Commissioning

Engineering Design

Staffing Services

Mission Critical Facilities

Commissioning

CSIE acts as the Commissioning Authority (CA), managing the “Owner’s Quality Process.”

During the 35-years of electrical and mechanical infrastructure design, it is important to verify the design intent has been executed properly within the construction and operational process to ensure a reliable installation that maintains the design capacity desired. The formal process of this verification is called commissioning. CSIE provides both third-party owner commissioning authority for owner’s protection, and engineering verification of technical designs for engineering and construction project administration.

CSIE provides the resources to support the systematic process of ensuring that all building systems perform interactively according to the design intent and the owner’s operational needs. This is achieved by beginning in the design phase by documenting the design intent and continuing through construction, acceptance and the warranty period with actual verification of performance.

The commissioning process encompasses and coordinates the traditionally separate functions of system documentation, equipment startup, control system calibration, testing and balancing, performance testing, and training.

It is CSIE’s experience that team chemistry is essential, as the team must commit to the Mission, Schedule and Budget. Decisions must be collaborative and timely as delays to schedule are costly and impact the quality process.

CSIE’s approach to ensuring quality design, construction, and operation is called an “Integrated Commissioning Process,” i.e., a comprehensive approach to the development of testing/qualification procedures for completed construction projects.

As part of the commissioning process, CSIE developed the Level 5 process which is defined as the Integrated Commissioning which includes the oversight for the manufacture, shipping, installation, design, construction, system component functionality, and integrated site operating procedures to assure optimal environmental reliability and uptime of critical site infrastructure. Site-specific procedures and portable instrumentation are used to qualify installation and to measure critical operating parameters, under both normal and abnormal conditions.

After spending millions on the construction of a major new site, your senior management will expect faultless performance when the facility is finally brought on line. Unfortunately, the initial startup and first six months of operation of any new facility is typically a period of high risk. Most new sites experience multiple failures due to one or more of the following problems:

Undetected construction defects

Undetected equipment defects

Undetected interface inconsistencies between subsystems

Equipment failures due to infant mortality

Inadvertent human error resulting from new people learning to operate a new facility with unique idiosyncrasies.

CSIE Consulting Engineers offers unique verification, testing, and training processes for early identification of these common problems before they can cause expensive and embarrassing downtime. Not only does our systematic approach assure realizing maximum return on your infrastructure investment, it also helps to protect the reputation of you and your project management team with senior management. Even without including the value of avoided downtime, our clients have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars by identifying and documenting problems (punch lists) before the facility goes operational and the contractor has departed the site.

CSIE’s proprietary testing assessment techniques will help everyone on your staff identify existing vulnerabilities, design limitations and benefits of the new infrastructure. Once the commissioning is complete, CSIE can further assist you by producing operating, maintenance and emergency procedure manuals, a logical extension of the commissioning protocol. Future benefits will accrue when maintenance procedures can be validated by comparing system performance to the original commissioning benchmarks.

CSIE has been developing unique Commissioning specifications, standards and protocol since 1990. CSIE’s approach is unique and comprehensive. Our process includes the following six (6) commissioning components:

Level Zero

Design Intent/Basis of Design.

Level One

Factory Witness Testing.

Level Two

Component Verification.

Level Three

Construction Quality Control.

Level Four

Individual System Verification.

Level Five

Integrated Systems Demonstration.

Existing Building Commissioning

Also Known as Retro Commissioning (RCx)
Retro Commissioning follows the same process as newly developed sites. The process concentrates on improving or optimizing the buildings operation and maintenance however, accommodations for on-line processing create additional scheduling and adaptive techniques that facilitate testing alternate systems without affecting the critical load or critical mission sustainability.

Our integrated commissioning process develops and executes site specific procedures to qualify current basis of design / design intent or parameters again under both normal and abnormal conditions.