National Operations Centers (NOC): Unlock the benefits of centralized portfolio control

Managing building performance across a diverse portfolio is a complex challenge. However, centralizing the oversight of these assets is easier than ever with analytics software like CIM’s PEAK Platform. By setting up a national operations center (NOC), also referred to as a facilities control center (FCC), engineering businesses can significantly reduce costs, enhance client value, improve retention rates, and create new revenue opportunities. This approach provides visibility, control, and transparency, benefiting both the operator and its clients.

What is a NOC?‍

A National Operations Center (NOC) centralizes the oversight and monitoring of operational HVAC plant and equipment across an entire portfolio of properties using advanced analytics software like CIM’s PEAK Platform. This approach allows a dedicated team of technical support engineers to manage and support multiple sites from a single location, providing continuous insights and real-time responses, no matter the type of BMS, asset type, or geographic spread of the assets. Typical results delivered by the software include main meter utility data visualisation, monitoring of HVAC and other critical equipment, sub-meter alert notification, smarter capex planning, and ESG reporting.

Who can benefit from a NOC? Setting up a NOC is ideal for engineering firms, engineering consultants, and HVAC maintenance companies. These firms often manage complex, distributed portfolios and require a proven, scalable solution to deliver consistent services.

Benefits of setting up a NOC

Client-facing benefits

A NOC powered by a proven technology also brings significant benefits to your clients, providing a clear differentiator in a competitive market.

Competitive differentiation: Centralizing operations with a NOC gives your business a clear advantage over legacy engineering firms. By offering advanced analytics, faster diagnostics, and real-time monitoring through PEAK, you can provide a higher level of service without increasing costs.

Increased client retention: PEAK’s real-time visibility into building performance strengthens client trust and satisfaction, helping transition from fixed-term projects to ongoing monitoring engagements. By delivering consistent results—such as faster response times, lower energy costs, and improved tenant comfort—your NOC can showcase the long-term value of continuous monitoring, making it easier to secure extended contracts and deepen client relationships.

Faster response times: Traditional methods of manually reviewing BAS data are slow and inefficient. PEAK’s real-time monitoring allows your team to identify and resolve HVAC inefficiencies much faster, improving response times and reducing client downtime, as Daniel Hosko explains below. In this example from a customer, significant energy cost savings were achieved by swiftly addressing BMS malfunction and preventing continuous pump operation.

“By seamlessly integrating with our systems, PEAK has enabled us to identify energy-saving opportunities more efficiently while providing our clients unmatched visibility into their building performance. The platform’s real-time monitoring, powerful FDD, client-friendly dashboards, and exceptional support from the CIM team have helped us to scale quickly, improve client engagement, and maintain a high standard of operational excellence across our growing portfolio.” - Daniel Hosko, Commissioning Manager at Aero Performance Group

New revenue generation opportunities: Using PEAK’s data-driven insights instead of OEM recommendations based purely on equipment age, you can offer smarter capital planning advice to your clients, identifying opportunities for equipment upgrades or efficiency improvements. Leveraging PEAK’s ‘equipment performance’ feature, shown below, provides an additional revenue stream as the basis for smarter capex planning as it combines multiple variables to assess critical plant and equipment.

Help clients bridge the gap between identified and realized savings: PEAK’s built-in workflow management tool allows your NOC team to empower your clients to close operational inefficiencies faster. This will ensure that identified savings are realized without delay. See below for an example of PEAK’s workflow module in action.

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Facilitate sustainability certification: Setting up a NOC with PEAK simplifies achieving and maintaining certifications like ENERGY STAR, LEED, and WELL. Improved performance around energy consumption and thermal comfort can contribute to certification credits, while the platform’s benchmarking tools allow comparison across sites or regions, helping identify further optimization opportunities. PEAK’s sustainability ratings dashboard centralizes all certification details and tracks renewal dates and rating movements, ensuring compliance while keeping assets on track for re-certification.

Operational benefits

Setting up a software-powered NOC offers several operational benefits that can dramatically improve efficiency and service delivery.

