egress? Here's my occupancy type. It's assembly and the answer is no, it says it right there and it gives you the code reference. It's not meant to replace your code book. It's meant to enhance it. And I think it really has hit that mark. So can anyone use this or do you have to have specific access to this? Do you have to be an Ossobloy friend? It's a free tool for anybody to use. We have single sign-on for Ossobloy employees. We have Connect to work with our distributor partners and anybody that is a customer of ours. And then for architects and people who do life safety consulting and any others, there's a guest login and you can log in for free. And it's on all the different platforms as I mentioned. So we've made it very accessible. What years or versions of the IBC are covered in the egress calculator so far? So far from 2006 to 2018. And right now the 2021 edition of the IBC is out but it hasn't been adopted by any state yet. Once it's adopted, then I will integrate that into the first update. But at this point, there's no rush because there isn't any state that has adopted it. Okay. Are you happy with the success of the egress calculator so far? I really am. I mean between the monthly training that we have and the attendance that we've steadily had the entire time. And plus just looking at the Google analytics of how many people are using the calculator and how long they've been on and things like that. It seems to be a very useful tool. I would love for everybody to use it every single day. I know that's not practical, but if you are working on a project and you just have a quick scenario you wanna double check, saving it as a favorite on your bookmark file and then just pulling it down, checking it out. It's just so fast and easy to use. And I'm very happy with it. Good. How can people get more information or ideas for how to best use the calculator in their day to day? There is a six minute online tutorial on the calculator itself to get you started. But we also have monthly classes on Oslobloy Academy. They're virtual instructor led training. So if you look up calculating occupant loads and egress width, then you can sign up for it and take the one hour class, which gives you all kinds of different scenarios and ideas of how to best use the tool. Okay, perfect. All right, and your hat says safe security. Can you explain what that means to everybody? Sure, it's a phrase that I coined in the door openings industry. We always have to walk the fine line, the balance between life safety and security. The owner wants security, but they also have to meet life safety. And if they don't, they could be fined, they could be jailed. If somebody, if there's a fatality in their building caused by their negligence of not applying the building code, they can go to jail. They can be fined. So that balance between what the owner wants for security and what the owner needs for life safety for the people who are in the building on a day to day basis, it's like a tightrope, it's a fine line. And I call it safe security is that balance. All right. Any other final thoughts you wanna share with us today? Just that it's not such a bad thing to be a door hardware nerd or even more specifically to be a code guru or a code nerd. And just, I absolutely love sharing my information, whether it's through teaching, training, the egress calculator or just get me talking about fantasy football or anything, I just, I gardening, there's so many things that I like to help people with doors and hardware and codes are just some of them. Yeah. Well, the code gurus are very important to keeping all of us safe in our everyday lives. So we thank you. We owe you guys a debt because without you we'd probably have some horrific events happening in our buildings. So for everybody watching, if you would like more information about the egress calculator, please visit egresscalc.asaoboy.com and I will put a link below for that. Thank you, Katie, so much for joining me today. Thank you, Mia. This was fun. Yeah, it was great. If you have questions or comments, please leave them below and make sure you like this video and hit subscribe to stay up to date on our, when our new videos come out. Thanks so much for watching.