September 28, 2026

Overview
For seven years, a group of global hyperscale data center operators has relied on Grantek to carry engineering and commissioning work across six sites in the United States and Canada. The relationship has grown from a single assignment into more than 90 projects and over 40,000 approved engineering and commissioning hours, delivered by more than 40 Grantek engineers working out of six offices.

The scope spans the full lifecycle of a data center build: preliminary engineering, design and drawing review, RFI management, device takeoffs, procurement support, control network installation, SCADA and EPMS development, and commissioning from Level 2 through Level 5. On the electrical side, that includes power skids, distribution boards, generators, automatic transfer switches, UPS and battery systems, medium voltage protection, branch circuit monitoring and high resistance grounding. On the mechanical side, it covers chiller plants, CRAH and air handling units at fleet scale, adiabatic and humidification systems, and outdoor air units. Tying it together is a sensing and network layer built for scale, including leak detection and environmental monitoring across several hundred points.

The clients chose Grantek because the work required more than a single skill set. It needed a team that could develop SCADA applications from scratch, commission mechanical and electrical systems side by side, and do it consistently across multiple campuses and multiple years without losing quality or momentum.

Challenges
Hyperscale construction does not wait for ideal conditions. Across six campuses and dozens of buildings, Grantek’s teams regularly encountered installation issues, missing equipment and compressed schedules, all while energization dates shifted around them. Commissioning plans had to be re-sequenced on short notice, with engineers preparing work offline so that on-site testing time was not wasted when equipment or access finally became available.

The technical scope also spanned platforms rather than sitting inside one. Ignition by Inductive Automation SCADA, Rockwell Automation FactoryTalk and control platforms, and third-party building management systems all needed to work together, alongside multiple metering and breaker families and several OEM cooling platforms. Building SCADA applications from customer templates or from a blank page meant developing architecture and structure documents, UDT libraries, Perspective operator graphics, and riser and one-line pages, then carrying each through staged design review before it touched a live system.

Alarming presented its own problem. Systems arrived with alarms that were incorrectly programmed or should never have existed in the first place, and there was no separate window in the schedule to fix that. It had to be resolved as part of commissioning itself, in step with the functional test scripts being written against those same alarm inventories.

Scale created a further test. In the busiest year, Grantek carried more than 30 active projects at once, running flagship programs concurrently out of separate offices without either program pulling resources from the other. Sustaining that pace over seven years also meant managing staff turnover without losing continuity, including at least one commissioning phase that had to be closed out by a different engineer than the one who opened it.

Solutions
Grantek addressed the pace and unpredictability of construction by building its own delivery tooling rather than relying on manual, one-off methods. Tag extraction utilities, automated checklist template and instance generation, and scripted tag trees were developed on one campus and then reused and refined on the next, so each successive building was commissioned more efficiently than the one before it.

To manage the multi-platform environment, Grantek engineers took ownership of SCADA development end to end, from architecture documents and UDT libraries through Perspective graphics and scripted tag generation, presenting each stage to the client for approval before moving forward. This same discipline extended to alarm management, where Grantek designed, configured and tested alarming as a core part of commissioning, correcting faulty alarms and setting up notification and escalation so operations staff would hear about the right events.

When issues surfaced in the field, whether with equipment performance or vendor deliverables, Grantek worked directly with manufacturers and commissioning agents, escalating to vendor engineering leadership when needed and validating fixes through re-test and integrated systems testing. Internally, defined senior review and junior execution streams supported documented mentoring, which allowed the practice to absorb turnover without breaking continuity on active projects. Multilingual delivery, including French language HMIs and French speaking site teams in Quebec, ensured the work fit smoothly into local operations.

The result is a client relationship that has lasted seven years and expanded across six campuses, with successive buildings and phases awarded back to the same team. It is a track record built on repeat trust rather than a single successful project, and it points to a delivery model that scales with the next campus just as it did with the last.