Lean Energy Audits Rethinking Common Management Practices of Multi-Building Energy Audits

Abstract

In their groundbreaking book Lean Thinking, James P. Womack
and Daniel T. Jones outlined the lean manufacturing process that sig-
nifi cantly 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 later as-
sembled 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 be-
coming a 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 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 campus-
es. 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, en-
ergy 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 ef-
forts.