Building Commissioning: What can other countries learn from the US experience?

Building commissioning has been gaining momentum and awareness within the building industry as a comprehensive quality assurance process that can be used throughout the buildings life cycle to ensure that the needs and requirements the owner has for the building are met. Although building commissioning is gaining momentum it is still far away from being viewed as normal practice within the building industry. Of the countries that are the closest to succeeding in making building commissioning normal practice, USA is the clear leader. In countries were commissioning is taking its first steps or has not yet been used it would be wise to try to learn from the leading nations, how they have implemented commissioning to decrease the time it will take for commissioning to become normal practice. Since the USA is among the leading nations in implementing commissioning, there is a lot that can be learned from how that process has evolved and all the effort that has been put into research on building commissioning.
This article investigates how the commissioning process is undertaken at a leading commissioning providing consulting company in Denmark and presents a case study with a comparison between two shopping malls out of which one has not been through a commissioning process, while the other has. The benefits of commissioning are outlined and proposals for how the process can be improved in the Danish consulting company compared to the well established ASHRAE 0-2005 guideline. Finally the article discuss and concludes what the future steps for commissioning in a country like Denmark should be based on how commissioning has evolved in the US.