Adopting Green Practices for Manufacturing...........................................
With a view toward your risks and what you want to achieve, you can con-
tinue to pursue green practices, both where they are mandated and done
proactively before mandates become an issue.
Establish an energy management program.....................................
Energy management is the discipline of conserving resources to lower costs
to the greatest possible degree. All businesses need such a program to match
the health and safety measures and emissions controls they have in effect.
The goal of all businesses, of course, is to get the best throughput at the
lowest cost. For example, the last thing you want to do is make your lowest
contribution products during the highest peak hours. What you do want, on
the other hand, is to make your most profitable products using the assets
that are at once the most productive and least costly.
After your company has established a corporate culture in such a way that
everyone is on board and understands what is best for both themselves and
the planet, you can begin to create a bill of materials for your energy
resources. An energy bill of material, or BOM, is the same as any other BOM.
It is a detailed list of the types and amounts of energy that are used to create
a given product. Creating an energy BOM enables you to attach costs to your
energies in specific ways. If you can’t see how much it costs to use a given
resource, you don’t have the information that is required for revolutionary
innovations. Nothing can be done to make improvements! It is important for
you to see the exact impact that consuming a specific type and amount of
energy has in the overall scheme of things.
To create your energy bill of materials, however, you need metrics — a means
by which to accurately measure your energy usage in near real time. Therefore,
you must first remove the archaic allocation of costs to resources from the
equation. If you allocate your periodic energy bill across all your costs —
when in effect that bill may include multiple stretches of time in a given
period, one that includes various rates for the energy components that go
into the bill — your view of the impact is bound to be skewed.
You cannot see a clear picture of your usage and costs until you first juxtapose
your costs against the energy conditions of any given time. You need to shift
from making decisions around your costs later in the day or week or month
to making those decisions right now, at this very instant. This change is
something that cannot be accomplished by enhanced awareness and nifty
208 Part III: Going Green
