Why Continuous Commissioning Is Essential for Multi-Site Commercial Buildings

How Continuous HVAC, Refrigeration, and Lighting Optimization Sustains Energy Savings, Comfort, and Asset Performance at Scale

For operators of multi-site commercial buildings, managing HVAC, refrigeration, and lighting systems at scale is a formidable challenge. These systems represent a significant share of operating expenses, directly influence occupant comfort and refrigerated inventory integrity, and are central to meeting corporate sustainability goals. Yet despite investments in building automation systems (BAS) and energy efficiency measures many organizations fail to achieve sustained performance improvements.

The reason is simple: asset optimization and conformance to standard operating setpoints is not a one-time event. Systems inevitably degrade over time as factors like changing weather, equipment aging, manual overrides, technician adjustments, retrofits, software updates, and shifting utility tariffs push HVAC/R and lighting assets away from their optimal state. Continuous monitoring and commissioning are essential to counter this inherent entropy, which otherwise erodes efficiency gains and drives higher costs, comfort complaints, cold-chain risks, and degraded asset reliability. Even the most sophisticated control strategies and energy conservation measures (ECMs) will erode within months unless supported by an ongoing monitoring program that is watching 24x7 for deviations from optimal.

This article explores why continuous monitoring and commissioning are essential for multi-site, commercial operations. It outlines a roadmap to ensure lasting and consistent operating performance across HVAC, refrigeration, and lighting systems.

The Challenge of Scale in Multi-Site Operations

Many multi-site commercial operators face the same challenge - retailers, grocery chains, dollar and convenience stores, quick-service restaurants, and event outpatient healthcare chains oversee hundreds or thousands of locations across multiple time zones and climates. Each site presents a unique combination of equipment vintages, control systems, occupancy profiles, and maintenance providers. Managing these assets manually or through fragmented BAS interfaces is virtually impossible for small Facility Management and Energy teams.

Executives understand the financial stakes: HVAC, refrigeration, and lighting typically account for 40%-60%¹ of energy expense - poor system performance leads to lost sales, reduced margins, increased maintenance and utility costs, impacting brand reputation and increased compliance risks.

For example:

• Grocery chains risk product loss and wasted labor from refrigeration failures and must maintain strict food safety compliance. Further failure to monitor humidity levels can create major liability risks due to condensation-related issues.
• Dollar stores and convenience stores operate on thin margins, making energy waste a direct hit to profitability and with small store teams, lack of automated refrigerated case monitoring and repair program, can result in $millions of product loss.
• Pharmacies must maintain controlled temperature conditions for medication integrity.
• Quick-service restaurants (QSRs) rely on consistent comfort conditions to maintain customer and associate satisfaction and throughput.
• General retailers need well-lit, comfortable environments to encourage shopping time and sales and most brands have strict occupied temperature standards that must be maintained.

The challenge is the absence of a programmatic, continuous, and centralized approach to asset operations.

We define optimum performance as a balance of three interrelated imperatives:

1. Occupant comfort and refrigerated inventory integrity – Maintaining ideal conditions to promote shopping, reduce complaints, downtime and wasted labor, and safeguard sensitive or perishable products.
2. Equipment lifecycle optimization – Using asset health - based on real-time operating telemetry and attributes (e.g. age) to predict failures and specialized faults like refrigerant leaks, minimize emergencies, and extend asset life through informed capital planning.
3. Energy expense and CO₂ reduction – Ensuring systems run efficiently for local conditions to minimize utility costs and reduce Scope 1 (avoided refrigerant loss) and 2 emissions (reduced purchased electricity and natural gas).

Why Multi-Site Operators Struggle

Despite the best intentions, most operators face systemic barriers to proactive asset management. These include:

1. Store expansions, retrofits, and acquisitions – Integrating new sites or changes to existing ones with new BAS platforms, equipment vintages, subject to inconsistent commissioning practices.
2. Fragmented BAS ecosystems – Multiple platforms with different user interfaces, running on different firmware versions, inconsistent asset naming conventions, and data standards create major data and usability silos and “swivel-chair” workflows. Additionally, BAS systems aren’t designed for long-term data capture and analysis, with most controllers only storing a few days of data.
3. Inconsistent commissioning practices – Different integrators often leave behind poorly labeled data, overridden optimal settings, and inconsistent configurations.
4. Changing IT and security standards – Frequent updates to network policies, authentication methods, and BAS firmware can block communication or disable optimization scripts. IT-related disruptions are now one of the most common causes of performance erosion.
5. Siloed data – A lack of centralized, usable, and accessible equipment data hampers both operational decisions and scenario analyses, such as prioritizing the most urgent issues, capital planning, evaluating repair versus replacement trade-offs, benchmarking equipment OEMs and FM service providers, or comparing scenarios under different utility tariffs or procurement and supply chain fluctuations.
6. Small operational teams – A handful of staff cannot possibly oversee, let alone enforce corporate setpoint standards across thousands of disparate systems.

The result is an operational environment where even basic enforcement of HVAC setpoints or lighting schedules is unreliable, and strategic questions such as “what if utility rates shift by 15%?” or “what if refrigerant compliance costs double?” cannot be easily answered.

Centralized Data Integration and Optimization

The first step toward solving these challenges is to unify disparate BAS and asset metadata into a single platform. Such a platform provides:

• Central visibility across HVAC, refrigeration, and lighting systems in the portfolio.
• Analytics that track comfort, cold-chain, asset lifecycle, and maintenance and energy costs.
• Automated optimization that continuously ensures systems operate within targeted ranges.
• Scenario analytics that enable smarter financial planning (e.g. capital planning and sourcing) or tariff optimization using real-time and historical asset operating data.

