Chemicals Solutions, Utilities Management

Utilities Monitoring Best Business Practices Consulting
With investment strategies identified and ROI quantified, EnteGreat turns its focus to applying Utilities Monitoring Best Business Practices that will maximize the business benefits for our clients.

To accomplish this, EnteGreat prepares the Utilities Monitoring Business Requirements Specification (BRS). The BRS documents the client’s business objectives to achieve their utilities goals. It further describes business processes, in terms of who is impacted and how work processes may change, to raise awareness of utilities management, implement continuous improvement, and realize the full value of the utilities monitoring investment.

The BRS is also used to describe actionable metrics and their derivation and use throughout every level of the organization. For example, a boiler efficiency metric may be described for the boiler operator dashboard to react to non-optimal operating performance. And the fuel oil component may be rolled into an overall consumption metric for a purchasing manager’s dashboard while the steam generation component may be used for an energy balance metric for the plant manager’s dashboard. We understand the need to effectively communicate actionable metrics throughout the organization to sustain overall awareness of the utilities monitoring program as well as maintaining accountability for positive results.

These metrics, or Key Performance Indicators (KPI), will be a significant facet of the BRS. The definitions of the KPIs will determine the parameters and process variables to be tracked and reported in order to maximize the effectiveness of the utilities monitoring data for decision making and continuous process improvement. Highlights of the utilities KPIs activity include:

• Assembling existing (manual or automatically) collected utilities data as well as data related to candidate causal factors. These factors may include production levels, process variables, or external parameters (such as outside air temperature).
• Conducting a sensitivity analysis of the existing collected data to determine statistical correlations and dependencies between utilities consumption and related causal factors.
• This analysis is critical because it provides insight and a rigorous method for determining utility KPIs that the business should be tracking in order to identify opportunities for improvement.

Once the BRS is complete, EnteGreat returns to each site to detail the infrastructure requirements necessary to meet the utilities monitoring vision. Our Instrumentation and Controls Engineers will:

• Provide an in-depth analysis of the current instrumentation to determine its effectiveness to support utilities monitoring.
• Specify critical meters and location requirements for data collection.
• Identify the impact on any existing control systems architecture.
• Recommend fundamental control strategies to optimize utilities usage.

Our Systems Architects will:

• Define changes to the site’s technology infrastructure necessary to support the utilities monitoring program.
• Describe the layout and placement of user dashboards to facilitate effective communication of actionable utilities monitoring metrics.
• Evaluate user training requirements and establish a training strategy.

The final step of the Utilities Monitoring Best Business Practices Consulting phase will be to develop the Utilities Monitoring Implementation Plan. EnteGreat prepares the implementation plan strategy in a manner that effectively achieves rapid returns and is sensitive to investment outlays tolerable to the client. The implementation plan is structured to clearly identify the phases of the utilities monitoring program, training requirements, and implementation investment requirements.