Using your CMMS to Go Greener in the Utilities Industry

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For most companies, a strong business case exists for decreasing waste, cutting energy and water consumption, minimising transportation costs, curtailing emissions, and/or undertaking other environmentally beneficial initiatives.

Before your company spends a lot of money on certification programs, public relations campaigns, or consultant reports, consider how you can use systems like your computerised maintenance management systems (CMMS) for creating key performance indicators (KPIs) relevant to your business, setting reasonable targets, and executing an action plan for achieving them.

Let’s look at some specific ways in which your CMMS might help you manage energy costs and meet environmental goals.

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Utilities management

The greatest cost of an asset stems from the “operate and maintain” stage of its lifecycle. On average, this accounts for roughly 80% of the total cost of ownership. During this stage of the asset lifecycle, one of the largest cost categories is the energy consumed by the asset.

Your CMMS will let users set improvement targets and track their progress. Some more-modern CMMS packages can track energy consumption – not unlike the metering of any asset for condition-based maintenance. This may require the addition of metering capability for individual assets, as many companies rely on utility companies to meter only site-level energy consumption.

Once individual assets are metered for energy consumption, data can be analyzed on a detailed basis. This allows for the following:

  • Use of condition-based monitoring, such as detecting equipment downtime, power surges, brownouts, and other important triggers
  • Correlation of other factors, such as aging and wear factors and prediction failure or other significant events
  • Analysis of peak, average, and total consumption
  • Translation of consumption volumes into dollar values
  • Use of lifecycle analysis to compare total cost of ownership for older equipment with costs for newer, more energy-efficient equipment
  • Validation and better understanding of utility bills.

Full article can be seen here by David Berger at PlantServices.com