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Lean Means Sustainability – Step 2 – Measure
By Claus Schafhalter | March 3, 2010
Earlier I wrote how to start a lean sustainability initiative by defining objectives and framework. Step 2 of the DMAIC cycle is “Measure”.
It sounds obvious that we need to know where we are before we know in which direction we need to go. By measuring we are trying to understand where we are, and once we measure our environmental impact we might run into some surprises.
For example, let’s establish the current electricity consumption of an office building. Usually it should be easy to get electricity usage information from the utility and add them up for the building. However, data to generate a usage pattern over a year (i.e. summer versus winter), or over a day (consumption at midnight is usually significantly different than at noon time) can sometimes be just not available. In another example, measuring the total energy input into a production facility and following the energy stream throughout the production process can in itself be a project step that takes weeks to accomplish.
Here is the beef, though: When a human being starts to measure something that is at least somewhat interesting, the human being also starts to think about possibilities to control.
One of my clients looked at the electric usage pattern over a typical weekday and compared many days. It was interesting to see that the facility always used a certain significant amount of electricity, even at minimum times (2AM to 4AM in this example). The team was now curious to see what the sourc of this energy demand is. After compiling a list of energy users potentially running during minimum times, they measured consumption using standard devices like Kill-A-Watt and added consumption up. They found more than they expected, like lights that consumed more energy than necessary, a big copier machine that was defect and refused to go into stand-by mode, and some electric heaters used to heat some basement storage rooms which operators forgot to turn off when they left the building.
It is a fact that it can be very difficult to measure sustainability impacts of more complex systems. However it is better to start to measure now – even with limited scope and accuracy – than to not measure at all.
Claus Schafhalter, Sunogos
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