Centralized data integration and asset optimization deliver significant savings within the first year, but are not sufficient for maintaining long-term success.

The Value of Continuous Commissioning

The assumption that optimization is a one-time effort is one of the most damaging misconceptions in asset lifecycle optimization. In reality, optimization is subject to relentless degradation from the systemic barriers described earlier. Unless these forces are actively monitored and addressed, the performance gains achieved during initial optimization quickly erode.

Continuous Commissioning

Continuous commissioning is the process of continually monitoring building systems, identifying deviations from optimal performance, and re-commissioning the assets as necessary. It is not a one-time event, but a standard and long-lived program that adapts to changing conditions.

For multi-site operators, continuous monitoring and commissioning is the only way to ensure sustained performance across a portfolio. Continuous commissioning is the gold standard for optimizing asset operations at scale.

The Business Case for Continuous Monitoring and Commissioning

Executives want measurable outcomes. Continuous commissioning delivers value across three dimensions:

1. Occupant Comfort and Inventory Integrity

• Improved comfort and cold-chain operations lead to higher sales and margins due to better shopping conditions, fewer disruptions of operations and wasted labor so associates can focus on running the stores and service customers.
• Proactive monitoring and automated repair workflows significantly reduce product loss and business interruption.

2. Equipment Lifecycle Optimization

• Early detection of issues such as refrigerant leaks, failing compressors, or clogged filters enable proactive maintenance that reduce expensive emergency work orders and equipment downtime. Equipment life is extended, and total cost of ownership is reduced.
• Integrated datasets enable smarter financial decisions based on assets’ health and benchmarking across the portfolio. This supports cost efficient outcomes in capital programs, repair/replace scenarios, and purchasing choices. Modeling scenarios of variable supply chain and energy costs enable strategic planning and risk management.

3. Energy and Sustainability

• Persistent enforcement of corporate setpoints and schedules enable lower utility costs and Scope 2 emissions.
• Visibility into and the proactive management of refrigerants and leaks avoid costly fines, ensure regulatory compliance, and reduce operating costs.
• Adaptation to existing and changing utility rates through load shifting and reductions in consumption deliver sustained energy and Scope 2 savings.

The Role of Refrigerant Savings

While this article focuses broadly on HVAC, refrigeration, and lighting, refrigerant management deserves specific attention. Undiagnosed refrigerant leaks are among the costliest failures in retail refrigeration. They lead to higher operating costs from mandated leak checking, and risk of fines associated with environmental compliance.

Continuous monitoring of refrigeration system data, called Indirect Automated Leak Detection, can detect refrigerant leaks early and across the entire refrigeration system, allowing operators to act before the problem escalates. The financial and compliance benefits make refrigerant leak management an essential component of effective refrigeration operations.

Case Example: Entropy in Action

As an illustrative scenario, imagine a grocery chain that deployed an advanced BAS optimization across 500 stores. In the first year, the program achieved 15% energy savings relative to the baseline (operations prior to continuous commissioning), but by the second year those savings had declined to 8%, and by the third year only 3% remained. This erosion underscores the need for continuous oversight. Research from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory shows that commissioning can deliver a median whole-building energy savings of 16%², highlighting the scale of performance gains at stake. Ongoing monitoring and periodic re-commissioning are therefore critical to preserving these gains over time.

A root-cause analysis revealed:

• Multiple setpoint overrides by store staff.
• Contractors bypassing control sequences during service calls.
• New tariff structures make prior demand management strategies obsolete.
• Aging equipment performing below design specifications.
• IT-driven firmware changes disabling integrations at dozens of sites.

In short, entropy erased most of the gains within 24 months. Only after implementing a continuous monitoring and commissioning program were savings stabilized at 12%-14% relative to the baseline, portfolio-wide.

Why Phoenix Energy Technologies Matters

Phoenix’s platform is designed to provide exactly this type of continuous oversight and management. By running 24/7, the system ensures that optimization is not a one-time event but a sustained program. It delivers:

• Data centralization – A single pane of glass for all sites with relevant data, regardless of BAS or equipment type.
• Insight generation – Analytics tailored to comfort, equipment lifecycle, and energy performance.
• Scenario analysis capability – Tools to support capital planning and risk management.
• Continuous enforcement – Automated re-implementation of corporate standards to combat entropy forces.
• Scalability – The ability to monitor thousands of sites across multiple time zones and climates without additional headcount.

Conclusion: The Executive Imperative

Executives overseeing multi-site portfolios face relentless pressure to reduce costs, improve asset performance, and meet sustainability targets with fewer internal resources. HVAC, refrigeration, and lighting systems are a major cost center and a critical operational risk, but also an opportunity to distinguish your operations from your competitors.

The evidence is clear: optimization efforts degrade rapidly without continuous oversight and adjustment. Entropy ensures that one-time commissioning projects cannot deliver sustained results. The only way to preserve and extend the benefits of consistent comfort, reliable cold-chain, and energy conservation is through continuous monitoring and commissioning.

Organizations that embrace this approach will not only achieve measurable financial savings, but will also protect brand reputation, reduce compliance risk, and build resilience into their operations. In a competitive market, continuous commissioning is no longer optional. It is a business imperative.

¹Use of energy in commercial buildings - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)

²Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Learn More!