Brain Food: From Construction to Operations

An owner undertakes the construction of a world-class medical facility, taking all the right steps, setting all the right goals, and allocating all the right resources. The project is designed and built, systems and components are started up, and performance validated. System integration is coordinated and verified. Building automation and control systems experience sequence-of-operation procedures and testing. Commissioning is executed, confirming successful overall compliance with owner requirements and objectives. Regulatory compliance is completed and certified. Operations and maintenance (O/M) staff receive basic systems training, and the facility is equipped and occupied. And yet, somehow, within the first year of operation, the owner begins to notice faltering building performance, including high energy consumption, occupant complaints, and subpar control system function.

What was a fully functional, efficient, and well-tuned facility begins to degrade, and the owner is left to wonder what happened between construction and occupancy, and more importantly, how to get the facility back on track.

Learning Objectives

1. Identifying common industry shortfalls in current O/M training.
2. The importance of more robust operations training focused on critical integration and interoperability between components and systems, including examples of systems to focus on
3. Development of an integrated education curriculum that includes not an only vendor - or system-specific information, but also facility system operations at the macro level
4. Additionally, tools available to O&M staff to provide a daily review of system setpoints, actual conditions, and possibly conflicting data points to pre-empt and avoid issues

Approved for 1 AIA LU