Portfolio-wide visibility: A NOC using PEAK allows you to monitor and manage assets across multiple BAS systems and asset types. Whether dealing with office buildings, retail centers, hospitals, or airports, you’ll have visibility across the entire portfolio, making it easier to standardize operations and benchmark performance. The same goes for tracking of sustainability performance across multiple asset types and geographies. Whether it’s NABERS, LEED, or other rating systems, PEAK simplifies the management of these certifications and helps you benchmark progress. See below for PEAK’s portfolio and sustainability ratings dashboard.

Best practice sharing: Centralizing monitoring with PEAK enables your team to standardize best practices across all clients. Any new rules developed by your engineers can be deployed portfolio-wide, ensuring consistent performance and improving client satisfaction. PEAK's built-in workflow management tool further enhances this by allowing teams to track and manage the implementation of these best practices across sites, ensuring that no operational improvements are overlooked or delayed.

Avoid development costs and delays: Developing your own software requires significant investment, time, and technical expertise. Building and maintaining such a platform is time-consuming and expensive, as it demands highly skilled developers, who are increasingly difficult to recruit and retain. CIM’s PEAK Platform, a SaaS solution, is an ‘out of the box’ solution, already operational and scalable, allowing you to serve your clients immediately without the risks of building from scratch, or the costs associated with setup and hosting. Read more in our Head of Engineering’s article, 5 Reasons Why Partnering Is Preferable to Building from Scratch.

Mitigate HVAC talent shortages: Finding and retaining skilled HVAC technicians is increasingly difficult. A NOC reduces your reliance on this limited talent pool by enabling fewer engineers to manage more sites remotely, improving operational efficiency while maintaining service quality. Additionally, a tool like PEAK lowers the barrier to entry by providing automated solutions to common HVAC issues, allowing less experienced engineers to resolve problems more effectively, as demonstrated in this overnight operation example.

Prevent brain drain: Engineers are often frustrated by frequent site travel, a lack of visibility into operations, and the pressure to diagnose issues quickly on-site, leading to high turnover and the loss of valuable tacit knowledge. A NOC provides remote access to all site data, allowing engineers to work more efficiently, reduce travel, and improve talent and knowledge retention. With PEAK handling the continuous monitoring of systems, engineers can focus on more challenging, high-impact tasks, further enhancing job satisfaction and reducing burnout.

Unlimited data storage: While traditional building automation systems (BAS) only store 30 days of data, PEAK leverages Amazon Web Services (AWS) which is built for scalability, storing historical data across all energy meters and BAS indefinitely. This gives your engineers the ability to review long-term trends and make informed decisions about your clients’ assets.

Leverage the power of big data: PEAK’s scalable platform, built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), offers unlimited data storage, far surpassing the 30-day limit of traditional building automation systems (BAS). This enables long-term trend analysis and more informed decision-making across all energy meters and BAS. By centralizing data collection, PEAK ingests a massive dataset from multiple sources—up to 20,000 data points every 15 minutes for a 500,000 sqft building—allowing for precise management and optimization across your portfolio.

Resource efficiency: A NOC boosts efficiency by reducing travel and enabling engineers to remotely monitor more sites, increasing their capacity. This improves operational efficiency and enhances the customer experience, as clients benefit from faster diagnostics and resolutions, as highlighted by Nick Muscolino below. PEAK’s AI-powered onboarding further accelerates the process, allowing new sites to be brought online quickly and with minimal effort. Additionally, centralizing operations reduces the need for multiple regional offices, lowering real estate costs and optimizing resource allocation.

“PEAK has helped us increase productivity and significantly expand the number of projects the team can actively work on. We have been very impressed with the platform’s AI-powered monitoring, and the advanced visualization capabilities have enhanced our client engagement, helping to improve our retention rates. We are proud of our award-winning track record in delivering energy savings, and CIM has quickly become a key partner for our ambitious growth plans.” - Nick Muscolino, Vice President at Aero Performance Group

Retain independence: Unlike software from OEMs like Honeywell, Siemens, or Schneider, PEAK is agnostic, allowing you to maintain your independence when making recommendations to clients. This strengthens trust by showing that your decisions are based on data, not vendor incentives.