Our company put together an in-house automatic control training (ACT) class for our employees. It evolved in part from our commissioning experience, with an emphasis on the need to continuously improve the product we provide to our clients. It is important to note that this concern doesn't stop with our firm. The industry as a whole clearly needs to do better, as building owners continue to be less than satisfied with the product being turned over to them at the end of a project.
Another reason for the classes was the need to improve our skills at writing automatic control sequences of operation because of client dissatisfaction with building system completeness and, more recently, because of the big push to have projects be LEED™ certified. This next generation of energy conservation, LEED, results in more sophistication, more complexity, and more requirements for understanding how systems function.