《Lean_Energy_Audits_Final》.pdfVIP

Lean Energy Audits Lean Energy Audits Lean Energy Audits Rethinking Common Management Practices of Multi-Building Energy Audits Adam F. Knapp, I.E., C.E.M. CS Engineers Syracuse, N.Y. In their groundbreaking book Lean Thinking, James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones outlined the lean manufacturing process that significantly impacted the manufacturing world. The book denounced as wasteful the traditional manufacturing method of batch processing in which each piece of an assembly was made one at a time and then later assembled as a whole. This revolutionary concept of lean processes isn’t exclusive to the manufacturing realm. There are valuable lessons about streamlining and reducing wasted effort that can be applied to many types of processes. As energy efficiency consciousness grows, energy audits are becoming more common practice. Increasingly, the private and public sectors are turning to energy professionals to perform large-scale, multi-building energy audits. Traditionally, these audits are similar to a batch manufacturing process in that a host of measurements are taken across all of the buildings and then various analyses are performed with these measurements. While this method is theoretically sound, in practice it can be especially complicated—particularly on multi-building campuses. By applying “lean” principles, traditional batch style energy audits can be turned into “lean energy audits.” Lean auditing has four distinct advantages over traditional energy audit management methods: the propagation of errors is avoided, energy savings can be realized earlier by reducing work in progress (WIP), project management control can be increased through better metrics, and systems-level understanding can be increased by narrowing efforts. The batch and lean energy audit processes are outlined in Figure 1 and Figure 2, respectively. Avoiding propagation of errors In traditi