Modern buildings are becoming digital citadels, but their increasing complexity creates challenges for both commissioning and ongoing operations teams. Coordinating thousands of HVAC components to balance comfort, efficiency, and longevity is a massive challenge. Commissioning is time-pressured, labour intensive and witness testing is often only sampled. This increases the risk of underlying issues slipping through the cracks with latent defects, ranging from subtle control misalignments to dynamic system malfunctions manifesting as longer term operational headaches for both occupants and facility teams.
Energy costs often take the headlines, but the impact of poor performance on rental income and subsequent asset value is also apparent.
While the "Golden Thread" usually focuses on information management and digital construction, it often ignores actual operational performance. Systems may be well-documented on paper, but validating their real-world interaction has historically been difficult due to a lack of performance data flowing from construction through to handover and in-use operation.
Operators rightly expect new buildings to work properly.Advanced Fault Detection & Diagnostics (FDD) should be deployed as part of Monitoring-Based Commissioning (MBCx) during the final project stages. This replaces manual sampling with total transparency, streamlining defect resolution. This digital foundation is critical to a transition into data enabled Continuous Commissioning (CCx), using Building Analytics to optimise performance throughout the entire lifecycle.
The phase leading up to Practical Completion (PC) is the most critical window for ensuring that building systems are operating as intended. Validation at the end of this stage assesses whether the installation meets design intent, and, while faults should have been identified and ideally resolved during commissioning, this is the last opportunity to identify remaining defects while the contractors are available to carry out remedial works. However, this stage is often squeezed by delays in previous phases and a desire to achieve PC as early as possible. This lack of transparency can materialise into a project-wide risk of overruns to both time and cost.
In addition, Issues that go undetected or ignored can quickly balloon into a Performance Gap following PC, when contractors have moved onto their next project and responsibility becomes blurred. The burden inevitably falls on operations teams during the In-Use phase with significant impact to occupiers.
A zero defects PC will likely always be a dream, however MBCx will help teams get as close to this as possible. A digital baseline, recording the operational performance of every component, can be created and known issues which aren’t resolved before PC can be managed through to resolution during the defects liability period. At the same time, as the occupied building operates in real-world conditions through the seasons, a seamless transition to CCx supports optimisation of the building’s performance - the golden thread which is supported and recorded by Cx-to-Ops Analytics.
No building has a perfect data architecture during the construction/project phase. Sensors may be missing, central networks unfinished and integrations incomplete. This presents a significant challenge for Smart Building software which needs prescribed data foundations and finalised integrations to function.
Any advantages of a holistic ‘smart building’ concept cannot be usefully applied during the critical phase of setting the building to work.
Therefore, specialist MBCx tools which provide automated data normalisation and facilitate an agile approach to creating a live digital model of the building are required in order to be effective during commissioning. Plant operation should be visualised and insights provided in a collaborative environment to the project team without delay as commissioning progresses..
Construction is using more digital tools to support the creation of physical buildings and FM is using more digital tools to support ongoing operations; Demand Logic’s MBCx software solution, CxLogic, fills the digital gap between construction and operation, supporting the critical phase of setting the building to work.
CxLogic acts as a cornerstone in Digital Commissioning strategies by continuously tracking system behavours and making building-wide performance visible, down to component level, to the whole project team in real-time. Combining end-to-end data contextualisation & modelling, autoFDD, optimisation control and collaborative workflows, Cx Logic delivers for construction project teams and enables the golden thread to empower those involved in post-PC operations.
With data enabled CCx (Continuous Commissioning), building systems are analysed every few minutes, not just when somebody can make time to manually analyse whatever they can glean from the BMS. Maintenance becomes more predictive and less reactive, transitioning to data-led maintenance with optimisation as the key driver. When this has been enabled by MBCx and a soft landings approach, FM teams hit the ground running. Rather than chasing their own tails with poorly catalogued defects and fire-fighting poor performance from day #1. This approach is designed to streamline day-to-day workflows for FMs, making complex tasks more manageable.
As an example, the introduction of CxLogic at a client site, and the subsequent evolution of the service into Demand Logic’s ongoing Building Analytics service ‘DL Insight’ saw this process play out:
Continuous commissioning is more than technology, it’s a strategy for sustainable, data-driven building management. By integrating agile MBCx, automated FDD, and structured pre-PC activities, facility teams can:
Commencing operation of the occupied building is historically the point where poor building performance comes to light and evidence suggests that operation can spiral out of control as the maintenance team treat the symptoms and the performance gap invariably widens. By empowering MBCx with digital solutions like CxLogic before PC, we help de-risk the project and close this gap. We enable a transition from the "static snapshot" of traditional commissioning towards a dynamic, data-rich "Golden Thread" that informs every stage of the building’s lifecycle.
Ultimately, our goal is to ensure that Practical Completion is not just a contractual milestone, but a launch pad for long-term operational excellence. By investing in your digital foundation today, project teams can empower the facility teams of tomorrow to stop firefighting and start optimising - ensuring that the "Digital Citadel" remains as efficient and high-performing on year ten as was intended on day one.
Get started today with CxLogic >> www.demandlogic.co.uk/request-a-demo