Case Study: Johnson Controls achieves energy savings and reduced downtime with Microsoft Power BI

Connecting Buildings to the Cloud for a Greener Planet

Johnson Controls, a global leader in building automation and sustainability, faced an overwhelming flood of sensor and equipment data from chillers, rooftops and subsystems that made manual reporting and analysis impractical. To create a scalable, extensible analytics and reporting platform, Johnson Controls partnered with Microsoft Power BI and Azure services (including Azure HDInsight, Azure Machine Learning, Azure SQL Database, Azure Storage and Azure Virtual Machines) to aggregate, visualize and act on building data.

Using Azure to ingest about 14 million records a day (roughly 3 TB stored) and connecting thousands of chillers, more than 5,000 rooftops and ~40,000 building subsystems, Johnson Controls implemented Microsoft Power BI dashboards, alerts and mobile reports to deliver real-time insight and predictive maintenance. The result: faster diagnosis and remediation (connected chillers come back online nine times faster), avoided costly unplanned downtime (one customer’s potential loss was ~$300,000 per hour), and significant energy savings opportunities (up to 35% on simple maintenance, with examples like $1.75M/year for a 250‑building campus).

Johnson Controls

Sudhi Sinha

VP and General Manager for the Digital Solutions Business