Unity Mall, Guwahati.
- Guwahati, Assam
- In progress · 2026
- NCC Limited
- Anchor mall with multi-tenant retail, F&B and parking podium
· The brief
What we were
asked to deliver.
An end-to-end Building Management System deployment for a flagship retail anchor in Guwahati, executed for NCC Limited as the principal contractor. The brief: turn the mall's mechanical, lighting and energy plant into a single dashboard the operations team can run from day one of opening.
· Engagement note
The kind of building
this actually is.
A commercial brief is rarely a brief about technology. It is a brief about the operating reality the building will inhabit on its busiest day — the rota, the audit, the inspection, the regulator, the family, the night shift. We engineer to that day, not to a brochure. The systems below were designed against the worst-case load and tuned to feel effortless against it for everyday use.
On a project of this type, the discipline is in the seams: where the cause-and-effect from one panel has to read cleanly into another, where the cabling pathway is shared by three trades, where the commissioning calendar needs to clear before the operator’s calendar opens. We hold all of that under one contract — design through commissioning — so that when something is asked of the building three years from now, there is one accountable hand to ask.
The scope below is the measurable output. The unwritten output is a documentation pack the operator can hand to a successor without losing a year of institutional knowledge.
· What we delivered
6 disciplines,
one contract.
A single integrated stack — design, procurement, installation, commissioning and AMC by a single accountable contractor. Each line carries its own drawing pack, cause-and-effect and commissioning sign-off.
- BMS supervisory control across HVAC, lighting and plant
- Chiller and AHU sequence-of-operations programming
- Sub-metering for tenant-billing
- Energy analytics dashboard (peak demand, anomaly alerts)
- Integration pathway for future fire-alarm and access-control
- Mobile dashboards and alarm escalation to facilities team
· Systems integrated
The named systems,
not the trade-list.
Each system was engineered as a coordinated layer — its own controllers, commissioning report and AMC inclusion — and stitched into the cause-and-effect that runs across all of them.
- Honeywell BMS supervisory layer with chiller, AHU and lighting integration
- Chiller plant sequence-of-operations programming with daily-load optimisation
- AHU control with CO₂-driven damper modulation per tenant zone
- Sub-metering at chiller, AHU, lighting circuit and tenant-zone level
- Energy analytics dashboard with peak-demand alerts and anomaly detection
- Mobile alarm escalation routing to nominated facilities-team mobiles
· Engineering challenges solved
The hard problems,
not the press release.
Below is what actually had to be engineered through — written by the team that solved each one, not by the team that wrote the brochure.
- 01
Sequencing chillers around the mall's actual occupancy curve — F&B opens earlier, retail trades a longer envelope, weekend load peaks differ from weekday — solved by a programmed daily-load schedule rather than a flat setpoint.
- 02
Sub-metering tenant zones so the billing data is decision-useful for tenants and auditable for the operator — granular at the level of each retail unit, with the meter address exposed in the tenant lease.
- 03
Designing the BMS network with a future-ready integration pathway for fire-alarm and access control — VLAN design, DDC controller capacity and dashboard real-estate are all scoped against the Phase 2 brief, not just Phase 1.
- 04
Engineering AHU CO₂ logic that satisfies tenant-comfort expectations during peak weekend footfall without driving the chiller plant into demand-charge territory — CO₂ targets are zoned per tenant cluster, not blanket-set across the mall.
- 05
Routing supervisory cabling through a working construction site without conflicting with the structural and MEP build-out — staged installation phased against the principal contractor's programme, with our pull-points pre-agreed before each civil milestone.
· Integration summary
How the disciplines
were stitched.
The mall's HVAC, lighting and energy systems were engineered against the operations team's day-two reality, not the contractor's day-one handover. Chillers sequence on a programmed daily-load schedule that mirrors the mall's actual occupancy curve; AHUs modulate on CO₂ per tenant zone; sub-metering is granular at the lease-clause level; and the supervisory dashboard surfaces named alarms in plain English routed to nominated mobiles. The Phase 2 fire-alarm and access-control integration is already pathway-ready.
· Operational impact
What changed for the
day-two team.
A handover is not a milestone — it is the day the operations team starts running the building without us. These are the changes they inherit.
- Day-one operability for the facilities team — the mall opens with a working dashboard, named alarms in plain English, and a documented escalation calendar instead of a vendor handover that requires three months of stabilisation.
- Tenant-billing data ready for the lease's audit clauses from the first month of trading — sub-metering granularity matches the lease wording, not the BMS catalogue.
- Peak-demand visibility on the energy analytics dashboard — the operator can see the demand-charge driver before the bill arrives, not after.
- Phase 2 fire-alarm and access-control integration is a configuration exercise, not a re-cabling exercise — the pathway is already engineered.
· Standards & compliance context
The codes the work
was held to.
Each standard is the framework an inspector or auditor would check our work against. Deliverables sized to satisfy each one in writing, not in conversation.
- ASHRAE 90.1 — energy-efficient design for buildings
- ASHRAE 62.1 — ventilation for acceptable indoor air quality
- GRIHA / IGBC retail-mall energy benchmarks
- BIS / NEC — wiring and equipment-room practice
· Documentation handed over
What our client received
on day one.
As-built architectural-coordination drawings
Single-line diagrams + panel schedules
Rack and patch labelling schedules
Controller configuration files (offline baseline)
Calibration reports for AV and life-safety
Cause-and-effect matrix (signed by AHJ)
Software-licence registers
AMC enrolment with response SLA
Operations manual in plain English
· Why it mattered
A building is not commissioned on the day the contractor leaves. It is commissioned on the first ordinary morning the operators run it without us in the room.
We design every project with that morning in mind — the panel labelled in the operator’s own language, the documentation legible to a successor we will never meet, the AMC programme already calendared, the spares already in our Lachit Nagar office. A commercial engagement of this scale is judged not on handover day but in year three. That is the standard the brief was held to.
/ On site
A frame from the engagement.
Photographs from the working installation. Permitted by the client; published with redactions where the brief required.
· Systems used on this project
Read the systems,
in depth.
Each linked service page goes deeper than this case study — capabilities, integration logic, failure scenarios, FAQs and the codes the work is engineered to.
· Explore similar systems
Projects that share
the same disciplines.
· Where this work sits
Guwahati,
in our practice.
Guwahati is our headquarters and our home — the city we have served continuously since 2010 and the seat of our design practice, programming bench, engineering bench, procurement desk, project-management team and the Studio now being built.
Read our Guwahati practice· Reference walkthrough
With the host’s permission,
we’ll arrange a site visit.
Brochures and CGI tours teach you nothing about how a system actually feels. For serious enquiries we facilitate site visits to active deployments — typically within a week of request, subject to the host’s availability.